With Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas over, have you ever wondered what it’s like to cover the NFL’s “Big Game”? Some will be surprised to learn it’s a year in the making project for the World’s news agencies. And plans are underway to prepare for the 2025 Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans.

While the NFL and the various new organizations analyze their performance from this year’s event, at the Associated Press (AP), the planning has already started for the 2025 Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans.

The AP staffed the game Las Vegas event with ten photographers, two robotic operators, eight photo editors, and four technicians, some of whom arrived up to ten days before the event to start running cables and setting up robotic and remote cameras.

The AP is just one team in the media, along with teams from Agency France Presse (AFP), Reuters, Getty Images, New York Times, USA Today Sports Images, and many others, bringing more than 100 photographers to cover the game from every angle. The Super Bowl is sometimes called the largest one-day sporting event and doesn’t have a permanent home. This means that everything set up must be torn down for the next Super Bowl in some distant city just 364 days away.

The AP technicians deployed over 3000 feet of ethernet cable, switches, and photo servers to connect photographers’ cameras and servers to photo editors. Photographers used four Robotic Cameras, eight Static Remote Cameras, twenty-four Sony Alpha 9 III, thirty Sony Alpha 1 cameras (used in the remotes, robotics, and handheld), and too many Sony lenses to count from 16mm to 600mm and teleconverters.

The AP tested the latest photo transmission technology with a prototype of Sony’s portable data transmitter on the 5G network. So, whether the photographer is attached to an ethernet cable or running around on the field, the pictures they take should arrive in front of a photo editor in seconds.

The goal is to move that defining moment from the camera to the clients in less than two minutes.

Pictures will stream into the photo editors, get metadata applied live via Photo Mechanic templates so that every photo has a time stamp, basic caption, and byline so complete captions can be checked with voice annotations from the photographers in the field back to the editing desk under the stands in the basement concourse. Every detail has been checked and rechecked, from the photographer’s camera date, time, and serial numbers to the metadata templates and network connections.

All this is done to save precious seconds from the processing of images from the photographer to the clients waiting for the game’s critical storytelling moments. It’s a race amongst the news agencies to deliver images first to feed social, sports, and news outlets in this day of instant news on the internet to eager fans waiting for images.

Upstairs preparations are going on with Sony, Canon, and Nikon Pro Support teams cleaning and loaning out cameras and lenses and training on the latest in their camera lineups.

Like the Olympics, the Super Bowl is a great place to test new hardware and workflow solutions, and the just-released Sony Alpha 9 III camera was on the frontlines; with its Global Shutter, 120fps, eye tracking AI autofocus, and pre-capture, it was the buzz camera of the game. The AP used them on the sidelines, and Sony Pro Support had thirty to lend out to those eager to try the latest camera technology.

Photographers, Editors, and Technicians arrive about 6 hours before the game to get settled and make last-minute adjustments at all stages of the game coverage.

On the sidelines, there is talk about the main photos of the game and who will win at past Super Bowls. But this year’s Super Bowl has a new angle as Taylor Swift will arrive to watch her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, who plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Millions will be tuned in for the championship match – which also threw the spotlight on Taylor Swift’s closely watched romance with Travis Kelce.

Everyone agrees the kiss will be the picture to get, and it may even eclipse the standard front page photo of the winning team’s Quarterback hosting the Super Bowl Trophy winner holding the cup.

It’s hard to estimate how many pictures were shot by the AP photographers in the stadium on Super Bowl Sunday this year. But an estimated 30,000 images were shot, about 6000 pictures were looked at by editors, and about 1000 were sent to clients and the AP archive.

After the game ends, the last pictures have moved, and the fans are back home. What took more than a year’s planning and a week to set up gets packed up in six hours into twenty-three cases for shipping to the next event. The AP team is exhausted, as we were the last to leave the stadium past midnight.

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Nick Didlick is a photographer, videographer, instructor, and consultant.