An evening with CBS: Goals, glitterballs and what ‘UCL Today' tells us about football on TV

New York Times

28-01-2025

The cameras finally stop rolling after more than two hours of broadcasting in which, both impressively and disappointingly, nobody has attempted a single cartwheel. Or broken into a spontaneous dance routine. Or dressed like a king. By the standards of UCL Today, CBS Sports' flagship football show, this counts as a sedate evening's work.
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But only relatively. The show's suite of pundits — Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards, wrangled with an air of affectionate exasperation by presenter Kate Scott — have still found time to measure the width of Richards' forehead, air a slow-motion replay of a tailoring malfunction and discuss the stylistic choices of Paddington Bear.
They have also, it should be pointed out, dissected the nine games that have taken place in the Champions League that evening: heaping praise on Julian Alvarez, the Atletico Madrid forward, and pouring scorn on Wojciech Szczesny, the Barcelona goalkeeper. That, after all, has been UCL Today's primary purpose in the four years, plus change, since it launched.
At first glance, then, it is not materially different to a raft of other shows of the same type. Its format and look are immediately recognisable, a staple of sports broadcasting for decades: four people, dressed for dinner, offering an hour of pre-game build-up and an hour of post-game takedown, with a few minutes of conversation to keep things going during half-time.
The tone, though, is drastically different. UCL Today is many things, and a football analysis show is only one of them. It is a viral sensation, a content factory, a possibly unintentional clickbait production line. It is a rule-breaking trailblazer and line-crossing pariah. Depending on the viewer, it can be consumed as light entertainment or as a circus act, as a guilty pleasure or as a travesty. At times, it is all of them at once.
It is sports broadcasting, or not just sports broadcasting, or not sports broadcasting at all. However it is regarded, whatever your view, there is also a very good chance that it is a glimpse of the future: not just of how sports looks and feels on television, but of television itself.
Four hours before they go on air, the UCL Today cast — that seems an appropriate word — are gathered in a small production room at Stockley Park, the studio space near Heathrow Airport which acts as CBS Sports' London home but is most famous as the base from which the Premier League's video assistant referees conspire against your team.
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As Matt Curtis, the show's producer, runs through his plan for the evening, Scott sits at a desk, two laptop screens open in front of her, assiduously updating her script and cross-referencing it with the running order. Henry, Richards and Carragher, though, find themselves caught in a fervent but not immediately relevant argument about the relative merits of Jack Grealish.
Each falls into a specific role. Carragher acts as the firestarter, a mischievous grin spreading across his face as he spots an unexpected chance to needle his colleagues. Richards is the good-natured foil, unable to resist the provocation. Henry acts as the cool, detached voice of reason, the one both parties are trying to persuade.
It is precisely the same dynamic that has played out on screen ever since Henry joined the show in 2021. Scott has previously compared it to a family, with Henry playing the older brother who can 'do no wrong', Carragher as the 'annoying middle child who will say anything for attention', and Richards as the puppyish younger sibling.
'The main thing is that it is us,' says Henry. 'It is really us. People think I am putting on a face, but that is how I am. That is me. The most important thing is that we are friends. Nobody is acting.'
But while the relationship is authentic, capturing and broadcasting it requires a little engineering. There can be a stark contrast between former players in a green room, relaxed and indiscreet, and former players once they go on air. By both instinct and instruction, they tend to be more reserved, more diplomatic, more formal once their thoughts are being shared with millions of people.
'If people are guarded, if they're worried about how long they have to talk or what happens if they mess up, there is an air of tension,' says Curtis. 'Hopefully we've taken that away from them. We've tried to create an environment where they feel comfortable being themselves.'
That was, according to both Curtis and Pete Radovich, the senior creative director at CBS Sports, the plan from the start. 'Even before we launched, we didn't really rehearse in the traditional way,' says Radovich. 'We just sort of hung out, got to know each other. The chemistry was the intention immediately.'
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Where that would take them, though, was not quite so planned. It is, as Poppy Miller, host of the network's Golazo show, put it, 'very different from traditional TV'.
