A new Champions League season, a new format and new faces for some of the broadcasters. So what did you make of the coverage?
Our writers Nick Miller and Pablo Maurer ran the rule over some of the first matchday shows in the UK and U.S. to give us a flavour of what to expect over the next few months.
TNT Sports: Familiarity — but RIP the Goals Show as we knew it
All of the talk going into this Champions League season has been of change. A brand new format, more games, bigger, better, more, more, more.
With that in mind, and knowing how people can react to change, it was actually quite comforting to find that TNT’s match coverage of this brave new world was really quite familiar.
The old elements were there for the first game of the round, Young Boys vs Aston Villa: Rio Ferdinand with that frowning intensity that can be quite engaging on TV but you wouldn’t want to be cornered by him at a party; Peter Crouch providing the slightly goofy light relief; Ally McCoist continuing to balance hyper-avuncularity with genuine insight.
It’s all very chummy and it’s perfectly understandable how the guffawing banter can grate quite significantly, but the coverage is all pretty slick and the chances are there are enough personalities involved that you do like to balance out the ones you don’t.
However, while the live match coverage was pretty solid, the same can’t be said for the Goals Show, the long-running round-up offering that is broadcast parallel to the live games. For years, the Goals Show was a few hours of beautifully marshalled chaos, with three or four pundits assigned a game or two each to analyse and report on from the studio.
Crucially, the on-screen humans, while smart, knowledgable and with an easy rapport, were always secondary to the goals. You didn’t actually see them on screen a huge amount: you heard them, but almost always while providing relevant comment and analysis and the focus was very much on the action. It was an almost universally popular format, a way of keeping across everything, done with a light enough touch that you didn’t feel overwhelmed.
So of course TNT have completely changed it. A new format. A new presenter. Roving reporters at each game. New, more famous pundits. It’s like they’ve tried to be more like Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday, putting more people between you and the action, forgetting that Soccer Saturday works precisely because you can’t see the action, so you need the people.
Whereas before the studio was incidental, just a place for the broadcasters to sit while you watched the action, now it’s there constantly, the presenter and pundits around a table while the games are shown on a giant screen in the background, coming into vision less frequently than you’d like from a show that is theoretically supposed to be showing you football. It’s a bit like watching games through the window of a pub.
It would be remiss not to point out that a few members of the former presenting team work for The Athletic in some capacity, so accuse us of bias if you wish, but if you search for ‘Goals Show’ on X, you will see that this adverse opinion is pretty widely shared.
CBS: How is the B-team depth?
There’s no doubt CBS has rapidly established the gold standard for Champions League coverage in the United States. The network has poured time, money and attention into its Champions League coverage, something most evident when you watch their four biggest names — Kate Scott (formerly Abdo), Micah Richards, Thierry Henry and Jamie Carragher — trading barbs and providing analysis. This is set to be bolstered with the news that David Beckham will host a ‘watchalong’ show in the later stages.
Introducing Beckham and Friends 😍
The LEGEND David Beckham will host a #UCL altcast for the second leg of the semifinals and final on @ParamountPlus 📺💫 pic.twitter.com/X91SmbHOxg
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) September 17, 2024
It’s the dynamic of these existing personalities that has made CBS’s coverage wildly popular in the United States, a vibe that closely mirrors TNT’s Inside the NBA, which has become a bit of a cultural phenomenon Stateside. The broadcaster, with its Golazo network and assemblage of rights deals, has a firm foothold here.
It also has a large collection of talent, many of them varying in quality. Scott, Henry and the rest were nowhere to be found on Young Boys versus Aston Villa, of course, replaced by Nico Cantor, Poppy Miller and former Aston Villa and West Ham midfielder Nigel Reo-Coker. All were serviceable and well-researched, but the network’s coverage didn’t feel like anything special — even for what was likely Tuesday’s most deeply unsexy fixture.
BBC and TNT commentator Jonathan Pearce handled play-by-play duties alone in a bland game that may have benefitted from the presence of a colour (or co-)commentator. Pearce, who you might recognise from Sensible Soccer if you’re of a certain age, was at times inaudible during the opening stages of the match. It’s also worth mentioning that, quite bizarrely, he did not mention his name at any stage of the game, nor was it displayed on the screen. Pearce is a known-enough entity in the UK, of course, but viewers in the United States might feel otherwise.
Allow her to REINTRODUCE HERSELF! 💍
Congratulations to our very own @kate_abdo on her wedding 👰 pic.twitter.com/x9Bg5yQr6L
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) September 17, 2024
CBS’s broadcast proved to be an interesting look at the middle of its talent roster, in a way — still perfectly palatable but nothing to write home about — while there was some general post-game analysis on a large screen, without anything remarkable. In coverage of a tournament like the Champions League, you simply want every match treated like the final, even if it is a bit of an unrealistic ask.
Amazon Prime Sport: Power in numbers?
