If you are a fan of the old world order of daytime television, you probably aren’t a fan of international soccer.
Saturday mornings used to be the exclusive domain of children’s shows, mostly cartoons, until news directors at networks and stations convinced their management that they could provide more salable adult audiences who would be willing to take back control of TVs if they’d expand upon their Monday-Friday news franchises. So we got CBS NEWS SUNDAY MORNING, weekend installments of THE TODAY SHOW, and a lot of local long-form blocks that came along for the ride. But that’s what weekday TV ultimately looked like, and since kids by then had their own channels and likely their own TVs, there was little to be upset about.
But then someone at NBC, with a nudge from a passionista like Michael Davies, realized that there was a whole lot of top-quality English Premier League soccer that could be shown, and at that point the league was simply looking for someone to air the matches at all. So a deal was made and, lo and behold, ratings were strong. Even after its struggling sports network went belly up the EPL found a home on NBC proper, USA and now Peacock, and now if one chooses one can immerse themselves in matches pretty much until the “real” football games start up around midday.
In exposing this world to more of the masses in the U.S., it was revealed that there was an even broader and, at least locally, equally as significant regular tournament that would occasionally disrupt the regular Saturday schedules. It was mostly relegated to sporadic scheduling on TNT on weekday afternoons, at a time when they actually had more attractive sports to tout. CBS came to its rescue, in a rare attempt to acquire truly global programming that actually befit the corporate name Paramount Global. Now with an expanded slate and a foothold, it is bigger and better than ever, and yesterday kicked off its 2024-25 season with six matches spread out over an otherwise moribund Tuesday afternoon stateside.
THE ATHLETIC does an outstanding job detailing this phenomenon, and earlier this week the tandem of Eduardo Tansley and Mark Carey explained how much bigger and better it now is:
This season will bring us a Champions League like none we have seen before.
In the competition’s new “one big league” format, holders Real Madrid will be looking to add to their 15 titles but it will be a different challenge to any of those previous years.
(I)n brief: there is an increase from 32 to 36 competing clubs and from 125 to 189 total matches (eight each in the first phase, rather than six), with the final league games all being played simultaneously on Wednesday, January 29.
And as their colleague Adam Crafton also shared, that’s making a new crop of daytime TV viewers with no allegiance to news, soaps or game shows happy:
Pete Radovich, the coordinating producer of the UEFA Champions League coverage on CBS Sports, is reflecting on how he came to realise that the network’s Champions League Today studio now owns the global conversation on major nights of European football.
“Thierry Henry, in no uncertain terms, says he gets asked more about CBS now than Arsenal,” Radovich grins. “He will tell you that straight up. That to me is wild.
The growth is reflected in numbers as well as anecdotes. CBS say their Champions League coverage garnered more than 3.5 billion video views across social media last season, the majority of which were from their Champions League Today studio show. It is anchored by Kate Abdo, the multilingual, 43-year-old British presenter, and merges insight and camaraderie with a panel comprised of the former Arsenal and Barcelona legend Henry, a Liverpool icon and Champions League winner in Jamie Carragher and ex-Manchester City defender Micah Richards, who is a Premier League winner.
This season represents the start of a six-year contract for Paramount Global, the owner of the CBS network, to broadcast UEFA club tournaments across the CBS network and its Paramount+ streaming service in the United States. It is one of the largest broadcast contracts in the sport, worth $1.5billion (£1.15bn) across six years. Paramount beat competition from Amazon to keep the UEFA competitions, including the Europa League and Conference League. David Berson, the president and CEO of CBS Sports, says the property is now considered one of the network’s “marquee assets”. He says: “We’re known for the NFL, Super Bowls, NBA Final Fours and the Masters and so on. The fact that we now put our soccer portfolio with the UEFA Champions League in that same discussion, that’s thrilling for us. It’s different. It’s exciting. It’s growing. It’s young-skewing (the average age of soccer viewers on Paramount+ is 37). It’s moved into that upper echelon of properties that help define who we are.”
And yesterday provided quite a bit for the winsome, articulate and attractive panel to gab about, as yet another colleague, Tim Spears, reported:
The Champions League is back, with a new format, more games and lots more goals.
There were 28 scored across six matches, with blistering Bayern Munich scoring almost a third of that total.
In fact, in Champions League history, only one more night (in October 2014) has seen a higher goals-per-game ratio than the 4.7 per game we saw on Tuesday.
And there may be upside to all of these numbers by year’s end. Here’s the postscript that DEADLINE’s Dade Hayes dropped yesterday afternoon while all of this scoring was going on:
David Beckham and Paramount+ have formed a marketing partnership bringing alternative telecast Beckham & Friends to CBS Sports’ UEFA Champions League coverage.
The deal will give additional exposure to the “ManningCast”-esque show and increase options for UEFA Champions League viewing on Paramount+. The show will stream during both UEFA Champions League Semifinal Leg 2 matches and the UEFA Champions League Final. Beckham made the announcement Tuesday during a guest appearance on CBS Sports’ UEFA Champions League Today studio show.
And if you think it’s rare for a new project and good news involving Paramount+ to be announced, let alone on a Tuesday afternoon, you’d be right.
CBS has already cancelled THE TALK, and its soap operas are struggling. They’re tinkering with an expansion to their morning show and looking for strong, multicultural personalities to do so. They’ve already hit relative gold with Nate Burleson, ex-Minnesota Viking.
Word to the wise: Maybe Ebdo and Henry might be worth a tryout?
Courage…