The Premier League is expected to return back to action pretty soon but almost certainly these matches will be played behind closed doors without any spectators.
PL has been sending out details of how to go about planning a restart in a project called ‘Project Restart’ and now to make things even more interesting, reports are suggesting that the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery) is being discussed as an alternative to the empty stadiums.
“Even if a club doesn’t sell all of its seats in the Premier League if you have one stand that’s particularly empty that results in much lower feedback from the viewer,” says a senior Sky source, via I News.
“Even when the noise is there, one empty stand really impacts people’s enjoyment of the spectacle. When you add the two in – i.e. the ground is totally empty and totally silent, then it really is an odd experience.
“People seeing banks of empty seats and people hearing no noise and no audio effects, for more than a novelty value of one match, there’s a serious concern over what that would do for people’s enjoyment of the matches and their desire to see the sport played behind closed doors.
“People have found closed-door matches at international level a bit of a novelty in the past but if you have to watch that multiple times over many months then that will probably devalue the product, which runs the risk of harming of the Premier League’s brand and arguably the broadcasters too.
“It’s not actually that hard to put in CGI moving graphics, even on the side of live-action. The challenge is to do it at the scale that’s now required. Can you make Old Trafford look full when you’re moving the camera between all of the angles that cameras have to move between?
“CGI is easy to do if you have one fixed camera and you’re doing it in one-fixed zone. But think of 24 cameras essentially giving you a 360-degree view. That’s a lot of techs. The tech exists but the challenge of running it at the latency that’s required has never been done before.”
Will the Premier League go ahead with CGI?
As we see it, at this point, the Premier League is practically thinking of any solution that can help resume the remaining matches in the 2019-20 season.
Over the past month, we have heard a lot of ideas regarding this matter, one as absurd as taking the whole tournament to China and ending the matches there.
But most of these outlandish theories have not seen the light of the day and we feel the CGI concept might also be flushed down the drain pretty quickly.
The use of CGI across all the venues in all the matches is a real challenge and we believe there is just not enough time to pull off such a feat in such a massive scale.
