Manchester City reveal ambitious plan to produce fictional TV programmes, including children’s shows – as CEO Ferran Soriano insists ‘lots of ideas’ are in the pipeline

Manchester City have launched an ambitious project to move into children’s television programmes.

The Premier League champions routinely produce in-house documentaries, from season reviews to focused pieces on individual players – with ‘Together’, the latest feature-length film winning four consecutive titles, released this week.

But after a collaboration with Sony Pictures Television, City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano wants them to expand beyond that remit and move into surprising areas.

Those include animated, fictional programmes designed to attract new and younger audiences and Mail Sport understands two kids shows are already in the works.

City have not disclosed details of either but it opens up the prospect of top stars like Erling Haaland being showcased in cartoon form.

‘We have a lot of ideas that we are developing,’ Soriano said. ‘They are not in the air, we are working on several fictional TV shows. We are working on shows for kids and we have a list of projects that we are excited about.’

CEO Ferran Soriano (R) revealed the bold plans and said ‘lots of ideas’ were being developed

City have regularly produced in-house documentaries charting their success in recent years

City are also eyeing up other non-fiction products. The streaming platforms looked at are unknown, although Sony have an entertainment app on their PlayStation models.

‘When we do these documentaries we don’t compete with anyone, we are the only one who have this incredible footage that the [City Studios] team captures,’ Soriano added. 

‘If we do fictional TV or shows, we are competing with everybody with Netflix, Amazon or whoever.

‘We are confident we have the creativity, we have the insights in football to create some fictional stories.

‘My hope is you see some of these on your screens in the next few years. I can say that the pipeline of projects is large and the ideas are very exciting.’