Behind the scenes at Apple and MLS’ studios, where every Saturday is ‘like the Olympics’

NEW YORK ― The wood decor, soft white lights, and giant video screens on the Apple-MLS studio sets offer no hint that they’ve been built at one of the most famous locales in TV production history.

The Harlem home of the MLS 360 whiparound show has been around for 80 years, hosting stars from Dave Chappelle to Regis Philbin and shows from Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to the 106 & Park music video show named for the location.

Now it’s the site of something that is far less well-known, but of a far bigger scale. Apple, MLS, facility operator NEP Group, and sports TV production giant IMG teamed up to create the shows that surround the MLS games played across the U.S. and Canada every Saturday night. Recently, they invited The Inquirer behind the scenes of a night’s production.

Since almost every game this year kicks off at 7:30 p.m. in its local time zone, it made sense on paper to show up at around 4 p.m. This day was longer than usual, though, since there was a game in Chicago at 1 p.m. Eastern. That meant on-air and behind-the-scenes staffers showed up by noon to prepare for pregame coverage. They would stay there until almost 2 a.m. to wrap up the last postgame show.

By 6 p.m., multiple production rooms were full of people preparing for English and Spanish pregame shows and MLS 360. Each show has its own production team, with the whiparound show commanding the most staff. Along with the 15 people in its control room, another 14 were in an adjacent room cutting highlights in real time.

» READ MORE: How to watch Union games in the Apple MLS Season Pass streaming package

“The guys back there really know the sport,” executive producer John McGuinness told The Inquirer. “They’ll do more than they really need, and then they’ll cut it back; they’ll edit it down. They’ll build a story as they go along of what’s happening in the match, and then a producer will say, ‘I need 45 seconds; I need a minute,’ or ‘I need two minutes,’ and they’ll have a version of that.”

Each language’s pregame show has a control room staff of 16 people. In the Spanish control room, staffers switched between Spanish and English on the fly.

In another room, seven people were setting up to cut highlights for social media, with seven more working remotely.

And at stadiums across the country, there were some 900 people working at cameras, microphones, and production truck control boards.

McGuinness called it “a little bit like an Olympics,” and he’d know from having worked at NBC for decades. But instead of being a two-week spectacle once every two years, this is almost every Saturday for eight months.

» READ MORE: We know what MLS wants from Apple. What does Apple want from MLS?

It hasn’t been long since much of what exists now at Metropolis Studios (the facility’s official name) wasn’t there.

NEP crews built new walls to create more control rooms and knocked down other walls in building two smaller studios that host pregame and postgame shows while MLS 360 is on the air. The construction wasn’t complete until a month before the season started in late February.

The smallest of the studios has a wall that backs onto Park Avenue, where trains rumble overhead. But the soundproofing is so good that you’d never know.

The main studio hosts MLS 360 and the English-language end-of-night wrapup show. At some 7,000 square feet, it’s the largest studio in Manhattan. It’s huge, with three set areas and two big LED screens.

The bigger screen is 935 square feet, composed of nearly 300 blocks snapped together like Legos in a curved shape.

But the most impressive technological feat dwarfs everything in the building.

» READ MORE: Apple TV becomes the new home of Major League Soccer with a 10-year deal for every game

Seth Bacon, MLS’s executive vice president of media, sat at a table in a meeting room and drew everything out on a piece of paper.

In the top corner, he put small circles for the venues of the night’s games. Below that, a box for the Metropolis studios, divided into three parts for the various shows.

Then Bacon drew a fleet of lines from the left to a box in the middle for a NEP-owned data center in Dallas. Everything from the stadiums and Metropolis goes there: Apple’s English, Spanish, and French (for Canadian teams) game broadcasts, plus the home team’s English radio overlay, plus all the studio shows.

On top of that, there are different commercials for viewers in the U.S., Canada, and the rest of the world. In total, there are over 100 different feeds on a given MLS game day. They are encoded in Dallas, then sent to Apple’s Live Operations Center in Van Nuys, Calif. What you ultimately see on your TV, phone, computer, or other device is sent to you from there.

