Why Sports Teams Are Building Studios, and What I Bring to the Build

The Team Studio Series  |  Part 1 of 4  |  David Frangioni

By David Frangioni

The Chiefs, Cubs, Manchester City and MLB are all building in-house studios. I have spent my career building the rooms where world-class content gets made. Those two things belong together.

Last week I read a Front Office Sports feature that described exactly what I have been watching happen across professional sports. Teams are no longer just licensing their stories to networks. They are building studios.

The Kansas City Chiefs turned a two-minute playoff parody into a feature-length Hallmark movie, then into Foolish Club Studios, and now into film investments with no football connection at all. The Cubs produced a 17-part scripted series for TikTok. Manchester City runs a documentary operation on its own streaming service. MLB has a studio. The NFL partnered with Skydance.

When I read that, I did not see a sports story. I saw a production story. And production is what I do.

Teams Already Own What Studios Want

Every studio in Hollywood is looking for the same things: talent people care about, stories with built-in stakes and an audience that already exists. A professional team has all three before it shoots a frame.

What most teams do not have yet is the infrastructure to turn that into content at the level the audience now expects. A social team with a few cameras is not a studio. A converted office is not a mix room. A shared drive is not an archive.

That gap is where I work.

I Have Built This Before, for Artists

My career has been spent on both sides of the glass. I have produced, recorded, mixed and delivered projects for artists including Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Shakira, Sting, KISS, Elton John and Ringo Starr. I have designed and built the studios, theaters and systems where that kind of work happens.

Artists at that level are a lot like franchises. They are global brands. They have decades of catalog. They have fans who notice everything. And they cannot afford a room that gets in the way of the work.

A team studio has the same demands. Cameras, stages, control rooms, edit suites, Dolby Atmos mixing, podcast rooms and storage all have to work together, and they have to work every day of the season.

The Company and the Facility Are One Project

The mistake I see most often is treating the production company and the production facility as separate decisions. One group decides what content to make. Another group decides what to build. They meet in the middle when it is already expensive to fix.

I build them together. I start with what the team wants to make, who it is for and where it will live: broadcast, streaming, social, film. Then I design the rooms, systems and workflow around that content, and the staffing model around the rooms.

I also run a media business myself. Through Modern Drummer, I operate a publishing, video, archive and commerce platform. I know what it means to feed an audience on a deadline, and I design facilities with that pressure in mind.

A team building a studio should have one person who understands the creative, the technical and the business.

David Frangioni

One Call

A team building a studio should not have to manage a dozen vendors who have never worked together. It should have one person who understands the creative, the technical and the business, and who is accountable for all of it.

That is the role I play. Through Frangioni Media, I deliver the production company and the facility, turnkey, at the highest level of quality and in the most cost-effective way I know how.

If your organization is building the blueprint, let us talk.

Frequently Asked Questions

David Frangioni

Building a team studio? My company Frangioni Media designs and builds turnkey production studios for pro sports teams. See how a team studio build works or contact me.