The Premier League played host to ECAL Founder & CEO, Patrick Barrett and Client Services Director, Cassandra Calleja at the Emirates Stadium on Monday night (25th Sept 2017), for the match between Arsenal and West Bromwich Albion.

It was also a case of ‘Football Meets Football’ (big time!), with Barrett taking the opportunity to introduce the touring NFL team New Orleans Saints to Arsenal, for a media opportunity like no other.

In town for their weekend clash against the Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium, 10 Saints stars led by Drew Brees, Mark Ingram and Cam Jordan, were treated to a night out they’ll never forget, thanks to Arsenal and ECAL.

With not even a day’s notice, the New Orleans Saints players were scheduled in for a pre-match pitch walk, media interviews, photo opportunities, shirt presentation and exclusive seating.

The two leading ‘football’ organisations worked together to create huge media value, with the story picked up by major media publishers across the US and UK, including ESPN, Fox, NBC Sports, Yahoo!, The Sun, The Guardian, The Mirror, Daily Mail and others.

For the Saints, this was the perfect promotional lead-in to their upcoming game on the weekend. For Arsenal, well, if there are any Saints or NFL fans that don’t yet have a Premier League team, they may have one now!

The Arsenal social media team produced a video from the footage and released this via Facebook  (541k views), with cross-posting provided to the Saints. A longer video feature was also quickly produced for Arsenal TV, and aired across their affiliates globally.

There was also some amazing ‘user generated content’ by the players themselves. The first goal by Alexandre Lacazette was sensationally captured by Drew Brees on his mobile and posted to Instagram. It’s an awesome moment, and has had more than 60k views. There’s also some cool content from Mark Ingram and the Saints.

ECAL Founder & CEO, Patrick Barrett said “I think this is a great example of how our company is unlike any regular technology vendor. As a team, we pride ourselves in going above and beyond for the success of our partner clients, and I think when you engage in at this level, sometimes, magic happens. Kudos to the unbelievable professionalism of Arsenal. What they were able to achieve as an organisational team, on the day of a game, was pretty damn impressive.”

For the record, Arsenal defeated West Brom 2-0 with Alexandre Lacazette scoring a brace. Arsenal currently sit seventh on the Premier League table.

You can follow your Premier League team throughout the 17/18 season directly from your personal calendar via the official Premier League ‘Add to Calendar’ service, proudly powered by ECAL.

For Arsenal fans, visit Arsenal’s dedicated ECAL digital calendar service for even more great content including First Team Fixtures, Ladies Fixtures, Academy Fixture and Ticket On-sale Dates.