The California facility also is run by NEP, which is a helpful coincidence. Apple was negotiating a separate deal with NEP at the same time MLS was negotiating with NEP for its production.

As big as the production is, it was remarkable to learn that the setup at Metropolis Studios is only meant to be temporary. Plans are in the works for a larger, longer-term setup elsewhere. It might not be in New York, depending on what makes sense for facility costs and travel costs for on-air talent.

» READ MORE: More production details on Apple and MLS's game and studio show broadcasts

7:30 p.m. arrives, and the MLS 360 control room starts buzzing.

Six minutes after kickoff, a spotter in the front row sees that New England has scored a goal at Miami and shouts it out, sending a half-dozen colleagues into action. Once the play is clipped in the adjacent room, a producer cues it up to go on the broadcast. Someone else alerts the talent, and shortly they take the viewers to South Florida to see what happened.

Every graphic that goes on your screen, no matter how big or small, was put there by someone in the studio. It’s a reminder of how much work it takes to make a live TV program happen.

“That whole front row [of the MLS 360 control room], everybody has done soccer before,” McGuinness said, running down a list of names with experience at CBS, Fox, ESPN, and NBC.

IMG also hired Shaw Brown, one of the top soccer producers in U.S. broadcast history, to build the production crews that work at stadiums. Among Brown’s hires were veterans Ken Neal, Chris Alexopoulos, and Jordan Strauss, the last of whom earned wide praise for his work as the Union’s local TV producer.

Another addition came on board a few weeks into the season: ESPN veteran Marc Connolly, a former writer and later booth producer for games, who now is the head of research for the Apple-MLS team.

“All our game producers and game directors have done soccer,” McGuinness said. “The tape room, there’s a spattering of people who have done soccer before. ... As a start-up, you get some people who haven’t done it before, and you have to teach them, but we’re in good shape with soccer knowledge.”

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On the MLS 360 set, there’s a formal desk with a LED screen behind it, a group of lounge chairs a few feet away, and the big screen across the room. As most of the on-air talent moves from one location to the next, refereeing analyst Christina Unkel moves to where the cameras aren’t.

Unkel is an ex-ref who rose to the top of the sport, then became a popular analyst for Fox and CBS. She spends her Saturday nights at the MLS studios analyzing all the big controversies, and there’s rarely a lack of them.

She has a monitor split into nine separate game boxes, a laptop with live stats, and a tablet that serves as an extra monitor or for note-taking.

The night grows long, but even at 10 p.m. there’s still a long way to go. So there are plenty of snacks and drinks to keep everyone’s energy up, and at this hour, a tasty-looking pizza delivery shows up.

The mood is upbeat as the cast members eat during commercial breaks and extended cuts to live games, making sure to not get any tomato sauce on their clothes.

» READ MORE: After decades at Univision, broadcaster Pablo Ramírez starts a new era with MLS and Apple

Everything that’s here is a big gamble by MLS: abandoning traditional local TV, charging $14.99 a month or $99.99 a year, doing one national TV deal with Fox instead of working with ESPN and Univision (or others) to get more games on.

If it all pays off, the dividends could be huge for a league that’s only the third-most-popular soccer league in its own country behind England’s Premier League and Mexico’s Liga MX. If not, it could end up being a huge mistake.

Whether on or off camera, on or off the record, it isn’t lost on anyone involved that Apple has yet to say a single word publicly about how things have gone so far. There’s plenty of secondhand chatter that the company is happy, but, at times, there’s just as much chatter that it isn’t.

A report by the Athletic in early March that Apple has an early-opt-out clause in its 10-year, $2.5 billion deal has hung over everything ever since it was published.

Over the course of the night at Metropolis it was clear how badly the people doing the work want it to succeed.

“It’s been everything you could hope for and more in terms of making MLS coverage better,” studio host Jillian Sakovits said as she prepared to go on air that night. “But then also, doing it at this kind of scale — in some ways it feels like we’ve been doing it for years, and in other ways you have to remind yourself it’s Match Day 12.”

It was a moment full of promise, just like the present is for MLS and Apple. But from the smallest scale to the biggest, there’s still a lot of work to do.