Late Wednesday afternoon, legendary soccer broadcaster Jon Champion sat in an office at ESPN’s Bristol, CT headquarters watching Manchester United’s stunning late Champions League win over Paris Saint Germain.
However, Champion, 53, a veteran of over 30 years calling Premier League, World Cup, and Champions League matches, wasn’t preparing for any European matches. He was getting ready to call his second regular season Major League Soccer match in his first full week as ESPN’s lead broadcaster after more than 30 years in England, a role that’s been years in the making and one he’s genuinely excited about.
In a quirk in ESPN’s MLS schedule, Champion and his broadcast partner Taylor Twellman will call two Atlanta United games before the network takes a three-week break to air the women’s NCAA basketball tournament. So Champion attended the second leg of Atlanta’s first round CONCACAF Champions League match last week before calling the defending champs’ opening week loss last Sunday against D.C. United, played in a driving rainstorm at Audi Field.
“It was very British weather in the end,” Champion told Awful Announcing.
The next game after Sunday’s Atlanta home match against expansion FC Cincinnati for Champion will be on March 31. That gives him the opportunity to go back to London and get ready for a permanent move to the Boston area, which is quite the daunting task.
“I’m still catching up on all the admin tasks that go with moving across the Atlantic and having my family three-and-a-half thousand miles away as well,” Champion said. “What I have discovered with this move is it’s an awful lot more than just broadcasting in a different environment. When you move your life, it’s quite a big thing.”
Eventually Champion’s wife and youngest son, 16, will move across the pond in late August. Champion is still searching for a high school for his youngest, which will dictate the family’s exact move. It also helps that Twellman and a couple of senior producers for ESPN’s soccer coverage live in that area. When moving to another continent, having friends nearby will surely help.
Relocating to the U.S. permanently for ESPN is something Champion contemplated for more than four years, but only now has he and his family truly been ready to make the very large decision to come to America.
Champion has actually been associated on and off with ESPN for a decade now. The network hired him to lead their Premier League coverage for ESPN UK when it won those rights in 2009. Champion did that for four years before ESPN lost the rights there, and “there was really no role for me” at that time. So he began doing some freelance work before ESPN expressed interest in Champion working the 2014 World Cup in Brazil for its American audience.
“That seemed to go well,” Champion said. His most memorable match he’s called for ESPN was one of the opening matches in that World Cup, when the Netherlands thrashing Spain 5-1 after Spain dominated the competition in 2010.
“Do you remember the flying header by Robin van Persie?” Champion excitedly asked.
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“At that stage, it was the wrong age for our children.” Champion, who has three older kids in addition to the 16-year-old, said.
The family concluded that they’d like to make the move at some point, but needed to find a time in everyone’s lives where it was going to work.
“And this year,” Champion said, “was the first time that it wasn’t going to be too disruptive to all the children’s existences.”
ESPN approached Champion again last August, as it was making a bigger push into soccer with ESPN+ and the fact that the network wanted to put on a top level MLS broadcast. The two sides then began talking seriously and agreed to a deal in November.
Though working a weekly MLS match necessitates a lot more air travel than going around the U.K., Champion estimated that he called about 185 matches last year. That number will plummet to roughly 35 this year for ESPN.
“In the U.K. last year, I drove 60,000 miles in my own car,” Champion said. “I’m banking on the fact that actually that’s a lot more tiring than sitting on an airplane two or three times a week.”
And calling far fewer matches, he said, will allow him to better prepare for his weekly MLS showcases.
“I can concentrate properly on all the games, do the preparation that I want to do, go and watch them train, meet the coaches beforehand,” Champion said, “and do the job the way we used to do it in the U.K.”
If you watched the D.C.-Atlanta match on Sunday, you probably noticed that Champion and Twellman already had a good chemistry and rapport with one another, cracking jokes and enabling a free-flowing, but not too serious broadcast. The pair first met in 2014, when Champion was assigned a U.S. Men’s National Team World Cup tune-up in San Francisco against Azerbaijan.
“In fact, it was about the last sporting event at Candlestick Park before they blew it up,” Champion said. “They gave me Taylor as the analyst. And I remember he sent me a very kind note about a week before I was due to fly over, never having met or even spoken to him before, welcoming me to the U.S. and offering me help on all sorts of levels.”
So they got off on the right foot, and have been developing their friendship since then.
“We enjoy each other’s company,” Champion said. “I’ve enjoyed broadcasting with him periodically, and that was one of the major attractions as well. I think he’s become a very impressive analyst and broadcaster, and so the prospect of working with him was also a pull in this.”
When it comes to his abilities as a broadcaster Champion is still of top quality, but he’s maintained that he is still and will always be his own harshest critic.
“I always beat myself up after broadcasts,” Champion said, “because what I learned very quickly in my career is that there is no such thing as a perfect broadcast.”
Champion has been impressed “with the sheer physicality” of the MLS game and how many world-class athletes the league has. The atmosphere of the matches are generally different than the Premier League, he said, but he’ll be in Atlanta on Sunday where the environment will surely be electric.
“I’m not saying that they’re the same as the Premier League,” Champion said of the match day experience, “but they’re getting closer to that season by season. There’s now a staple of maybe half the MLS ground where you’re more or less guaranteed a good atmosphere. And other clubs are seeing that and thinking they need to raise their game and raise the bar.”
Champion believes that MLS is heading in the right direction, with the aim being a top 10 league on the world stage.
“It’s improved markedly in the five years I’ve been covering it every so often,” he said.
It’s one of the numerous reasons why Champion is “genuinely enthused about this opportunity.”
“I’ve been lucky enough to achieve everything I could have possibly dreamed about achieving in U.K., broadcasting and around the wider world now with the expansion of the Premier League,” Champion said.
Moving to the U.S. and calling MLS for ESPN appealed to him as an appealing challenge he never expected to come his way, Champion said.
“How lovely to be given the opportunity to move to another country, to bring my family with me and to be part of, quite possibly, another exciting growth story as MLS matures over the next few years as well,” he said.
Champion and Twellman will call MLS Cup this November for ESPN, and Champion has moved himself and half his family across an ocean to get that opportunity. After calling the world’s biggest matches, Champion is ready for a new beginning. And he thinks MLS is as well, and is excited to see and experience how the league develops.
“So that excitement, that motivates me,” Champion said, “and that will, I hope, make sure I’m able to match the standards I’ve set for myself over the last three decades.”