That is putting it mildly. 'We knew from day one that we were going to have moments that were imperfect,' Radovich says. 'I think that was the biggest shock for the talent.'
They have clearly overcome whatever initial reticence they felt: Carragher's idiosyncratic pronunciations of foreign place names has become a running joke; those occasions when Henry becomes 'visibly irritated' by one of his co-stars, as Scott put it, are not brushed over but highlighted. The show, according to Carragher, has 'found its own way'.
Radovich, too, has been on a similar journey. He was comfortable with the idea of adopting a more anarchic style, but he admits he found allowing viewers to see the show's 'mistakes' was 'more of a hurdle'. He has, after all, spent much of his career striving to produce the same sort of 'clean, perfect' broadcasts as everyone else.
He understood, though, that UCL Today had to go in a different direction. In part, that was a simple business decision: 'For you to make people open their wallets for a pay service, you have to give them something extra,' he says. 'We had to give them a show they did not want to miss out on.'
More than that, though, it was rooted in an understanding of what television has become. 'We are a second-screen option,' Radovich says. 'We are competing with cellphones. Even with the audience that is actually watching, we are competing with their phones. You need things that will make the viewer put their phone down and pay attention to what is happening.'
There has probably been no better definition of UCL Today than an Instagram caption posted by Scott last week. It accompanied a clip of Carragher and Richards, clad in the sharp suits of the serious pundit, dancing in front of a giant Champions League table. 'This segment may or may not be to your taste,' Scott wrote.
A post shared by Kate Scott (@katescott)
Much the same could be said for a reasonable portion of the show's output. Although CBS Sports does not disclose UCL Today's precise, traditional viewing figures — the number of people actually watching it on a screen — they likely do not match the number of views the show can attract on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X. The maths are quite simple: last year, CBS Sports Golazo's accounts attracted more than a billion views. There are, famously, not a billion people in the United States, the only place where the show can be seen whole.
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The chances are, then, that the vast majority of people experience UCL Today in the abbreviated, bitesize format that plays so well on social media, the moments that are spread far and wide by the combined might of algorithms and group chats.
It might be Richards giggling at the fact that there is a team called Brest in the Champions League. It might be Carragher enjoying an evening on Borussia Dortmund's famous Yellow Wall to the fullest extent possible. It might be Henry offering Scott a drink to soothe a sore throat, an incident that led to the show being described by The Screen Rot Podcast as a 'romantic comedy aired at halftime of Ajax and Benfica'. Or, as it was last week, it might be between two and four of the cast dancing beneath a glitterball.
And they might be consumed by viewers who find them genuinely entertaining, or by viewers who find them strangely compelling, or by viewers sincerely stunned to see Henry and Carragher, in particular, behaving in a way that contrasts so starkly to their other television appearances. The algorithm, after all, does not distinguish or discern; its only measure is engagement, not pleasure.
This gift from @SB29 for @MicahRichards hits on so many levels 😭 pic.twitter.com/Sj7tHtcqFP
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) January 22, 2025
It presents both the show's cast and its producers with a double-edged sword. 'The perception is based on the clips,' says Richards. 'It is a bit disheartening that people think we're just messing around. I find it quite disrespectful, especially to an aspiring coach like Thierry. Some of his analysis is mindblowing.'
The problem, as Radovich pointed out, is that none of that can be seen outside of the United States. 'We're geoblocked,' he says. 'The majority of our show is really good analysis. You just don't get to see that outside the U.S. I do get a bit frustrated that we don't get enough shine for that educational part.'
Henry, at least, has come to terms with it. 'For me, when you talk about the game, you talk about the game,' he says. 'People need to understand what is happening. But I know I can be boring with that. If you watch a game with me at home, you will hate it. I pause it all the time. But the show has helped me see it in a different way. You can entertain and educate at the same time.'
And, of course, there are benefits. UCL Today has a global profile that most of its peers would relish. The clubs it covers are increasingly keen to use it as a vehicle to boost their own profiles; at one broadcasters' conference last year, one major European club said that UCL Today was the only show its players really wanted to grace. Scott, for one, regards its innate virality as a 'big blessing'.
