Everton’s new stadium on the Liverpool waterfront lost 119 seats before its first season began. The capacity revision reduced Hill Dickinson Stadium from 52,888 to 52,769, citing segregation lines between home and away supporters and space for media facilities and camera positions. One of the newest grounds in English football traded paying spectators, however few, for camera angles.

That trade looks trivial on a single ticket. Across European football, it has become routine. Clubs now draw stadium broadcast infrastructure into the plans from the first sketch, with studios, commentary positions, interview zones, fibre routes and parking for outside-broadcast trucks laid out as carefully as the stands. The building increasingly behaves like a television studio that happens to sell tickets.

Here’s the puzzle. While stadiums wrap themselves ever more tightly around production, the people who make that production are leaving the building. Vision mixing, replays and graphics are moving to central hubs in other cities, and some matches now reach viewers without a director anywhere near the ground. Clubs are shaping their venues around a crew that increasingly works somewhere else.

The premise holds up on paper. UEFA’s stadium infrastructure regulations set a minimum broadcast compound for every category of ground, from 300 m² at the bottom to 1,000 m² at the top.The broadcast compound must be sited next to the stadium and able to take vehicles over 40 tonnes. The Champions League goes further. Its rules on facilities for audiovisual rights holders require studios of at least five metres by five metres by 2.3 metres, provision for up to 50 commentary positions for a semi-final and at least ten flash-interview positions at that stage.

The crowd remains the reason a club exists. UEFA counted 240 million people at European club and national-team matches in 2024/25, an all-time record, with more than 80 million of them watching matches below the top tier. Supporters still turn up in huge numbers. What has changed is the share of a stadium’s value that depends on people who never will attend.

The money explains the shift. In November 2024, Premier League clubs unanimously agreed to bring international media production in-house from the 2026/27 season. For 20 years IMG had produced that output in partnership with the league, providing full coverage of all 380 matches to broadcasters in more than 180 countries.

That changeover has now taken place. According to SportsPro’s guide to the new season, international content now comes from Premier League Studios, a 73,000-square-foot production hub at Olympia in west London, and ending the old production partnership helped the league launch Premier League+, its own streaming service, in Singapore. A league that makes its own pictures can sell them straight to fans.

Italy got there first. Serie A’s International Broadcast Centre at Lissone, north of Milan, presents itself as the production centre where all of the league’s content is created. It houses eight VAR rooms, three master control rooms, 16 commentary booths and 24 highlights stations. Twenty clubs play in stadiums across Italy, and the league assembles their television in one building. That is the first half of the contradiction: control of the picture is moving towards buildings the leagues run themselves.

Remote production accelerates the move. At a 2022 UEFA Youth League match between Tottenham Hotspur and Sporting CP, a cloud-based production cut the carbon footprint by 25% compared with Tottenham’s previous home Youth League fixture. UEFA’s report on the trial said the same approach can halve the on-site crew and cut the technical infrastructure needed for production galleries by up to 70%. Those are early figures from a single youth fixture, but the direction has held. The Olympics have pushed furthest. AVIXA has reported how Olympic Broadcasting Services has been  moving switching, replay and audio processing from trucks onto servers, most recently at Milano Cortina 2026, in an approach the host broadcaster says can cut compound space by about half.

Germany shows where remote production leads. During the 2025 off-season, the Bundesliga connected all 36 stadiums in its top two divisions to one IP-based broadcast network, and it now produces two Bundesliga matches per matchday remotely. The match still happens in the stadium. The decision about which camera viewers see is taken elsewhere.

The truck has not vanished. NEP began the 2025/26 season with new outside-broadcast units supporting more than 100 of Sky Sports’ Premier League matches, and those units still travel to the grounds. They are built to connect quickly back to Sky’s studios, with a separate on-site pod for the production team that stays on site. The top of the English game now runs a hybrid: some people at the stadium, more of the work connected back to base.

Read quickly, this looks like the end of the stadium as studio: fewer people in the compound, fewer trucks, smaller galleries, and a production team that sees the pitch only on a monitor. Cameras stay.

Strip the people out of a broadcast and what remains is infrastructure. Every camera still needs a fixed position, a power feed and a signal path. Every microphone, intercom line and data feed still has to leave the stadium and arrive, intact and in sync, at a gallery that may sit hundreds of kilometres away. Remote production shrinks the compound and hardens everything around it.

The evidence is laid in the ground itself. When NEP Connect needed to carry high-definition feeds from Premier League grounds to its remote production hubs for the 2025/26 season, it chose Neos Networks, whose fibre was already in place at all 20 Premier League stadiums. The stated aim, in Neos’s announcement, was “reducing the need for on-site trucks and personnel”. In Spain, Telefónica Servicios Audiovisuales runs a fibre network linking all 42 LaLiga stadiums, able to carry more than 200 simultaneous signals between grounds, production centres and broadcasters. Each is a permanent installation, built into the venue so that people need not be present.

Remote production moves the risk. When a director sat in a truck outside the stand, an engineer ten metres away could patch a failed link. When the director sits in another city, the stadium’s own cabling, switching and fibre become part of the live broadcast chain, and a fault at the venue becomes a fault on air. A league-wide network of this kind only works if every ground behaves the same way, matchday after matchday, with no production engineer on site to coax it back. That is a building-services standard applied to television.

Regulation has not caught up. UEFA’s compound rules still assume heavy trucks parked beside the stand, so many grounds must provide for both models at once: space and power for the traditional outside broadcast, plus permanent connectivity for remote work. Venues end up building a studio for a crew that may not come, and a network for one that never will.

For the people who design and run venue AV, the consequences are already visible. Clubs now fix camera positions at the planning stage, as Everton’s seat count shows, and once they sit in the seating plan, they are hard to move. Cable routes, fibre and power to those positions become permanent building services, specified and commissioned to broadcast tolerances and expected to outlast several rights cycles.

Some of that cost already lands on the club. Champions League rules oblige clubs to make available, and pay the rental on, up to four internet lines in the outside-broadcast area, and to provide dedicated Wi-Fi free of charge across every broadcast zone. Connectivity has quietly become part of the price of hosting European football.

The pressure will not stop at the broadcast. A stadium that already carries a permanent, monitored media backbone will struggle to justify a separate network for its in-bowl screens, public address and fan connectivity, and venue teams will push those systems onto shared infrastructure. AVIXA’s account of what happens when a live production outgrows its infrastructure describes the same move in theatres and entertainment venues, away from permanent point-to-point signal paths and towards networked systems that can be rerouted as the show changes.

That raises a question of ownership most venue contracts were never written to answer. A league may own the production, a broadcaster the rights, a club or a city the stadium, and an integrator may have installed the cabling. When the picture freezes on a Saturday afternoon, each will look at the others. The integrators who settle that question in the contract, before the first matchday, are likely to be the ones the venue calls again.

“Television studio with seats” gets the direction right and the shape wrong. European football is moving its production people out of the stadium and into central buildings the leagues control, and it will keep doing so, because owning the pictures is how leagues reach fans directly. What it leaves behind is a stadium that works as the permanent capture layer of a studio located somewhere else: fixed cameras, permanent cabling and connectivity that must perform without anyone watching over them.

That makes broadcast a building service. Building services belong to whoever designs, commissions and maintains the venue, which puts this work squarely in reach of integrators and in-house AV teams. Those who still treat broadcast as a matchday visitor will lose it to those who build it into the walls.