Football On Bbc

[alfieconn]

The BBC Sport website has delivered some major projects in the past few years - World Cups, Olympics, big breaking news stories - but I would argue that none have been as complex and wide-ranging as the Football League coverage which launches this week.

The BBC won the rights to be a broadcast partner of the Football League back in 2007, as part of a joint bid with Sky, who will be the primary rights holder. Thus, from Saturday 8 August 2009, there will be a TV highlights show on Saturday nights on BBC TV after Match of the Day ("The Football League Show") wrapping up all the games from that day's matches in the Championship, League One and League Two, and on top of that, there will be an awful lot of highlights to watch for UK users on this website.

Namely, this website will be bringing you video highlights of every game in the Coca Cola Football League, Carling Cup and Johnstone's Paint Trophy. That is quite a simple way of stating what you will see on bbc.co.uk/football. How it gets there is a little more complicated.

BBC Sport is in partnership with an independent production company, IMG, as well as BT, on this project. Hence all of the 'film' (the industry term is "rushes") captured by the camera operators at each and every ground is sent to BT Tower in central London on the evening of the game. Here the rushes are edited into neat packages, ready for publication on the website at midnight the following day.

So, I will take a moment to clarify that, because it is not an easy thing to explain. We are allowed to publish from midnight the day after matches. We will try to get some content up on the stroke of midnight, but most of it will go live the following morning.

That means, if your team plays on a Saturday in any of the competitions I outlined above, you can expect to see a video edit of that game (approx two-five minutes) on this website when you get to your desk at 9am on Monday mornings. If your game is on a Tuesday night, check in with us on the Thursday morning. Sunday game? We should be showing that to you on Tuesday mornings. You get the picture!

In addition to the match edits, we will also offer a video edit rounding up all of the games from each division (one edit for each division) after each full programme of fixtures.

If you really cannot wait to see your team's goals online, there are two other options I can point you to. The Saturday night Football League Show will be on the BBC iPlayer from Sunday mornings, and a lot of club websites will be offering their own games earlier than we are allowed to, mostly (I believe) on a subscription basis.

The BBC will also have 10 live Championship games on TV this season, plus one leg of each Carling Cup semi-final, and the final itself. Each of those live games will be streamed on this website (again, for UK users only), starting with West Brom v Newcastle this coming Saturday; two of Sir Bobby Robson's clubs and, coming so soon after his death, it should be a poignant occasion.

Beyond video, this site will also see some changes to the way we present live football coverage this season.