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'The key term is cut-through,' says Radovich. That has always been the aim, for any form of television or content creation, regardless of the medium through which it is working. 'You have to entertain people to do that,' he says. 'If you're not entertaining people, if you're not cutting through on social, if you're not cutting through on television: good luck.'
Henry, Richards, Carragher and Scott do not linger at Stockley Park when the show is over. They quickly dive into their individual dressing rooms, gather their belongings, offer thanks to the dozen or so staff who have made the show work as they take their leave. Everyone wants to get home. They have to do it all over again tomorrow evening, after all.
They have just watched Barcelona steal victory from Benfica, at the last; they spent a portion of the hour-long post-game debrief wondering whether it was, as Richards posited, a wild and glorious piece of entertainment, or puerile and inexpert and slightly silly, as Henry might have it. They have obviously yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion. They are still discussing it as they head out into the night.
Four years into its run, the thing that makes UCL Today stand out from its contemporaries and competitors is not, in truth, the set-piece gags that have become its hallmark. Nor is it the bonhomie and badinage among its co-stars, a trope that plenty of shows have tried either to maintain or to manifest.
It is the fact that UCL Today is happy to show its wiring. Much of the artifice of television is in pretending that it is not television at all; that you just happen to be able to see the four people on your screen, having a perfectly-formed discussion of the evening's football.A small, but illustrative, example: each guest wears an earpiece, allowing them to take instruction from the producers and directors in the gallery. They are translucent, almost invisible, and placed on the side of the guest's head that is not in the camera's eye. Making them visible, after all, would be to ruin the illusion.
UCL Today, though, makes no secret of the fact that it is television. Scott, frequently, will place a finger to her ear to make it clear she is talking to her producers. The guests will occasionally mention the fact that they have been instructed to say something. They do not skate over the moments when things go wrong; if anything, they revel in them.
Radovich believes this makes for a better show — 'If things are too smooth, it feels like we need to disrupt it a bit,' he says — even if, at times, it is not always comfortable viewing. In May, Scott effectively had to forgive Carragher publicly for an injudicious joke about her private life; when the former Liverpool player was spotted looking up another guest on Wikipedia, the producers decided to air the footage.
'Having a clean show, no glitches, is a big thing in live TV,' Scott says. 'A lot of broadcasters don't want awkwardness on the show. But we don't mind awkwardness, in a multitude of ways. We are happy for it to feel more like what it is.'
That is, she says, a technique inspired by — or perhaps borrowed from — shows like Inside the NBA. The emphasis on what Nigel Reo-Coker, a regular guest on Golazo, described as the 'personality aspect' is rooted in American, rather than British, traditions, too. 'Yes, it's sport,' he said. 'You're knowledgeable on that. But, at the same time, it's entertainment. You're encouraged more here to bring out your personality.'
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The show is structured to make that as easy as possible. Scott only uses an autocue sparingly, for instance, to give UCL Today a more conversational, naturalistic feel. But it is also an aesthetic that has much in common with YouTube and TikTok, media in which there is often no fourth wall, in which the audience is acknowledged, even actively engaged. 'It is a deliberate choice,' says Radovich. 'We want to show our working.'
Increasingly, that is where UCL Today draws its style, its tone, its humour. It might not be representative of the whole of the show, but those are the moments that are shared on social media, that achieve virality, that cut through. Sometimes, it might be because they find them funny. Sometimes, it might be because they find them difficult to believe. It does not matter. What matters, more than anything, is that they can make people look up from their phones.
Watching Benfica collapse against Barcelona, Henry says, was the sort of thing that would infuriate a coach. He could not accept that a game that chaotic could be considered 'good'. It was, after all, defined by its errors, by its mishaps, by all the things that went wrong.
'Yeah, but it was entertaining,' says Richards, not willing to give up his point. Henry pauses, thinks, and concedes. Good, he admits, is subjective. It depends on the viewer's personal preference. Entertaining, he can accept, is different. 'Of course it was entertaining,' he says.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA, Simon Stacpoole/Offside, James Gill – Danehouse / Getty Images)