• October 9, 2024 3:26 pm

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CBS stars, BBC debuts and Prime delivers: How Champions League telecasts compare so far

ByTony El Blanco

Sep 19, 2024 #Arsenal, #astonvilla, #champions, #championsleague, #liverpool, #milan, #UCL, #uefa, #westham


A new Champions League season, a new format and new faces at some of the TV stations. So what did you think of the coverage?

Our writers Nick Miller and Pablo Maurer moderated some of the early UK and US matchday shows to give us a taste of what to expect in the coming months.

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

All the talk this season in the Champions League has been about change. 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 very comforting to find that TNT’s coverage of this brave new world was actually quite familiar.

The old elements were there in the first game of the round, Young Boys vs Aston Villa: Rio Ferdinand with that wrinkling enthusiasm that can be quite captivating on TV but you wouldn’t want to be cornered by him at a party; Peter Crouch provides slightly goofy light relief; Ally McCoist continues to balance hyper-avancularity with genuine insight.


Rio Ferdinand and wrinkle strength, you say? (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

It’s all very delicious, and it’s completely understandable how the gags can get serious, but the coverage is all pretty smooth, and chances are there’s enough personalities involved that you like to balance out the ones you don’t.

However, while the live game coverage has been pretty solid, the same cannot be said for the Goals Show, the long-running recap offering that airs alongside the live games. For years, the Goals Show was a few hours of beautifully orchestrated mayhem, with three or four pundits each given a game or two to analyze and report from the studio.

Crucially, the men on screen, while smart, knowledgeable and easy to relate to, were always secondary to the goals. You didn’t actually see them much on screen: 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 track of everything, done with a light enough touch that you didn’t feel overwhelmed.

So of course TNT has completely changed that. New format. New presenter. Live reporters at every game. New, more famous sages. It’s like they tried to be like Sky Sports’ Football Saturday, put more people between you and the action, forgetting that Football Saturday works precisely because you can’t see the action, so you need the people.

Before the studio was incidental, just a place for broadcasters to sit while you watched the action, it’s there constantly, the announcer and the pundits around the table while the games are shown on a giant screen in the background, less often than you’d like to see shows that are theoretically supposed to show you football. It’s a bit like watching games from the window of a pub.

It would be remiss not to point out that several members of the former promotion team work for Athletic to some extent, so accuse us of bias if you like, but if you search ‘Goals Show’ on X, you’ll see that this negative opinion is pretty widely shared.

CBS: How is the depth of the B team?

There is no doubt that CBS has quickly established the gold standard for coverage of the Champions League in the United States. The network has poured time, money and attention into its coverage of the Champions League, something most evident when you watch four of its biggest names – Kate Scott (formerly Abdo), Micah Richards, Thierry Henry and Jamie Carragher – trade barbs and provide analysis. This is set to be reinforced by news that David Beckham will host a ‘watchalong’ show at a later stage.

It’s the dynamic of these existing personalities that has made CBS’s coverage hugely popular in the US, an atmosphere that closely mirrors TNT’s Inside the NBA, which has become a bit of a cultural phenomenon Stateside. The radio station, with its Golazo network and combination of rights deals, has a firm foothold here.

It also has a large collection of abilities, many of which vary in quality. Scott, Henry and the rest were nowhere to be found at Young Boys v Aston Villa, naturally 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 unsexy outfit.

BBC and TNT commentator Jonathan Pearce conducted a play-by-play in a spirited game that could have benefited from the presence of a color (or co-) commentator. Pearce, who you may recognize from Sensible Soccer if you’re of a certain age, was unheard of at times in the early stages of the game. It’s also worth mentioning that, quite surprisingly, he didn’t mention his name at any stage of the game, nor was it shown on screen. Pearce is of course a well-known enough entity in the UK, but US audiences may find otherwise.

The CBS broadcast proved to be an interesting look at the middle of the talent roster, in a way – still perfectly palatable but nothing to write home about – while there was some general post-game analysis on the big screen, without anything remarkable. In the coverage of a tournament like the Champions League, one simply wants each game to be treated like a final, even if that is a bit of an unrealistic ask.

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Amazon Prime Sport: Power in numbers?

As with the Premier League, which it broadcasts only a few matchdays per season, Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Champions League will be relatively fragmented. They have one game a week and you wonder if it’s perhaps 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.

Still, you can’t accuse them of half-assedness ahead of their opener, AC Milan and Liverpool on Tuesday. The coverage starts at 6.30pm 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 witty articles about it?

Much of the prologue is relatively standard stuff, but there is a very strange short intro that involves Joe Thomas, most famous for being the guy with the jelly hair from The Inbetweeners, dancing around a movie theater for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

There are still about 88 minutes left to fill, but thankfully they have come in droves. There’s the presenter, Gabby Logan. There are the former pundits — four of them, in fact: Frank Lampard, Daniel Sturridge, Josephine Henning and Clarence Seedorf. There’s the commentator, Jon Champion. There is the co-commentator, Alan Shearer. There is the roving reporter, Alex Aljoe. Then there’s sideline reporter/post-match interviewer Gabriel Clarke. And finally, there is expert referee expert, Mark Clattenburg.

Is 10 people to cover one game… too much? It’s like they hired them all before realizing 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 funny and smart, Seedorf seems every bit as likable as you always thought he was – and also roped in some old friends to make pictures at the desk: nice to see you, Kaka, 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 with a good agent was delightfully, delicately edited. There is a very good article by Henning on how Mike Maignan’s injury could have affected Milan before Liverpool’s second goal.

One familiar bone of contention: Broadcasters’ obsession with having former judges on hand to explain decisions must stop. Clattenberg made little contribution, apart from an eyebrow-raising moment in which he suggested the official needed to make some 50:50 calls to Milan to stop the home supporters being mean to him.

But it’s like picking. After watching TNT and Amazon follow suit, you’re left wishing game distribution was the other way around.

BBC Sport: A Match of the Day sensation with a surprise panel

It’s not the first time the Champions League has been shown on the BBC – it showed the final until the mid-1990s – but it’s been so long that you simply don’t associate the greatness of Europe with the British public broadcaster.

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

It’s essentially Game of the Day with a Champions League skin (actually it’s called MOTD: The Champions League), the tried-and-true highlights-analysis-highlights-analysis format, but in a studio with a familiar icon: the stars of the Champions League are predicted. on the back wall in Champions League blue while the Champions League anthem plays.

It’s an intense montage that should probably be very overwhelming and cheesy, but show me someone who says they don’t love montage and I’ll show you someone who’s either a liar or in denial. There’s also a lovely tribute to Toto Schillaci at the end: say what you like about the BBC, it knows how to edit.

The set-up in the studio for the 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 got 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 Girona goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga’s mistake, he laughs and says “who would be a goalkeeper?”), just that it’s a little unexpected given that the occasion .

There’s a Sky Sports-esque interlude where Warnock is given a tablet and a big curved screen to provide some analysis of the Villa game, which feels a little disjointed, like the highlights of the games “down the ticket” soundtracked with some generic dance music and funky camera angles. It’s like a decision was made to try and set it apart from the normal game of the day, so some of this stuff has been shoehorned.

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

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

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




#CBS #stars #BBC #debuts #Prime #delivers #Champions #League #telecasts #compare

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