As with the Premier League, for which it only broadcasts a couple of matchdays a season, Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Champions League is going to be relatively piecemeal. They have one game per week and you wonder whether that’s perhaps a sensible way of dipping your toe into the water or so sparse as to be virtually pointless in terms of growing a broader audience.
Still, you can’t accuse them of half-measures for their opening game, AC Milan vs Liverpool on Tuesday. The coverage starts at 6.30pm BST, 90 minutes before kick-off, and you are left wondering: who is going to watch all of that, aside from football writers who have to write snarky articles about it?
A lot of the preamble is relatively standard stuff, but there is a really weird short promo that involves Joe Thomas, most famous as being the blonde one from The Inbetweeners, dancing around a cinema for reasons that aren’t really clear.
That still leaves about 88 minutes to fill, but luckily they have come mob-handed. There’s the presenter, Gabby Logan. There are the ex-player pundits — four of them, in fact: Frank Lampard, Daniel Sturridge, Josephine Henning and Clarence Seedorf. There’s the commentator, Jon Champion. There’s the co-commentator, Alan Shearer. There’s the roving reporter, Alex Aljoe. Then there’s the sideline reporter/post-match interviewer, Gabriel Clarke. And finally, there’s the expert referee analyst, Mark Clattenburg.
Two sides with a rich history in the UEFA Champions League 💪
Four-time #UCL winner Clarence Seedorf can’t wait to get going with Milan v Liverpool at the San Siro
Watch live on Prime in the UK & Ireland#UCLonPrime pic.twitter.com/kQLeE2TTki
— Amazon Prime Video Sport (@primevideosport) September 17, 2024
Is 10 people to cover a single game… overkill? It’s like they hired them all before realising they only have the rights for one broadcast, so had to cram them all in.
All that said, the coverage is pretty good. Logan is the safest pair of hands imaginable. Sturridge is fun and smart, Seedorf seems just as likeable as you’ve always thought he is — and also ropes in a couple of old pals to make cameos at the pitch-side desk: nice to see you, Kaka, good evening, Zlatan. Champion is a wonderfully affable commentator but throws in a few arch asides as a little sprinkle of spice: one about Milan manager Paulo Fonseca having a good agent was delightfully, delicately cutting. There’s a really good bit of analysis from Henning about how Mike Maignan’s injury could have impacted Milan before Liverpool’s second goal.
One familiar gripe: broadcasters’ obsession with having a former referee on hand to explain decisions has to stop. Clattenberg contributed little of note, aside from an eyebrow-raising moment where he suggested the official needed to give a few 50:50 calls to Milan to stop the home fans being mean to him.
But that feels like nit-picking. After watching TNT followed by Amazon, you’re left wishing that the distribution of games was the other way around.
BBC Sport: A Match of the Day feel with a surprising panel
This isn’t the first time the Champions League has been shown on the BBC — it broadcast the final until the mid-1990s — but it’s been so long that you simply don’t associate Europe’s big one with Britain’s national broadcaster.
Perhaps with this in mind, they’ve made quite an effort to make it look familiar, to make it look like a Champions League broadcast, but also like a BBC show.
It’s essentially Match of the Day with a Champions League skin (indeed, it’s called MOTD: Champions League), the tried and trusted format of highlights-analysis-highlights-analysis but in a studio plastered with familiar iconography: the Champions League stars are projected onto the back wall in Champions League blue, while the Champions League anthem plays.
There’s an intense montage that probably should be very overwrought and cheesy, but show me someone who claims they don’t love a montage and I’ll show you someone who is either a liar or in denial. There’s also a lovely tribute montage to Toto Schillaci at the end: say what you like about the BBC, it knows its way around a montage.
The in-studio line-up for its first show is slightly eccentric: the obvious thing to do for your first Champions League broadcast would be to pack the sofa with people synonymous with the Champions League, but instead we had Stephen Warnock, Joe Hart and broadcaster Julien Laurens. Which is not to say it’s a bad panel (although when Hart is invited to analyse a mistake by Girona goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga, he chuckles and says “who’d be a goalkeeper?”), just that it is a slightly unexpected one given the occasion.
There is a Sky Sports-esque interlude as Warnock is given a tablet and a massive curved screen to provide some analysis of the Villa game, which feels a little incongruous, as do the highlights of the ‘down ticket’ games which are soundtracked with some generic dance music and funky camera angles. It’s like a decision has been made to try to differentiate it from the normal Match of the Day, so some of this stuff has been shoe-horned in.
It’s all perfectly fine, nothing spectacular, but it does raise some more existential questions about the nature of a highlights show for the Champions League: in an era when you can watch every game if you have the requisite subscriptions, and if you don’t you can see highlights within minutes of full time for free on YouTube, do we need a show like this?
Maybe, maybe not. But ultimately, the more free-to-air football we can get in the UK, the better.
(Top photo: Chris Ricco/Getty Images for Amazon)