Champions League Immortals
BT Sport, 2022
A format that transformed Champions League archive into an ongoing debate across social and broadcast.
MY ROLE
Led the creation and rollout of the format, scaling it from a social concept into a campaign that ran across editorial, PR and live TV.
CONTEXT
BT Sport needed a more repeatable way to drive engagement across its Champions League coverage.
The competition’s 30-year anniversary created the perfect opportunity to unlock the archive. Existing output was high-volume, but failed to sustain attention beyond the match cycle.
We needed to create something that could run across the season, generate debate and translate naturally across social, editorial and broadcast.
STRATEGY
Football fans don’t just watch the Champions League. They debate it, relive it, reminisce about it and constantly re-rank its players, teams and moments. The conversation never really stops, but BT Sport weren’t giving fans a reason to keep it going on our channels.
Nostalgia and debate sit at the centre of how the Champions League is experienced. As early 2000s football culture started to resurface - Total 90s, the starball era, Ronaldinho vs Chelsea - the archive gave us everything we needed.
UCL Immortals turned that nostalgia into something active and repeatable by building a format around the behaviour.
Working with UEFA, we used the Champions League archive as the foundation and built a library of iconic moments, players and matches.
We turned those moments into decisions, asking fans to choose, rank and challenge, then feeding those responses back into social, editorial, punditry and PR.
The format ran as a continuous loop across the season: start with the archive, spark debate and use the response to drive the next wave of content.
It launched with social polls about iconic players and moments. As formats began to outperform match clips, Immortals expanded into editorial, PR and ultimately a live TV debate show.
WHAT CHANGED
UCL Immortals became part of how fans talked about the Champions League that season.
Fans built their own XIs, challenged selections and carried debates into their own timelines. Conversations like Gerrard vs Lampard and Van Dijk vs Ferdinand evolved into wider club rivalry discourse that sustained engagement well beyond matchdays.
What started as a social format expanded into live TV, becoming the first BT Sport campaign developed by Digital to make that transition. By the end of the season, it had become BT Sport’s largest-ever UEFA content campaign.
75M+
video views across socials
1.4M
viewers for live TV show
LARGEST EVER
UEFA BT Sport campaign by output
Images & Video: UEFA, BT Sport