Video streaming giants Netflix and Amazon Prime have demonstrated their ambition to break into football by competing for Premier League clubs' fly-on-the-wall documentaries.
Both subscription services are known to have asked clubs in the top flight to afford them the access in all areas required to make such sports programming, which has proved very popular in the United States, as reported by the Daily Mail.
The two hugely popular subscription services have reportedly approached the Premier League trio to request access to the inner workings of the clubs in order to produce 'fly-on-the-wall' style documentaries which would show fans exactly how the clubs work – from a non-official perspective.
While City, Liverpool and Chelsea are thought to be the clubs to have been approached, no deals have been signed yet but the prospect of the companies creating high-quality documentaries sounds exciting not just to fans of those clubs, but football supporters in general.
Liverpool previously had a similar style documentary done by Fox Soccer and Channel 5 in 2012, but Netflix and Amazon Prime would surely create even better content due to their incredibly high budgets.
Manchester United are only top club against inviting Amazon or Netflix behind the scenes, as they like to keep everything in-house on their MUTV channel.
The project will probably concentrate on the pre-season build-up as current TV rights deals would make documentary filming more problematic once the season gets under way.
Money is certainly no object, with Netflix claiming this week they had the budget to commission new programmes costing £15m an hour to produce — even more than the £11m Sky pay for each live Premier League game — as part of their drive for more subscribers.
Amazon Prime have already entered the sports market by buying the rights to ATP tennis tournaments.
The Premier League will also be desperate for either of these two digital behemoths or both to enter the live TV match auction later in the year.
