When Jamie Carragher was approached to take part in CBS’s Uefa Champions League Today panel, he had already established himself as one of football’s most notable pundits.
But while English viewers had long become accustomed to the Liverpool legend’s sharp comments and eye-opening analysis on Sky Sports, there was one aspect of Carragher’s expertise that had CBS Sports senior creative director Peter Radovich concerned.
“He was concerned about whether or not the audience would understand me,” Carragher tells The Guardian via Zoom. Radovich had an entire plan to discover whether Carragher’s Scouse accent was decipherable to the American ear. “Would you believe that these three executives showed a video of me to all their wives and it was essentially up to them to decide if they could understand me?”
Even then, Carragher failed to reach a unanimous decision. “Two of them did, one wasn’t sure. So I just got the votes.”
It’s safe to say the decision worked out well for both CBS and Carragher. Uefa Champions League Today’s coverage of Europe’s premier football competition received rave reviews, almost all of which is down to the playful camaraderie between host Kate Abdo and experts Thierry Henry, Micah Richards and Carragher.
Every week, footage of Abdo making fun of Richards, his infectious laugh, a cheeky Carragher joke, or Henry taking a break. The Office would be proud of the win which was as much online chatter as the best goals from that round of games.
“A lot of it is spontaneous,” Carragher explains. “None of us really know what Kate is going to say. We respond to that. One of us may know a funny fragment of mine or Micah that will be used. It’s about being ourselves and responding to those situations. The team we have is so good at that and they always try to get us.”
As Henry tells Jack Grealish that he could take on Kyle Walker in his prime and Richards literally cries in hysteria over Carragher’s mispronunciation of Internazionale, these are two of the most viewed clips from the show, there’s one example from the campaign 2022-2023 that Carragher sums up what makes the show so popular.
As they interviewed AC Milan defender Fikayo Tomori, Richards turned to Carragher off camera to confirm how to pronounce his name. This turned out to be a big mistake. “I’m just completely wrong. So we both kept saying his name wrong. At the end Kate is joking, you can see the shock on our faces, but we are joking.”
Carragher insists they wouldn’t have gotten away with such a mistake in England, especially when it comes to the biggest games in the Premier League. “There is no way people would accept what we do on CBS on Sky. They would think we were showing a lack of respect or that we didn’t know our stuff. That would have been taken in a completely different way. If someone laughs or jokes about a result, performance or interview, they will be jumped on. (UCL Today) is a different show because people watch it without that tribalism. I think everyone is watching it in a good mood, waiting to be entertained.
That does not mean that no attempts have been made to lighten up the English reporting. Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football show allows for more ‘jokes and laughs’, with Carragher adding: ‘I feel like I have more ownership over it because I’m on it every week, normally we bring on a guest along, and we try to make them feel welcome with a joke and a laugh.”
At the same time, he would never want to change MNF’s opening hours. This is when he can really analyze games in an eye-opening and meticulous way. After eleven years at Sky Sports, both Carragher and the show continue to receive critical acclaim. “I wouldn’t say the producers at Sky are saying, ‘Do this, it’ll be funny.’ They really want top analyses. We want to be the best and most respected show about football. At CBS, the producers are always asking, “How can we make this funny?” They think it probably has to do with American culture. It’s new to me. But I love it.”
Carragher’s contract with Danish sports channel TV3 Sport had just expired when CBS approached him in the summer of 2020 to join their coverage of the Covid-affected Champions League knockout tournament in Lisbon. Having previously had to travel around Europe to cover the games live, Carragher was immediately attracted to the opportunity to work in a studio in London.
“I really wanted to cover the Champions League. I just didn’t want to travel. At first I thought I would do what I do with Sky. I didn’t think it would be a case to do something completely different.”
Even as the team of Abdo, Richards and Roberto Martinez, who sat in Henry’s chair before becoming Portugal manager, had assembled, Carragher didn’t think much would change. Especially since he knew the rest of the team so well. ‘Kate had worked for Sky, as had me and Micah. I knew Roberto very well because we had worked for Sky and he was manager of Everton, so there was a connection with Liverpool.”
