Nico Cantor in front of a table graphic on "Champions League Today" ahead of Matchday 8. Nico Cantor in front of a table graphic on “Champions League Today” ahead of Matchday 8. (CBS Sports Golazo on X.)
CBSOriginalsSoccerBy Andrew Bucholtz on

One of the most remarkable simultaneous events in sports happened Wednesday. The UEFA Champions League’s format change for this year meant the final matchday of the league stage saw all 18 matches taking place at the same time. And CBS Sports broadcast them all.

For Wednesday’s “Matchday Mayhem,” CBS aired Juventus v. Benfica on CBS Sports Network and Paramount+, with all other matches on Paramount+. On that streaming service, it also aired a special edition of their whiparound The Golazo Show. That saw regular UEFA Champions League Today analysts Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, and Micah Richards join Golazo Show host Nico Cantor (with regular UCL Today host Kate Scott joining for pre- and post-match coverage):

On Thursday (shortly after CBS wrapped up an encore performance with 18 simultaneous Europa League broadcasts), CBS Sports senior creative director and VP of production Pete Radovich spoke to AA on these simultaneous broadcasts. Radovich, who’s also the coordinating producer of CBS’ UCL coverage, said he had some nerves going in on the technical side, but that all went smoothly.

“It was a home run, an absolute home run, I thought, for the viewers, for us,” he said. “The biggest fear going into something like yesterday with 18 games at once was the technical side, cause we’re dealing with two different continents, more games than we ever deal with in any sport that we do.

“There’s never been an NFL week with that many games, there’s never been a European football week that we’ve done that many at the same time. So on the technical side, that was my biggest fear, and that went off flawlessly: zero hiccups, zero issues, zero glitches. So I was really pleased there.”

Radovich gave major credit to the technical teams at both IMG Studios in London (where UCL Today and much of the CBS UCL coverage is based) and at CBS Sports’ headquarters in New York.

“Props to our technical team,” he said. “The technical side of things often is overlooked because it doesn’t, something doesn’t go wrong, you don’t really pay attention to it. But I think this is a case where a light should be shined on something that was done well. I can’t think of a prior scenario, a precedent, for 18 games going on at once in two continents, with two different media companies working together, IMG in London and CBS Sports in America.”

“So what I don’t want to be overlooked is how difficult of a job that was for them to put this on, the technical teams both at IMG and CBS Sports, to be able to do this flawlessly. I think that needs to be highlighted because we’re so quick to highlight when things go wrong; we should give credit when it goes right.”

He particularly spotlighted IMG head of live technology Charlotte Winter and CBS executive vice president (operations and engineering) Patty Power.

“Charlotte Winter here and Patty Power in New York probably had sleepless nights going into yesterday, knowing that we had 18 games at once and a lot of eyes on us. You want a lot of people watching, you draw those eyes to you, but then when the pressure’s on you to deliver, that’s a different pressure. And I think those people should get a lot more credit.”

Making sure the feeds are working properly is one thing, but then there’s the challenge of providing good coverage beyond just the match feeds. That includes the standard pre- and post-match show, but this time, also that special edition of The Golazo Show. Cantor regularly hosts that whiparound coverage, but doing it for 18 matches at once was different, as was working in the UCL Today team of analysts. But Radovich said that went brilliantly.

“From a production standpoint, I feel that with Nico in place, we’ve got the perfect person that knows every storyline, knows every single player and team and scenario. And then you add the value that Thierry brings as an analyst: I’d put Thierry up against anybody doing this sport in America, on any network, I will put Thierry up against anyone, any analyst that’s on-air in America. So we’ve got the best guy in the United States doing it. And then you’ve got Jamie and Micah, who also add a lot of value on the analyst side, so I’m very, very pleased with everything.”

There could be some chemistry worries with having a different lineup than the usual Golazo Show cast for such a challenging broadcasting situation with 18 simultaneous matches. But Radovich said CBS has worked to build chemistry between their whole soccer group over the years, so he had full confidence this grouping would work.

“They all know each other. We very intentionally over the years have brought our different groups together. So Nico has been [at the London studios] before, our European crew has been in in America. We kind of look at it as a big family, not to be sort of corny and clichéd about it.

“But truly, if you work on Serie A or you work on The Golazo Network or you work on Champions League in London, we’re not completely different studio shows. We all feel like we’re one. And Nico especially, as a guy who was in this building doing The Golazo Show for the first three years from London, he’s been around these guys for years, quite literally for years. So there was zero fear that he wouldn’t mesh with them.”

Radovich said the past years of The Golazo Show were also important background and experience here, as the whole idea of a soccer whiparound show was difficult enough to properly execute at first, to say nothing of doing it for this many matches.

