Champions League turns into 'Gogglebox' as TNT Sports try to navigate the chaos
This, we were told, was what it was all about, what it had all been building to and why we’d come down this path in the first place.
Of course, we all knew it wasn’t true. The headline motivations for upending the Champions League’s format were commercial and political, in delivering more matches for the television product and appeasing the biggest clubs with a security blanket of sorts, as well as a guarantee of games amongst themselves.
But if willing to park that reality for a moment, there was little doubt this was a night with the potential for high entertainment and thrilling drama, far in excess of what the old group stage - once great but long stale - could deliver.
Eighteen games kicked off simultaneously across the continent, only two of which were outright dead rubbers, with five carrying threats of complete elimination and a fair cluster of teams still with designs on making the top eight.
This was the night on which, from a competition standpoint alone, the ends were to justify the means.
And did they? Well, that sort of depends on what you’re in it for.
It was fun, no doubt, in an instant gratification kind of way. A total of 62 goals were scored across the contests (several raising alarming questions about the state of goalkeeping in Europe’s elite competition), at a rate of one every 90-odd seconds through the night. At more than one stage, TNT Sports’ Goals Show threatened to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of them, like there being too much music on Top Of The Pops.
Clearly, there was mass interest; Bet365 and Flashscore’s apps both went down and X briefly reverted to being a place where people swamp timelines with nonsense about unimportant things, instead of nonsense about very important ones, indeed.
But if one of the concerns of modern football’s calendar overload is that the games come too thick and fast, with too little time to anticipate or digest, then this was it in microcosm. Goals flew in, but with too much else going on and too many variables at play to really gather their meaning. Having spent seven matchdays waiting for some clarity to emerge, you seemed to spend the first half of the eighth telling yourself that there was still so much football to be played, so much that could change.
To a British audience at least, the best period of the night came somewhere in the middle, with Manchester City heading out and Aston Villa’s meeting with Celtic in the balance. By the closing stages, most things had been all but settled; an Atalanta winner against Barcelona would have pushed Villa out of the top eight, but there was so much going on that you did not really notice that possibility until the whistle had gone everywhere else. Enjoyably, Club Brugge’s players did the whole nervous-phone-watching act at the Etihad, despite knowing only three goals in 60 seconds for either Stuttgart or Dinamo Zagreb could knock them out.
How the finale ultimately played out, though, is beyond the format’s control and the intrigue in this novel night was as much about its presentation.
In the US, CBS had Scott Hanson, the brilliant host of the NFL’s weekly across-all-games Redzone show, feature on their coverage, but if the Champions League crescendo appeared similarly made-for-TV then the differences between the spectacles were soon exposed.
Football’s inherent speed and unpredictability does not lend itself to the same format. Straight out of the gate, the Goals Show cut away from live pictures of nothing much happening at Villa Park and then missed, about thirty seconds later, Morgan Rogers’ opening goal. Equally, the desire to show something of consequence as it happened in real-time meant we spent a fair chunk of the evening watching men wait to take penalties.
The Goals Show, bizarrely relegated beneath TNT’s main TV channels, did not seem quite sure of what it wanted to be. With a small studio team stretched thin, it lacked the authoritative chaos of Sky Sports staple Soccer Saturday, but nor did it take full advantage of having match footage to speak for itself. Some moments were presented un-spoilered and “as-live” on a short delay - “there’s been a goal, but for who?!” - but the suspense was too often ruined by pundits screaming the outcome - “oh my god, Brugge have scored!” - before it had been shown. Where we needed expert guidance through the carnage, we got Champions League Gogglebox.
In fairness, this was TNT’s first attempt at an unprecedented broadcast and you do not envy the technical sleight of hand required, nor the logistics and planning involved. The product will surely be better next year.
What of the new format, more broadly? It has been good in this maiden year, with exciting matches each week and surprising storylines from the start.
The hope is it will get even better with familiarity, with context added to the strange early fixtures now we know roughly what it takes to finish where.
But will the struggles of so many of the biggest clubs - Manchester City, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Juventus - prove a one-off? And will we get quite so excited about the jeopardy, having seen them all go through in the end?
