Broadcast Sport speaks to TNS owner Mike Harris about the film it has made with Deft Touch
Welsh football hasn’t always had quite the spotlight on it that the English and Scottish leagues have, something that TNS owner Mike Harris is well aware of.
He told Broadcast Sport, “Wales has been the forgotten football league, really. We have had to struggle to get airtime with the sport fraternity, and it took a lot of campaigning to get our results included on national results shows.”
However, TNS has been doing its best to turn this around on the pitch, making it to the league phase of the Europa Conference League for the first time in 2024/25 and continuing its dominance in the Cymru Premier. Harris is keen for this to continue, and after watching Clarkson’s Farm on Prime Video, decided that they could make their own documentary.
“We were using a marketing agency to promote the club, and one of the ideas was, do you think it would have popularity enough to do a Netflix type of approach,” he revealed. “We’d seen the launch of Clarkson’s Farm, and we thought, ‘Is this something that could appeal to the general public, not just a football audience?’”
This led to contact with production company Deft Touch Films, “I’m not sure which way round it was, a bit chicken or the egg, but all of a sudden we bumped into Deft Touch, who were looking for subject matter to do a documentary on. It was a meeting of minds.”
The New Saints – Road To Europe, The Mike Harris Story was born, and is now available to buy or rent on Prime Video and Apple TV. It covers the 2024/25 campaign, when TNS became the first Welsh side to make it through qualifying and into a European competition proper, as well as the stories behind the scenes with Harris, manager Craig Harrison and players past and current.
“It hopefully teaches the fact that this isn’t a Sunday league,” said Harris. “It tries to appeal to the audience and put Wales on the map. It puts the New Saints, obviously, on the map, but also our league. Hopefully that it will be a beacon for other clubs to follow.”
It took some getting used to having the cameras around, “You’ve got to get used to wearing a microphone, and you’re always going to be a bit worried how much they’re going to intrude into your personal life,” but Deft Touch and the club were able to develop a layer of trust during filming.
Harris noted, “They do capture an awful lot, but I think they’re also quite sensitive with the way that they look to edit it. They’re not going to put you in a completely embarrassing situation.”
This led to getting stories such as that of former player Jimmy Aggrey on camera, where Aggrey told Harris about his lows after leaving Chelsea and how TNS led to a turnaround in his life, as well as plenty of others, including Harris’ wife, Rhian, who he said, “It probably affected the most. She was quite conscious that the cameras were on her, and she was quite concerned whether she wanted to be in it or not…but she became the real star.”
In showing that well-produced documentaries aren’t only for Premier League teams, Harris hopes other clubs will see how they can promote themselves. For the film itself, “We’d like to hope that it hits the numbers that get Apple or Prime to put it ‘free to air’ on their platforms.”
Mike Harris stars in The Road to Europe - The Mike Harris Story, a football documentary like no other, which is available to buy or rent now on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.
This isn’t just another football documentary. It follows Mike Harris, a man who’s taken a small village club to the edge of European football. But it’s more than the game - it’s about people, chaos, and the wild moments they face every week. With raw access to Mike’s world, it’s a mix of drama, humour, and high-stakes graft from the dressing room to the boardroom.
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