Fred Rowson pokes fun at football fanfare in Premier League's More ...

The Premier League has launched a new campaign titled More Than a Game, showcasing its investment in football at all levels. Directed by Blink Productions' Fred Rowson, the spots comprise in-depth portraits of emerging football talent: committed community members such as the long-serving Staveley Miners Welfare; player, manager, and now hospitality manager, Dave “Snip” Tromans; and the league’s Kicks community captain Ismael Bamba.

BBH first brought the project to Fred as “a bit of a conundrum,” he tells us. When starting out, the advertising agency had some scripts for the ads, but no direct access to players, “only pre-match green screen footage of them posing and answering questions”. As such, the challenge was to turn that footage into something captivating for the audience, while also ensuring it stood out from other Premier League ads that weren’t community driven. “It took me 15 minutes of scrubbing through to realise that the best bits were when the players weren’t posing, but breaking character and talking to someone off screen,” Fred adds, “being human, in other words”. Which kicked off this resonant and up-beat display of the campaign’s efforts.

“I really don’t know anything about football,” Fred shares. While some may believe it’s a major pitfall for executing a project like this, the director actually deems it a superpower because it gave him the ability to look at the footage of players in an unsentimental way. “What excited me was the opportunity to take ‘ordinary’ people and use the visual vernacular of football superstars to draw attention to how silly the whole circus is,” he shares, “whether it’s the over-the-top stats whizzing around or having your face in a video game, or on the side of a house. It was exciting being able to apply that treatment to regular players as opposed to the ones of celebrity status”.