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    CBS’s stars, BBC’s debut and Prime delivers: How the Champions League broadcasters compare so far

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    CBSs stars BBCs debut and Prime delivers How the Champions


    A new Champions League season, a new format and new faces for some of the broadcasters. So what did you do about the coverage?

    Our writers Nick Miller and Pablo Maurer ran the rule over some of the first fight day shows in the UK and US to give us a taste of what to expect over the coming months.

    TNT Sports: Familiarity – but RIP the Goals Show as we knew it

    All the talk in this Champions League season has been about change. All 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 actually 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 silly light relief; Ally McCoist continues to balance hyper-avuncularity with genuine insight.


    Rio Ferdinand and frowning intensity, you say? (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

    It’s all very amiable and it’s perfectly understandable how the laughing joke can grate very significantly, but the coverage is smooth enough and chances are there are enough personalities involved that you like to balance out the ones you don’t.

    However, while the live match coverage was pretty solid, the same cannot be said for the Goals Show, the long-running round-robin offering that is broadcast parallel to the live games. For years, the Goals Show was a few hours of beautifully orchestrated chaos, with three or four pundits assigned a game or two each to analyze and report on from the studio.

    Basically, the on-screen people, although intelligent, knowledgeable and easy to relate to, were always secondary to the targets. You didn’t actually see them on screen much: you heard them, but almost always while providing relevant commentary and analysis and the focus was very much on the action. It was an almost universally popular format, a way to keep through everything, done with a light enough touch that you didn’t feel overwhelmed.

    So of course TNT completely changed it. New format. New performer. Roving reporters at every game. New, more famous experts. It’s like they 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.

    While before the studio was casual, just a place for the broadcasters to sit while you watched the action, now it is there permanently, the presenter and experts around a table while the games are shown on a giant screen in the background, coming into vision less. often than you would like from a show that is theoretically supposed to show you football. It’s a bit like watching games through a bar window.

    It would be remiss not to point out that some members of the former presenting team work for The Athletics anyway, so accuse us of bias if you want, but if you look up ‘Goals Show’ on X, you’ll see that this unfavorable opinion is pretty widely spread.

    CBS: How is B team depth?

    There is no doubt, CBS has quickly established the gold standard for Champions League coverage in the US. 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 beards and providing analysis. This is reinforced by the news that David Beckham will host a “watching” show in the later stages.

    It is the dynamic of these existing personalities that made the CBS coverage wildly popular in the United States, an atmosphere that closely mirrors TNT’s Inside the NBA, which has become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon Stateside. The broadcaster, with its Golazo network and pool 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 against 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 probably Tuesday’s most profoundly unsexy fixture.

    BBC and TNT commentator Jonathan Pearce handled play-by-play duties single-handedly in an unhinged game that might have benefited from the presence of a color (or co-)commentator. Pearce, who you might recognize from Sensible Soccer if you’re of a certain age, was inaudible at times during the opening stages of the match. It is also worth mentioning that, rather bizarrely, he did not mention his name at any stage of the game, nor was it shown on the screen. Pearce is a fairly well-known entity in the UK, of course, but viewers in the US might feel differently.

    The CBS broadcast proved to be an interesting look at the middle of its talent roster, in some ways — still perfectly palatable but nothing to write home about — while there was some general postgame analysis on the big screen, nothing of note. In covering a tournament like the Champions League, you just want every match to be treated like the final, even if it’s a bit of an unrealistic ask.

    Amazon Prime Sport: Power in numbers?

    As with the Premier League, for which it broadcasts only a few match days a season, Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Champions League will be relatively piecemeal. They have one game a week and you wonder if that might be a sensible way to dip your toe in the water or so sparse as to be almost pointless in terms of growing a wider audience.

    However, you can’t accuse them of half-measures for their opening game, AC Milan against Liverpool on Tuesday. The coverage starts at 18:30 BST, 90 minutes before kick-off, and you’re left wondering: who’s going to watch all this, apart from football writers who have to write obscure articles about it?

    A lot of the preamble is relatively standard stuff, but there’s a really weird short ad that involves Joe Thomas, most famous as the blonde 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 came moby. This is the presenter, Gabby Logan. There are the ex-player experts – four of them, in fact: Frank Lampard, Daniel Sturridge, Josephine Henning and Clarence Seedorf. This is the commentator, Jon Champion. It’s the co-commentator, Alan Shearer. This is the roving reporter, Alex Aljoe. Then there’s the sideline reporter/post-match interviewer, Gabriel Clarke. And finally, there is the experienced referee, Mark Clattenburg.

    Is 10 people to cover a single game… excessive? It’s like they hired them all before realizing they only had 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 funny and intelligent, Seedorf seems as likable as you always thought – and also ropes in a couple of old pals to make cameos at the side desk: nice to see you, Kaká, good evening, Zlatan. . Champion is a wonderfully amiable commentator, but throws in a few arcs as a bit of spice: one about Milan manager Paulo Fonseca having a good agent was delightfully, delicately cutting. It’s a really good analysis by Henning on how Mike Maignan’s injury could have affected Milan before Liverpool’s second goal.

    One known problem: broadcasters’ obsession with having a former referee on hand to explain decisions needs to stop. Clattenberg contributed little of note, apart from an eyebrow-raising moment where he suggested the official should have given some 50:50 calls to Milan to stop the home fans being mean to him.

    But that feels like a niche. After watching TNT followed by Amazon, you’re left wishing the distribution of games was the other way around.

    BBC Sport: Match of the Day sensation with surprise 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 with the UK’s national broadcaster .

    Perhaps with this in mind, they went to great lengths to make it look familiar, to make it look like a Champions League broadcast, but also like a BBC show.

    It’s basically Match of the Day with a Champions League skin (yes, it’s called MOTD: Champions League), the tried and trusted format of highlights-analysis-highlights-analysis but in a studio covered in familiar iconography: the stars of the Champions League are projected. on the back wall in Champions League blue, while the Champions League anthem plays.

    It’s an intense montage that should probably be very tricked out and cheesy, but show me someone who claims they don’t love montage and I’ll show you someone who is either a liar or in denial. There’s also a nice tribute montage to Toto Schillaci at the end: say what you like about the BBC, it knows its way around montage.

    The in-studio line-up for its first show is a little eccentric: the obvious thing 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 isn’t to say it’s a bad panel (although when Hart is invited to analyze a mistake by Girona goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga, he laughs and says “who would be a goalkeeper?”), just that it’s a little unexpected given the occasion.

    There’s a Sky Sports-esque interlude as Warnock gets a tablet and a massive curved screen to provide some analysis of the Villa game, which feels a bit disjointed, as well as the highlights of the ‘down ticket’ games which are audio-tracked with some. generic dance music and funky camera angles. It’s like a decision was made to try and differentiate it from the normal Match of the Day, so some of this stuff has been shoehorned.

    It’s all very well, nothing spectacular, but it raises some more existential questions about the nature of a highlight show for the Champions League: in an era where you can watch every game if you have the necessary subscriptions, and if you don’t. you can see highlights in minutes of full time for free on YouTube, do we need a show like this?

    Maybe, maybe not. But ultimately, the more free football we can get in the UK, the better.

    (Top photo: Chris Ricco/Getty Images for Amazon)





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