Champions League TV coverage in 2024-25: What worked? What didn't? And what next?

New York Times

a day ago

Whether it was CBS's Micah Richards being banned from talking about French side Brest, Alex Aljoe's bilingual interview with Luis Diaz on Prime Video, or Paris Saint-Germain manager Luis Enrique telling TNT Sports that his team is from a 'league of farmers', there have been plenty of memorable broadcast moments in this season's Champions League.
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This year's competition introduced a new 36-team format, up from 32, and a new broadcaster, Prime Video, marking the end of TNT Sports' dominance as the exclusive home of Champions League football in the United Kingdom.
It also saw coverage on CBS, the increasingly popular American broadcaster with a stellar cast including Kate Scott, Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher and Richards, reach new global audiences despite not having the rights to screen Europe's elite club competition outside of the United States.
But with just one game remaining, the curtain is about to drop on another year of Champions League football when Paris Saint-Germain and Inter go head to head in Munich, Germany, on Saturday night.
So, with the 2024-25 Champions League nearing its conclusion, The Athletic has spoken to the broadcasters who brought it to your screens to see what they made of it all.
Heading into the Champions League, there was uncertainty around the revamped 'league phase', with many wondering if the introduction of four more teams would lead to meaningless matches.
How did the new format go down with the broadcasters?
'The biggest difference was something not done by us,' Pete Radovich, the coordinating producer of CBS's Champions League coverage, tells The Athletic. 'It was UEFA and the new format, which was brilliant.
'It's hard to argue against what we just witnessed, so from a broadcaster standpoint, adding four more weeks was more taxing, but also more gratifying.'
The introduction of a league table enabled Radovich and his team to get creative.
'We created a segment called 'table time', which was meant to be educational and informative,' Radovich adds. 'We put our spin on it, and in the first week, we had a little music — and then Jamie and Micah started dancing.
'We started thinking about what kind of music we could play next week, so it became a thing. It organically developed into a moment that went viral every single week.
'It got to the point where we asked Robert Lewandowski in a post-match interview what Jamie and Micah should dance to next week, and he said reggaeton. Sure as s***, the next week we did table time with reggaeton.
Ask and you shall receive @lewy_official 😉@Carra23, and @MicahRichards keep the vibe going with the reggaeton edition of #UCL table time! 🤣🎶 pic.twitter.com/bMXIWzQhxK
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) November 27, 2024
'We could have just thrown a table up and just said, 'There's a table, there's the first 10 clubs, there's the next 10', but what fun is that?'
For Prime Video, broadcasting the Champions League in the UK was a big step, even though it already had rights in Italy and Germany. It had experience screening Premier League football in the UK, but 2024-25 was its final season after executives decided to drop out of the running for future broadcast deals.
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Instead, Amazon put its eggs in the Champions League basket, securing the exclusive broadcast rights to 17 first-pick Tuesday games a season, excluding the final, from 2024-25 to the end of 2026-27.
'This was a transition for us in the UK and a major new package for us,' Alex Green, managing director of sport for Prime Video in Europe, tells The Athletic. 'This is a very different, season-long package, and every game is a really big moment.
'We had to deal in a context where Champions League football had solely been on one broadcaster for a long time before, so that did need some customer familiarity to be established, which is never easy in sport because there's so much muscle memory.
'But as the season went on, it turned into a really fabulous first season that we'll look to build on over the coming years.'
You cannot escape CBS's coverage. Each week, social media would come alight with something one of its pundits had said or done. One of this season's most viral moments was Henry and Richards talking about Brest, the French Ligue 1 club.
Micah Richards says Brest are 'a bit lopsided'…😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/txYJ18v29v
— The 44 ⚽️ (@The_Forty_Four) October 1, 2024
It should not come as a surprise that CBS Sports Golazo's social media channels — excluding Instagram, as those views are not made public — have amassed more than four billion video views since September.
'I'm not going to sit here and lie and say that it doesn't matter to us,' Radovich says of their social media strategy. 'It matters to us.
'I will make a statement that we are the first international football show ever. It's never happened before. There have been popular shows within countries, but there's never been one singular football program that was popular around the world until now. Someone prove me wrong.
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'I'm not saying that to brag, I'm just stating it as fact. We realised that social media was going to be our PR, our marketing and our advertising. That was the way we were going to get the word out.'
Is CBS making a show for TV or social media?
'We are not clip farming,' Radovich says. 'We are producing a show for television that we know will work on social media. Social media is a big part of what we do. It's very important and we don't hide from it. It's not embarrassing to us.'
