As you may know, the final rounds of the UEFA Champions and Euro Leagues are played this week with audiences excluded. Yesterday, I saw one of those matches for the first time, Bayer Leverkusen - Inter, and was irritated by the fake stadium/audience noises which were put in. I’ve only seen the Bundesliga “Geisterspiele” (ghost matches as we call those matches without fans), and there were no stadium noise added, and it was kinda fascinating because you so clearly could hear the communication on the field and outside between the players, the coaches and the ref.
So I asked myself if the fake audio stream is also audible over the stadium PA so that the players also hear them, or if it is only put into the audio stream for the TV audience.
I found it very off putting, because the noises, the roars and the applause didn’t fit to what happened on the field at all, and if I was a player it would irritate me too.
ETA: I forgot, I also saw a session of the Snooker World Championship yesterday, and there was the same thing, so same question for this.
I’ve been watching the Bundesliga since they came back, and in the US we’re getting fan noise on the English language channels, but not on Spanish language television.
As for UEFA, I was only able to watch Bayern versus Chelsea on Galavision, and I can’t even remember if they had audience sounds. I do remember that we could sometimes hear the players yelling to each other.
The Champions League in English is now on CBS All Access for some reason. Thank God for Spanish language TV.
I can’t think of many matches where English language commentary on a match has really helped me appreciate it better, I’m fine w Spanish.
As it happens, I’m watching a fine Leipzig-Atletico match right now on Univision, and they are piping in just a little crowd noise, but not enough to overwhelm hearing the players.
I haven’t heard that since 1986, when I said it just before the World Cup final (what is now Univision aired matches without commercials - it would air onscreen graphics for its sponsors during the match - whereas, IIRC, ABC did air commercials during play back then). To be fair, I did turn the sound down and listened to the audio on BBC World Service shortwave. Apparently, I wasn’t alone; the 1990 final was not broadcast on shortwave except to a small part of Africa for some reason, although by then, ABC had stopped airing commercials during play.
Spanish language TV again played low-volume crowd sounds today.
Of course, as a Bayern fan, I was louder than most of the fake crowd anyway…
My wife asked about the American sports. I heard they are showing MLB and NBA games with crowd noises, but there aren’t any crowd noises in the stadium, are there?