“That’s not easy. I remember the first year was tough for everyone. It was a learning process. That doesn’t just happen overnight, you know. Week one, you get thrown into the fire. It’s kind of like, ‘Oh, here we go, we’re doing all these games at once, how do we do this?'”

He said soccer brings particular challenges that other sports don’t, especially with it often not being as obvious when a scoring opportunity might arise.

“There’s really no playbook. You’ve got NFL Red Zone, but it’s a different cadence, it’s a different pace, it’s less games than we have to deal with. In the NFL, you know when a team is about to score and you have a little bit of time to get there in time, we don’t have that.  So there are parallels, but there are a lot of differences.

But Radovich said the Golazo Show team made incredible progress quickly, and their experience doing this for years set them up well for this week’s test.

“The whole thing was a learning process. In year one, from Week One until we did our last show, I think we got better and better, but it was never really sort of cruise control mode. Now in the last couple of years, we’ve gotten to the point where it’s like ‘Okay, we do this.’

“This is just more games than we normally do, but Nico’s done it. And it’s a little bit more studying, a little bit more homework, but we were positioned pretty well to handle what we had to handle.”

Speaking of NFL Red Zone, CBS pulled off a bit of a crossover there Wednesday. They tabbed in Red Zone host Scott Hanson for a five-minute preview with the UCL Today pregame show cast on what to expect:

Radovich said this all started when a soccer fan posted about the upcoming 18 simultaneous matches, and Hanson publicly took note:

Hanson tweet:

Radovich said the attention that got convinced him it was worth reaching out to Hanson.

“That blew up. People started tagging me and Nico, and then I just said ‘Screw it, let’s reach out.’ It was like ‘This is perfect,’ because we’re CBS, we do NFL, so it’s all in the family. It’s perfect cross-promotion, it’s logical. So once I saw how much traction that tweet of his was getting, it was a pretty simple decision to just reach out to his reps and say, ‘Hey, why don’t we, why don’t we creatively come up with something?'”

Radovich said that led to Hanson showing an unexpected level of interest in the details.

“He and I got on a phone call on Friday, which lasted, I’m going to say, close to 90 minutes. And to his credit, Scott asked me about everything: had to give him the whole history of the tournament, how it works, how we used to work, why this year is different, what are the storylines going in? And I thought,’Geez, really, he’s asking me a lot of questions, I didn’t think he’d be this into it for a quick appearance.’

“But then he did a promo for us, and to his credit, he wanted to be buttoned up across everything, and he was. It was fun to be on a call with him, and he was asking great questions. I produced Inside the NFL for years, so for someone that’s been in the NFL world, the American football world, and now the European football world, personally, for me, it was a really fun crossover moment.”

At the start of this UCL season, Radovich predicted that this format change would be “insane” and that a lot of big teams would be battling for a few spots. He said that came even more true than he’d hoped leading into this, though, with Manchester City in particular in dire straits and needing a victory heading into this final day, but falling behind Club Brugge 1-0 before rallying for a 3-1 win.

“We got the best-case scenario, a big team in trouble,” Radovich said. “From a viewer standpoint, from a drama standpoint, we got exactly what you hope for, a giant on the ropes. And we got it all the way into the second half.

“As a neutral, you hope that one of these teams maybe gets challenged up until the last day, and we had that. That was maybe not expected, a team that big looking at elimination. But again, from a viewing standpoint, it really played out as well as it could have from my perspective. I knew that Matchday 8 would be interesting because there was inevitable jeopardy, but not to that level.”

Radovich said the format change here (all 36 clubs are now in a single table and playing eight matches, which will then see the top 24 teams advance to the knockout phase; previously, there were eight groups of four teams with two teams advancing from each group)  generated more excitement than the previous setup.

“I’ve been in this building for some Matchday 5 and Matchday 6 games the last few years, and it’s been brutal on some days where really, honestly, nothing’s at stake anymore. You know the two teams that are going to advance out of each group, maybe there’s a little bit here or there. But those are tough days, it’s tough to create interest. We knew going in that this was going to be interesting until the last whistle, and it played out exactly as I expected, maybe even better.”

And he said this week’s drama proved the value of that change, and showed it was worth it tweaking even an already-beloved setup.

“Honestly, kudos to UEFA. The reaction was, ‘Why fix something that’s not broken?’ Which, I get it. But they took a product that was already very popular and doing very well. And in my mind, and not just my mind, if you look at managers across Europe, they all say the same thing, this has just been better. They took something that wasn’t broken and made it better. Kudos to them, that was a big risk. But I think what they did was great.”

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz