LETTER FROM AMERICA

Aberdonian commentator Derek Rae, now the global voice of the EA Sports FIFA video game, normally spends every week travelling from his base near Boston. This year, like most of us, he has had to adjust to working permanently from home.

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It was only a year ago but it seems in retrospect like a scene from a much earlier decade. My commentating travels as so often had taken me from my home in Massachusetts to Germany and then to England. On the back of that, I made a flying post-Christmas visit to Aberdeen to see family and catch up with old Hazlehead Academy friends from back in the day. We had a grand old time reminiscing at Number Ten’s that late December night wondering what the new year had in store for us and the world. Little could we have imagined of course.

I returned to Germany in February for a week of Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal commentaries all over the Bundesrepublik. On my travels in Munich, I began reading about the initial Covid-19 cases at a car parts manufacturer on the outskirts of the Bavarian capital. Friends who work in the scientific field were simultaneously telling me to consider restricting travel going forward. When credible scientists talk, I generally listen.

A few days after returning home following a long flight from Munich to Massachusetts via London, I was kept at home by a combination of fever, chills and body aches up and down my spine and legs lasting 4 days, before the symptoms resolved completely. I thought nothing much of it at the time but looking back, I wonder.

Anyway, March 1st arrived and I was due to be travelling to Spain, Germany and England. Amid a sense of foreboding, I hadn’t even made hotel reservations in Seville, and cancelled the whole trip as it was becoming clear it was going to be an exercise in walking on eggshells. It was one of the best travel decisions I’ve made in a very long time.

Naturally as a freelance, this meant losing a lot of work but what can you do in a global pandemic with a new virus when lives are being lost on a large scale?

I’ve always been a big fan of the idea that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, it has never been more apt than in 2020. Together with my broadcasting clients, we suddenly had to get our thinking caps on as regards how to be as productive as possible given the circumstances.

The biggest question mark hovered over my work as the lead voice of the EA Sports FIFA video game, the most popular football video game in the world. We still had stacks of content to record for FIFA 21 and there was no obvious way of doing it, at least not along traditional lines. Finding a suitable studio in Boston where I live was impossible as we were under a stay at home mandate until well into June. For obvious reasons, a commercial recording studio does not qualify as an essential service.

So my EA Sports colleagues asked if we could instead build a studio in my home. It was the perfect solution. It turned out the room we use as our clothes storage area actually offered the best acoustics, so it quickly got renamed “FIFA Studio A.”

Every day I would receive a shipment of a different piece of broadcast equipment and gradually constructed a working studio. I found the whole process somewhat magical and to be honest it gave us huge flexibility to record content just about every day for two whole months, the like of which we wouldn’t usually have.

My producer Andrew Vance would come on the line from Vancouver, ace audio man Pete Brown from London and I would join from Boston at lunchtime my time, supper time in England, breakfast time in western Canada. It was a thoroughly creative, collaborative process and even though we were thousands of miles apart, it felt as though we were all in the same studio. Literally keeping our distance but all together.

Although we missed doing it the traditional way, I’ll always look back fondly on how we recorded the main body of FIFA 21 in my own four walls from “FIFA Studio A.”

This recording flexibility also extended to helping Red TV with a project that was dear to my heart. With everyone home in lockdown on Gothenburg Day, May 11^th, the club asked if I would like to host a special show linking around a replay of the Cup Winners Cup final. The idea was we would get Willie Miller, Eric Black, John Hewitt and Neil Simpson together and just take fans through the story again. What a thrill that was to relive that experience with my heroes. I got the feeling on social media Dons fans had entered into the spirit of the whole occasion by reenacting the whole thing in their minds.

Since then, I’ve enjoyed helping the club with down memory lane interviews featuring Aberdeen greats and who better to start with than Bobby Clark, with whom I share an American connection. We’ve kept in touch down the years and it was wonderful to reconnect with Bobby now that he’s back living in Scotland and I’ve gone back the other way.

The Bundesliga is my other main project these days and I’m loving being back with my former employers ESPN as their lead linear TV commentator and columnist for German football. It also allows me to remain as one of the lead commentary voices on the Bundesliga’s world feed.

There won’t be any trips back to Germany or Scotland for the foreseeable future but the main thing as I see it right now is that we think about our community. Hopefully the one thing we all can glean from the last few months is, it’s not about “me” but all about “we.”

Best Festive wishes to you and your family.

Derek Rae

Twitter: @RaeComm