A ‘Succession’ For Soccer? Sony’s Wayne Garvie Thinks Football Could Field The Next Major Drama Series
Roman on the right wing? Shiv at center back? Logan as the next great club manager?
Not quite, but Sony Pictures Television International Production President Wayne Garvie wants to use his company’s JV with Manchester City owner City Football Group to find the next great drama series.
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“Imagine what a Succession for football would look like,” he said during a panel at Content London today. “That’s what excites me and Ferran [Soriano, CEO of City Football Group].”
Soccer content has in recent years been dominated by access docs such as All or Nothing, with one series from that Amazon franchise focused on Manchester City, who have won the English Premier League title for four seasons in a row and won the Champions League in 2021 under Spanish coach Pep Guardiola. The soccer field has rarely been the precinct for drama series, but Garvie said “football-adjacent” content, not set entirely in the world of soccer, could lead to rich pickings.
Garvie made the comments while unpacking the shape of Sony’s joint venture with City Football Group, on a panel also including former Netflix exec Erik Barmack, who unsuccessfully attempted to buy Scottish soccer team Motherwell this year, and Pilar Blasco, the CEO of Banijay Iberia, which operates Spanish joint venture La Liga Studios.
Garvie said Soriano had surprised him when they’d first met, with the Spanish business exec telling him that he regarded Manchester City as “an entertainment brand.” As such, they are planning all types of content through the JV including dramas, docs and kids programing “using City Group as IP.”
Blasco said La Liga Studios had formed after the Spanish top division, which is second in popularity only to the globally-dominant Premier League, announced plans to create content from based on its teams and players.
Banijay pitched for the venture and won, and the studio has since focused on providing shoulder content for Spanish league rights packages, social video campaigns and, now, original content. Blasco said this could span anything from biopics to anime, noting: “Football is the main subject but it is very, very diverse. Our approach comes from our extensive entertainment experience.”
Barmack, who is CEO of Wild Sheep Content, set out the case for why sports, and soccer in particular, had cut through so dramatically on streamers. Recalling his spell as VP of International at Netflix, he compared the 70-odd English soccer teams in the country’s top three divisions to “70 books of scale that if you could bid on, you would in a heartbeat.”
“We believed the way football stories would be told would develop massively over 10 years,” he added. “We were interested in how we could fit that with the product.”
Barmack reveals projects
Barmack said assessing how much to invest in soccer content was “difficult,” but that his approach looking to acquire clubs was driven by the idea of building a global business. He revealed he had been working on a series about Motherwell, the top division Scottish team, before his bid to buy them fell through. He also noted he was now working with an unnamed Latin American team on a drama series about their ‘ultras’ — fanatical South American fans who have huge influence over the teams they support.
Questioned whether docs such as Disney+’s Welcome to Wrexham would continue to drive the sports content market, Barmack said: “Are ‘follow docs’ sufficient? The answer is no, and the content is going to change very dramatically by country.”
Garvie said that pacting with City Football Group gave Sony content it could use as the basis for programs and films for years to come. “The players and manager might not want that intimacy revealed now, but in 20 years time” they may not mind, he added.
However, he added that the relatively nascent soccer precinct was still at the beginning of its lifecycle. “We don’t know where we’re going on this journey,” said Garvie.
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