Prime Video is training for 99, a documentary series about Manchester United’s historic treble-winning season in the late 1990s.
The iconic team featured the likes of David Beckham, Gary Neville and Roy Keane and won the Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League across 10 pivotal days at the culmination of the 1998/99 season.
Amazon’s UK original documentary comes from Ventureland, Beckham’s Studio 99 and Neville’s Buzz16. After retiring, both Beckham and Neville have gone on to high-profile public careers — Beckham is the co-President of U.S. soccer team Inter Miami CF and Neville is a well-respected pundit for Sky Sports. Both are co-owners of Salford City.
Ventureland’s John Battsek and Miles Coleman will produce the series. Executive Producers are Nicola Howson and David Gardner for Studio 99, Scott Melvin for Buzz 16 and Kerstin Emhoff for Ventureland. Sampson Collins, the RTS-winning director of Gazza, is directing the series.
This series is billed as “both a love letter to one of the greatest achievements in world football and the story of a group of players who were recruited, coached and moulded by Sir Alex Ferguson to create history.”
It will feature interviews with the likes of Beckham, Neville, Paul Scholes, Peter Schmeichel and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who scored a dramatic winning goal in the Champions League Final to achieve the treble and later went on to manage Manchester United. Unseen archive footage and behind-the-scenes video from the club and fans will also be included.
United remain the only English football team to achieve the league-FA Cup-Champions League treble in the same season, though ironically their neighbors and rivals Manchester City can repeat the feat in the next few weeks. City recently won the Premier League for the fifth time in six years and are in the finals of Champions League and the FA Cup, where, intriguingly, United are the opponents and can stop history repeating.
Prime Video has pushed heavily into UK sports docs. Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, a doc on the treble-winning team’s iconic manager, is among its highest-profile originals, along with the likes of All or Nothing: Arsenal, Rooney; Ben Stokes: Phoenix from the Ashes and Take Us Home: Leeds United. It also offers Premier League football and ATP and WTA tennis in the UK and Ireland.
99 will debut on Prime Video globally in 2024.
