Big Ron's soccer soap fills space between games

"Big Ron" Atkinson, the football manager's football manager, is facing a new challenge. The perma-tanned, bangle-toting former boss of Manchester United and Aston Villa is to take charge at the beleaguered Midlands club Harchester United, currently anchored to the bottom of the Premiership.

It is a situation that will be familiar to Atkinson, who was appointed to his previous post at Coventry City in similar circumstances. The difference this time is that Harchester United are a fictional side, the focus of Sky Television's football soap opera Dream Team, which is launched next month.

"Big Ron is born to act," Rod Brown, the programme's associate producer, explains. "He wasn't exactly line-scripted, we just told him to imagine he was talking to one of his former chairmen." It is rumoured that Atkinson's tenure at Harchester United is short-lived, but the future of the club itself seems to be secure: 64 episodes of the twice-weekly series have been commissioned. The logic of a football soap opera is irresistible: viewers can't get enough of the real thing, so they will be eager to watch the fictional version, which has all the fascinating paraphernalia of the Premiership, with the added attraction that you get to see the players with their kit off.

"There will be something for the girls and something for the boys," Brown promises. "The show is pitched at a family audience. But there will be things coming in from left field, things that came up when we were doing our research at football clubs. I can't tell you what came up at which club, but things that happen in real life also happen at football clubs."

The drama follows the fortunes of five players in the Harchester United youth team. The producers are very cagey about revealing precise plot lines, but students of the genre and followers of the back pages of the tabloids should be able to construct their own likely scenarios given the following dramatis personae...

Sean is a 16-year-old winger, who has "the kind of cocky charisma and arrogance of a Liam Gallagher-type character". Dean, his brother, the 18-year-old captain of the youth team, is "a bit of a pin-up, utterly committed, mature and driven, with a wilder, more random element bubbling under the surface". Vincent, the 17-year-old full-back, "has ambitions to become the next black sporting icon and star in Nike ads like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods".

Then there are Warren, a 17-year-old midfielder and a "roughneck" with a criminal record who lost his virginity at the age of 13; and 16-year- old winger Conor, "a young Irishman fresh from Galway who is caught in the headlights somewhat by his new environment". It is safe to assume that Conor's virginity will not stay intact for very long, given the presence of Georgina, the 15-year-old daughter of the club's chairman, "Lolita in a Wonderbra, attracted to the forbidden fruits of the youth team".

"There's lots of potential," believes Steven Murphy of Inside Soap magazine. "You've got the men on the field, the women behind the men on the field, the bosses, the laddish behaviour in the changing room, the rows about who is going to be allowed to wash whose kit: there is every possible level of intrigue."

There is also every possibility of embarrassment for Sky if the football sequences are not up to scratch. One way around the problem is to superimpose Harchester's purple colours on to actual Premier League footage. But the technique works best with blue shirts, so that the fictional club's fortunes will be tied to those of Chelsea, Leicester City and Everton.

The young actors will also have to look the part on the training field, and Sky recruited the former Chelsea player John Hollins to knock them into shape. "They went through three weeks of intensive football training before shooting started," according to Rod Brown. "It was the same kind of thing that YTS trainees would undergo in pre-season training with their clubs. Well, they weren't actually cleaning out the toilets, but John was quite tough on them."

John Hollins will also appear on camera, playing the club's assistant manager. Together with Big Ron, he has the responsibility of trying to live up to Harchester United's ambitious motto: Contende ad Caelum, or Reach for the Sky. Whether or not viewers will do so remains to be seen.