British soccer clubs have a radically different approach to news media that, except in rare instances, excludes reporters from locker rooms, viewing them as unnecessary intruders. “Our managers would say that the dressing room is sacrosanct,” a Premier League publicist said in a wire service article in 2010.

It is likely that no team but Liverpool would have agreed to give Fox the open door it requested. The team, like the Boston Red Sox, is owned by John Henry and Tom Werner.

“This was an idea that I bandied about soon after they acquired the team,” Nathanson said. But he felt more comfortable approaching Henry and Werner after the hiring of Scott Boggins, a veteran “24/7” producer, and Michael Bloom, as the senior vice president for original programming at the Fox Sports Media Group.

Werner said in an e-mail that Rodgers, Liverpool’s manager, “had some initial misgivings about the unvarnished access Fox wanted to have,” but that after he watched clips from “Hard Knocks and “The Franchise,” “I believe he saw that this series could humanize our players and bring new fans to soccer in general and Liverpool in particular.”

Episode 1 of the series will be shown at 4:30 p.m. in Fox markets after a 1 p.m. N.F.L. game, and at 3 p.m. in markets where N.F.L. games start at 4 p.m.

The debut comes within days of stunning news about the Liverpool club. On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, apologized to the families of 96 Liverpool fans crushed to death in a stadium in 1989 for the police, investigators and news media’s depictions of their loved ones as hooligans who were to blame for the disaster. He said that authorities at the game at Sheffield had failed to anticipate the disaster or to contain its scale once it started, and that the police had engaged in a cover-up.

The series starts as the team struggles with a winless record in the Premier League. Sunday’s episode is not as memorable as a typical “Hard Knocks” season opener. It shows little action, and no dominant personality emerges. Rodgers is an upbeat leader, imbued with leadership maxims, but he is not yet interesting onscreen. And the players featured so far lack on-air magnetism.