ROMANIA COMES TO
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER

ROMANIA to ABU DHABI to NYC

Alexandru Mitriță (also known as Mitri) is a Romanian professional footballer, hailed as one of the players to lead Romania to their new golden age after a multi-decade decline in performance. His performance in Liga I caught the attention of Italian Serie B outfit Pescara, who Mitriță helped lead to promotion in 2016 during his first season in Italy. Mitri joined Maxi Moralez and Jesus Medina as City’s third Designated Player for their 2019 Major League Soccer season.

[From official NYCFC Press Release] New York City FC Sporting Director Claudio Reyna said of the signing: “Alexandru is a very talented attacking threat who can score goals and create chances when running at the opposing team. At almost 24, he’s part of an exciting younger generation coming out of Romania.”

THE PROJECT

When we were told by New York City Football Club’s Technical Director about Mitriță’s signing, we had about two weeks before he landed in Abu Dhabi to join preseason. We had no footage of Mitri’s old games to flaunt his highlights, no interviews or soundbites, and were 8 hours ahead of our coworkers in New York. The scale of this player and what his presence meant for the future of the club’s season meant that the announcement would be a massive reveal, adorned with dozens of content pieces.

I was tasked with ideating and producing the center-piece reveal video as well as creating and piecing everything together for the final, multi-video package.

WORKED WITH:

Manchester City’s video team in England: Mitriță would be flying there first to get his physical testing…we decided to have his interview filmed there to save time and ensure we could have videos ready as soon as he was in Abu Dhabi
Mitri’s previous clubs in Italy and Romania: to get as much highlight reel footage as we could
NYC’s Romanian community: for interviews about their passion and excitement for Mitriță’s presence at the Club
NYCFC’s front office staff: one of my coworkers, a journalist by trade and an avid photographer, had never set up and filmed an interview solo, so I walked him through each step—from lighting to camera angles to mic testing

THE PRODUCT

This was truly a global effort because the last step was getting our New York City office’s IT intern—fluent in Romanian—to translate the interview transcript from Manchester, England. Upon receipt of the transcript at 4am—due to the time difference in Abu Dhabi—I gave my best guess as to where each English subtitle lined up with Mitri’s Romanian answers before sending it all back for the final round of approvals.

The final product from my end was 5 separate videos—Mitri’s reveal, his first interview, his first 24 hours with the Club, his highlight reel and a quick-hit text driven story. We had a sense that the Romanian football community was a big one, but the reaction to the campaign was bigger than we could have imagined. The videos quickly attained hundreds of thousands of views on our social platforms. The next weekend we had a preseason friendly against AIK (a Swedish powerhouse) and Mitri scored in his debut and on his birthday. That video quickly amassed close to 100,000 views, extremely rare for an unofficial match. Reacting quickly, we created one-offs from our previous videos in combination with some unreleased b-roll to keep the hype high.