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At 9.15am on Thursday morning (tomorrow) we kick off a five-a-side match which will finish at 6.15pm on Saturday evening in aid of . It’s 57 hours of football in total which is the equivalent of a 38-game Premier League season played back to back. That’s one continuous game for 57 hours on a specially constructed pitch with seating and lights and all that, on the piazza outside MediaCityUK in Salford.

We are going to have teams rolling on and off every half an hour, but the matches are going to be played constantly for the 57 hours, playing through the night then through the day and back through the night again.

Working on this project for Sport Relief is very different from my day job which is producing Mastermind. We have 96 people take part on Mastermind over a year, which feels like a lot, but this is over 1800 players in total over the 57 hours. So it’s five-a-side and three subs per team every half an hour and just finding those players has been a huge task over the last five or six weeks. That was when I came on board. At that point the pitch was all sorted, it was going to be filmed, that was all sorted, but the nuts and bolts of who was going to play and how it was going to work is the thing that I’ve been doing with the team for the last few weeks.

We’ve got a real mixture of people taking part– there’ll be some celebrities playing, there’ll be some familiar Ö÷²¥´óÐã faces and some familiar Ö÷²¥´óÐã voices - whose faces people maybe don’t know but they definitely know their voices - playing. There are also local community groups who are supported by Sport Relief and the Premier League, and also lots of teams who have come via Manchester county’s FA who’ve been very helpful, as well as some internal Ö÷²¥´óÐã teams, and lots of members of the public. I think about 24 hours out of 57 were put open for members of the public to sign up and play and we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of people who wanted to get involved.

As for the games themselves, they’re not competitive in the normal way, because it’s going to be more of a cumulative total by the end of the match – so it shouldn’t be 114 blood-and-guts half-hour death matches; hopefully it’ll be more fun for the people playing than that! We’ve tried to make it as open ability and open age as possible so that anybody can play at any time. Where we’ve got school kids coming they’re playing other school kids and we’ve roughly broken up the age groups 16-35 and 35 and over to try and make it fair, but totally mixed ability and mixed gender across the board.

There are a lot of spreadsheets involved in organising an event like this - a chap on our team, Nick is coordinating all of it. Some people who have signed up as teams from the public which is brilliant because you’ve got the eight names there and away you go, the more complicated ones are where you’ve got eight individuals who we have to slot together and put into place. And some of the games are through the night and it’s quite a big ask to expect people to sign up for that.

What was interesting is when we put some of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã teams together: so Radio 5 live came along and said they wanted a team and they submitted who they were going to be, and we paired them up against Question of Sport and the 5 live team contained at least two ‘ringers’ – ex-professional players. This news then prompted the Question of Sport team to scrabble around frantically to try and find some ringers of their own to even it up! So some people want to do well in their little bit, which is fine, but ultimately it’s a cumulative total that we will have for the end of the show.

Through the FA some of the teams that are coming along have got different abilities, and they’ve been helping us to pair those teams up for us because we didn’t want it to just be all full ability teams playing – we are trying to make it as inclusive as possible. And it isn’t just a Manchester event either, people are coming from quite far afield, I know there’s certainly one team that’s been set up by Sport Relief that are coming down from Newcastle for it, some coming up from Stoke and places like that. The first game pairing involves a team that Sport Relief have set up and that’s really important because that’s the whole point of doing this, to raise money for Sport Relief so they in turn can continue supporting these organisations .

From what I can gather from the people we have met with who run the MediaCityUK site, although it is licensed to have things through the night this is the first time it’s been done. So it’s a first for a lot of people all the way from me, I’ve never put on an event before, certainly not an event that’s 57 hours with 1800 people playing, all the way through to Salford City Council environmental health team who haven’t had an event here that runs for 24 hours. There’s so many bits to it – if it was just, “let’s go and play five-a-side in a sports centre” it would be quite straight forward – even finding enough players for 57 hours would be quite straightforward, but we are outside, we are exposed to the elements. I was writing a risk assessment on Friday and started looking through some of the documentation that had been sent through talking about which wind speed we would have to come off at, you don’t have to worry about that on Mastermind.

I’ve been producing Mastermind for four seasons - this is my fifth season getting underway now, and I know that job quite well. But with this it’s completely different: the firefighting side of it is really fun – where someone comes up and says: “This is a problem – what are we going to do?” And in the space of an hour you’ve got to come up with a solution because we haven’t got the time to spend days and days pondering. You just go with your gut instinct, and hope that’s the right decision, and if it isn’t you look at it again and come up with another plan. There are going to be things that will happen that we’ve got no idea what they are yet, and no idea how we’ll cope with them. But those things we can predict we’ve done everything we can. When I was an Assistant Producer or a Researcher I liked to feel I had checked every last detail and that I was happy that everything had been as organised as well as it could be, so then if something did go wrong I could think: “It’s alright I know everything else will run smoothly so I’ll just concentrate on putting this right…” I haven’t got that sense with this really – there are so many bits of it that could do wrong: there’s snow forecast for Friday – that will throw a massive spanner in the works. At some point in the 57 hours we are going to have to make a decision I’d imagine as to whether the pitch safe to play in the rain or the snow or whatever – wind restrictions we have to think about. People live around MediaCityUK – will be overlooking the pitch so we have to swap to a soft ball when it goes dark – you know there are all these different things that could crop up that we might have to think about and there is that slight trepidation that I don’t know what those things are.

If you want to watch our progress it’s going to be on the s website throughout, from kick off to final whistle, it’ll be on the Red Button quite a lot, there are going to be regular updates on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 5 Live and lots of other programmes from around the site are going to be getting involved as well, whether it’s people going on Radcliffe and Marconie to talk about it, or Blue Peter coming out of their studio to be pitch-side.  Newsround and Ö÷²¥´óÐã Breakfast who are also putting a team in but they’re going to  be doing reports from pitch side. In addition, 1Xtra have a team that leave their breakfast studio on the Thursday and then drive up to Manchester to play. All these different bits of coverage are going to be going on, so even if you’re not on the Red Button or watching online it’s going to be quite hard to avoid… hopefully it’ll be everywhere. 

Mark Helsby, Producer, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 5 live, Battle of the Five-a-Sides for Sport Relief

Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 5 live’s Battle of the Five-a-Sides for Sport Relief takes place at MediaCity, Salford Thursday 3 March-Saturday 5th March. To donate to the Sport Relief challenge go to . 

You can follow all of the action on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 5 live website  and on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Red Button. Follow all of the day's action on Twitter at #5liveAside.