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NBC and Peacock are ready for the NFL’s latest move: a Packers-Eagles game in Brazil

Vaseline September 6, 2024

On Fridays during the NFL season, Richard Deitsch will explore some of the biggest storylines in the NFL media world.

As part of his preparation for producing Friday’s Green Bay Packers-Philadelphia Eagles game in Brazil, longtime NBC Sports producer Matt Marvin traveled to São Paulo in May to tour the facilities at Corinthians Arena, home to the sports club Corinthians Paulista, or Corinthians, which plays in Brazil’s top soccer division.

Marvin has produced a lot of sports in his career — his current assignment is lead producer on NBC’s “Big Ten Saturday Night” package — and he’s well aware that Corinthians Arena is not exactly Camp Randall. It’s smaller than an American football stadium — it holds just under 50,000 — and, of course, built for soccer. The stadium will be one of the venues for the 2027 Women’s World Cup and hosted matches in the men’s World Cup in 2014.

During the trip, Marvin and a dozen NBC tech executives (and another dozen NFL staffers) met with Corinthians Arena officials to discuss the logistics of airing an NFL game. As a result, NBC has about 100 people on site covering the game, from cameramen to tape editors to security to translators. One of the things Marvin’s team asked stadium officials to do was create a booth for announcers Noah Eagle and Todd Blackledge (Kaylee Hartung will be on the sidelines) that resembled an NFL booth, meaning it was more private than the traditional football setup, where the audience is very close to the announcers.

“It’s a football stadium and we’re doing a football game,” Marvin said. “The (NHL) Winter Classic is the equivalent that comes to mind, and I’ve done a bunch of them in the past. But a football stadium is much more geared toward football than a baseball stadium is toward hockey, so the camera positions are certainly more familiar. The traditional football camera positions aren’t exactly what football camera positions are, but we can make adjustments and shift things around to make it look like a prime-time football game. There’s not going to be a camera position where the viewer is like, ‘What the hell is that?'”

The Eagles-Packers game is unique for obvious reasons. It’s the NFL’s first-ever regular-season game in South America and will air exclusively on Peacock, the streaming network’s third exclusive NFL game following the Buffalo Bills-Los Angeles Chargers regular-season game in December 2023 and the Miami Dolphins-Kansas City Chiefs AFC wild-card playoff game in January. (Kickoff is at 8:15 p.m. ET, and the game will also be available on free, over-the-air televised television in the participating teams’ local markets, as well as on mobile devices with NFL+.)

The broadcast will have some new features for viewers. For example, it will have less traditional commercials. There will be three or four spots in the game where they will stay with the broadcast during what would normally be a traditional commercial break.

“One of the things that the Peacock game will feature is we’ll do a studio takeover of sorts and not go to a traditional commercial, but stay on the field and provide additional content without taking a traditional break,” said Rob Hyland, the coordinating producer for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” “There’s actually one of those that happens during kickoff and at the end of the first quarter.”

The international market represents a huge growth opportunity for the NFL. The league says it has committed to Brazil as a venue for games and will play a regular-season game in Madrid next season. NFL officials are also exploring markets in Europe, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. (In this regard, we will likely see a future television package sold to a media company that revolves around international games.)

The Packers-Eagles game is a litmus test not only for the potential NFL fan base in Brazil (which the NFL estimates at 36 million, according to a study by the Brazilian Research Institute (IBOPE)), but also for the league’s ambitions to get American consumers to pay for its product, regardless of platform.The AthleticsBrooks Kubena spent eight days in São Paulo reporting on the NFL’s plans to enter the Brazilian market.)

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“You all know that our focus is on growing the game globally for the league, the 32 clubs, and expanding our presence in more key markets,” said Peter O’Reilly, an NFL executive vice president in charge of international events. “Brazil is a very important market and helps drive that global growth. There are 36 million NFL fans in Brazil, which is the third-largest NFL fan base behind the U.S. and Mexico.”

Eagle has never been to South America and the presenter said he downloaded some videos of the stadium to get a little familiar with the setup.

“It’s very much a soccer stadium field, which I had the opportunity to do last year when I did a game in Dublin between Notre Dame and Navy,” Eagle said. “That was my first exposure to the international differences between what we expect from a soccer stadium in America and what it feels like outside of the U.S..”

If all goes well, it should look like a typical NFL game to consumers at home, with the added benefit of some Brazilian culture. This is only Marvin’s third NFL game as lead producer, including last season’s playoff game between the Cleveland Browns and Houston Texans, but he’s no stranger to an NFL production vehicle, having previously worked as a replay producer on NFL broadcasts. He’s obviously aware of the NFL’s interest in the game as it relates to international growth, but like most people in his position, he’s hyper-focused on what he can control.

“I don’t feel any extra pressure, but when you can say you’re somewhere in the first game, there’s a responsibility to say, ‘OK, what’s unique about this?'” he said. “We want to capture some of the atmosphere of São Paulo and Brazil, and that’s going to be sprinkled throughout the show. But the word is balance.

“This is also the first game of the season for two teams that have high expectations … with passionate fans. The storylines for both teams coming out of last season are incredible and there are stars all over the pitch. So you have to put yourself in the fans’ shoes.”

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