The impressive social media reach coincides with CBS having its most-viewed Champions League season, with an average of just over one million viewers tuning in across the four semi-finals.
The dramatic second leg of the semi-final between Inter and Barcelona was the most-watched Champions League match — excluding finals — across CBS and Paramount+, peaking with more than 1.7m viewers.
Part of Radovoch's strategy is to avoid 'white noise'.
'If you looked at other networks' Champions League football shows, their format would not look much different from ours for timings per segment and what we are covering in those segments,' he explains.
'But how we execute it is where the difference is. Live television has this obsession with being clean and perfect and not making mistakes — but our goal has never been to have a clean show.
'If our show is too clean, we will throw a grenade as producers into the format to disrupt it. It becomes white noise, and white noise is when people are looking at their phones.
'If we're putting white noise on that big screen, we've lost the audience.'
Even though the viewing figures are on an upward trajectory, something else has put a bigger smile on Radovich's face.
'We are just getting more and more access to players,' Radovich says. 'Players are actively lobbying to get on our show.
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'Whether that is through their communications department or them texting Jamie, Micah, or Thierry directly after a game, saying, 'Hey, I wanna go on with you guys'.'
Radovich described it as a 'crazy scenario', adding that five years ago, they were 'knocking on doors' for player access and getting nothing back.
'Now we are in a position where we don't have time to bring in every player who wants to be with us,' he says.
Such has been the success of CBS's coverage in the U.S. that Radovich highlights how Kate Scott, who used to be a Sky Sports News presenter in the UK, was up for an Emmy this month, the first time someone has been nominated for soccer in America.
It was not just CBS that could boast about viewership, though, as Prime Video announced on Wednesday that more than 13million viewers tuned in to watch its Champions League coverage.
TNT Sports does not compile its viewership figures until after the Champions League final, which it will be broadcasting in the UK on Saturday night, although it revealed more than five million people watched its Europa League final coverage of Tottenham Hotspur beating Manchester United on May 21.
For Prime Video, the round-of-16 second leg between PSG and Liverpool, which the French side won on penalties, set a new record for a live sporting event, amassing more than five million viewers.
'I never like to talk about our targets, but the numbers speak for themselves,' Prime director Green says when asked if those figures surpassed expectations. 'This is a big investment — sports rights are not cheap, so we expected a large audience.
'When you get over five million viewers, those individual moments are big.'
For Green, one standout moment of their coverage this year is Aljoe's interview with Liverpool forward Diaz after beating Bayer Leverkusen 4-0. Aljoe asked the question in English, translated it to Spanish for Diaz, then translated his answer to English live on TV.
A post-match interview with a difference… @alexaljoe translating her own questions, and then Luis Diaz's answers! 👏🇨🇴#UCLonPrime pic.twitter.com/TnR3xDAJeS
— Amazon Prime Video Sport (@primevideosport) November 6, 2024
'Also, introducing Wayne Rooney into the line-up was a wonderful opportunity, not only for him, but for us as well,' Green added. 'Wayne has really developed and grown into the role. He gives such good insight and he's always willing to express his view.'
The new format undoubtedly helped Prime Video as it threw up matches with genuine jeopardy, including Real Madrid knocking out Manchester City in the new play-off round.
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'We were lucky with some of the scheduling,' Green says.
Part of Prime Video's coverage is a packed 90-minute pre-match show, including interviews with managers and players and in-depth analysis.
Asked whether people are watching this coverage as the audience builds nearer to kick-off, Green said it was worth the work.
'We wouldn't be investing in a 90-minute show if no one was watching and we didn't think it was adding value for the viewers,' he said.
Both CBS and Prime Video say plans for next season's Champions League coverage are already well under way.
Green noted how they 'tend to go for ongoing improvements rather than necessarily saying, 'Here's the next gimmick'', although suggested they will come up with 'one or two completely new things' people haven't seen before.
'With technology, some things have a much longer lead time, and we continue to explore how artificial intelligence and augmented reality can help us,' Green says. 'A lot of it we think, 'It looks fun, but it's not going to make a significant difference to viewers'.'
For Radovich and CBS, the formula is already a winning one — but he knows they can't sit back.
'We're on in the middle of the day in the middle of the week in the United States,' he explains. 'Think about what people are doing at 2pm on a Tuesday and Wednesday. They are working, in school, or doing other stuff.
'To have people stop what they are doing, or second-screen us while they're doing something else, is really difficult. In the States, entertainment is so important, and if you're not entertaining, you are not going to get people's attention. To cut through, we had to be entertaining.
'For us to be entertaining, the talent has to buy in — and they have.'
(Top photos: Getty Images)