Coral Sunday League Filming at Wormwood Scrubs
The location brief for the Coral Sunday League TV commercial was simple on paper: find London football pitches with a strong urban backdrop and the unmistakable feel of grassroots Sunday league football.
Not a stadium. Not a pristine professional training ground.
Proper Sunday league.
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Production Company: MJZ London
Client: Coral
Locations: London
Location Brief: London football pitches with an urban backdrop and an authentic Sunday league feel
Scouting London Football Locations for Coral
The search was for a football location that immediately felt real.
We needed open pitches, multiple games, space for a large cast and crew and, importantly, an urban London backdrop. The location had to have the scale to make the commercial feel cinematic while still looking like somewhere thousands of people might turn up and play football on a Sunday morning.
Wormwood Scrubs was a great fit.
The huge open playing fields and surrounding London landscape gave us exactly the scale and atmosphere the brief needed.
Filming at Wormwood Scrubs During COVID
We shot the commercial in September 2020, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic.
With a cast and crew of over 200 people, filming a large-scale football commercial in the middle of the pandemic brought a whole new set of challenges.
Location logistics are always a major part of a shoot of this size, but during COVID there was an entirely new layer of planning and organisation.
Despite the restrictions, the scale of the commercial never feels compromised.
The finished Coral Sunday League film captures everything familiar about grassroots football: the tackles, arguments, muddy pitches, touchline characters and moments of unexpected brilliance.
Working with Director Nicolai Fuglsig and MJZ
Director Nicolai Fuglsig brought a genuinely cinematic scale to the project.
Known for commercials including Sony Bravia’s famous Balls campaign and Guinness Tipping Point, Nicolai has an extraordinary ability to take real environments and everyday moments and make them feel epic on screen.
That approach was perfect for Sunday league football.
The idea wasn’t to make grassroots football look polished or professional. It was to capture the chaos, humour and passion of the real thing, but photograph it with the scale and energy of a major sporting event.
And Wormwood Scrubs gave us the canvas to do it.
From Sunday League to the Big Screen
For me, this is what good location work is about.
The brief might say “London football pitches with an urban backdrop”, but the job is finding the location that gives the director and production designer something more.
Somewhere that can carry the scale of the idea.
In this case, a collection of Sunday league football pitches in West London became the backdrop for a huge cinematic celebration of grassroots football.
Here is a selection of my original location scout photographs from the Coral Sunday League TV commercial:
