The ranks of alternate broadcasts hosted by famed figures continue to expand. The latest comes from CBS Sports’ UEFA Champions League coverage, which will have David Beckham host a Beckham and Friends alternate broadcast for the second legs of the competitions’ semifinals, as well as the final. Beckham announced that in an in-person appearance on the 2024-25 debut of CBS’ UEFA Champions League Today studio show Tuesday:
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
There, host Kate Abdo says this will be a watch party-style show, “and it’s you and a bunch of very famous people, who are all your friends, A-listers, from football, from outside of football, who are going to be coming along and watching all the big Champions League games with you.” Beckham says it will be a bunch of different people each time, and says he usually watches matches either with his kids or with friends, so “It’s going to be that kind of thing watching the games, commenting on the games, with friends, and not sometimes talking about the games.”
That leads to Abdo asking “Do they have to know football?” and Beckham answering “No.” Panelist Micah Richards then asked “What’s the criteria?” and Beckham said “The bar’s very high.” Richards asked “How high are we talking?” and Jamie Carragher asked “There’s no Gary Neville, then?” Beckham shot down the idea of his former Manchester United and England teammate (who’s also now a broadcaster, who Carragher worked with at Sky) with a laugh, causing the panel to crack up.
There’s a long history of these kinds of alternate broadcasts. They date back to ESPN attempts with CART racing in 1994 and college basketball in 2006, but really took off in 2014 with the first ESPN Megacast for the BCS Championship Game and CBS and the then-Turner Sports’ TeamCasts for the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four and title game.
In the last four years, Peyton and Eli Manning’s particular ManningCast version of this for ESPN’s Monday Night Football has really taken off and sparked many others, both on ESPN (some with Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions, some with other approaches) and many other places. However, while CBS and Paramount+ have done alternate broadcasts (perhaps especially the Nickelodeon NFL ones), they haven’t dove as far into the celebrity-hosted watch party style as some others to date. It will be interesting to see how Beckham’s version fits in with and differs from the altcasts seen so far, and how interested the U.S.-based Champions League audience is in it.
[CBS Sports Golazo on X/Twitter]