It quickly became clear that CBS would take a different approach if the production meetings were not just about football and tactics. “The people who put the team together were very smart. They made sure everyone involved had their niche. Roberto – and now Thierry – is the adult in the room. I always thought Micah was there initially as this huge personality. I think I’m somewhere in between the two.”
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Such an approach is precisely why UCL Today bears favorable similarities to Inside the NBA, which is widely regarded as the best sports analysis show on American television for its blend of jokes, genuine camaraderie and debate-starting analysis. Despite the comparisons, Carragher has yet to watch an episode of Inside the NBA. ‘I know the name. Charles Barkley is a huge basketball player. I’ve never seen it. But I’ve certainly heard a lot about it. Kate mentions it often. Obviously because she lives in the United States and knows the show. I’ve heard the producers say it too. They are looking forward to it and want us to get there one day.”
Like that show’s host, Ernie Johnson, Abdo’s subtle ability to create chaos and have fun, all while keeping the show completely on track, is one of the key ingredients to UCL Today’s growing popularity . “One of the things I like about Kate is that everyone knows that mistakes can happen during a live broadcast, whether it’s looking at the wrong camera or an interview that doesn’t go perfectly. She just rolls with it. People want everything to go well on TV. But that looks too polished. It has to be messy to be authentic. She never gets nervous.”
Carragher tested Abdo’s composure with perhaps UCL Today’s most viral moment of the season. After Arsenal’s round-of-16 penalty shootout win over Porto at the Emirates Stadium, a giddy Carragher made an awkward joke live on television about Abdo “not being loyal” to her partner Malik Scott.
“We’ve gone viral again for the wrong reasons,” says Carragher. “That’s one of the things about the show. Everything is flying around, everyone is saying one-liners. You get so carried away. As soon as you say something, you say, ‘Oh no.’ You just want to take it back. I apologized. But the way Kate handled it the next show was great.
Abdo’s response – in which she called Henry the group’s big brother, Carragher the annoying middle child and Richards the loud and sweet little brother – only helped to further cement the show’s growing reputation and the group’s chemistry.
In the semi-final, Carragher created even more viral content as he traveled to Germany to watch Borussia Dortmund beat Paris Saint-Germain at the Westfalenstadion. “I made a comment about us all going like we normally go to an away game. The producer called me privately and told me to go. At first I didn’t want to go alone. Then I thought I sounded like a prima donna, so I agreed.
When Carragher arrived, he was not supposed to go to the famous “Yellow Wall” stand, let alone have a drink. But when he stood among five or six Dortmund fans, they started buying him one drink after another. ‘They bought me some. So I had to return the favor. It went from there. I just thought the guys were really nice and I should return the favor. The plan was for me to just stand among the audience for ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. But I really wanted to be there for the match. It was brilliant. I loved it.”
After the final whistle and a few beers, Carragher found himself talking about the game on camera, but mainly telling the studio about his drunken antics. When Jadon Sancho walked past, he shouted for him to get in front of the camera. After the England winger agreed, Carragher repeatedly put his arm around him, like old friends reuniting in a pub, as he asked him questions, all eliciting big laughs from Richards, Henry and Abdo. “I wasn’t supposed to interview a player. I was just talking to the studio. I saw Sancho walking by and asked him to come in. There was just a lot happening. That’s the way the show is. There isn’t much rehearsal. It’s just the nature of the show.”
Carragher wouldn’t have it any other way and more than a decade on from reviewing his career at Liverpool, he can’t help but be proud of how his career as a pundit has gone. “Monday Night Football and CBS’ Champions League are one end of the spectrum to the other. One of them is a hard analysis that I have to wrap my brain around. The other is more relaxed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Sometimes I wake up on Thursdays and I’m a little tired. But in a few years it could easily be over. The nature of television is that someone can lose the rights or involve someone else.”
Until then, Carragher believes he is on “the two best football shows in the world”. It’s hard not to agree.