How Thierry Henry, Jamie Carragher, and Micah Richards Got on American TV
Interviews with the three stars reveal the inside story of how they got involved in a project that took shape over just 28 days.
28 DAYS ‘TIL LISBON
CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus was visiting the Inside the NFL production team one day when he subtly broke some news. “In passing, he said to me, ‘We’re in the mix for the Champions League,’” remembers Pete Radovich, senior creative director for the network. “I said, ‘Don’t f- with me, Sean. For real?’”
TNT had the rights to broadcast the Champions League in the United States in 2020 but exited their contract early, citing the pandemic. So CBS took over a year earlier than planned, when Europe’s highest-level football competition resumed in a special format in Lisbon, Portugal at the end of the summer. The way things shook out, the production team had 28 days to put a show together.
Things were closed up Stateside, but Radovich says he made some calls and found out they could do a studio show in London. That meant recruiting from the pool of local talent.
“We were meeting some of the greats of the sport on Zoom, day after day,” says Radovich, senior creative director at CBS Sports. “I had to go to London quickly, because I needed to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel room.” They soon settled on a strategy of recruiting talent that worked weekends covering the Premier League but had an opening on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to do American TV.
“We were getting deals done in, like, three days,” he says. “Usually, it takes three weeks, three months.” The first recruit was host Kate Abdo, and you can get the full story on that in GQ this week.
But how did the rest of the crew come together?
JAMIE CARRAGHER: TONE DOWN THE SCOUSE!
“The only debate was whether or not the American public could understand him,” Radovich said of Jamie Carragher, the local lad who wore the red shirt of Liverpool for a decade and a half before he became a broadcaster. “So, the first question on Zoom was, “Can you dial back your Scouse?”
Carragher laughed and said he’d already done Danish TV (in English), where he’d had to dial his accent back. It wouldn’t be a problem. But Radovich and the two executives on the call, Jeff Gerttula and Ben Stauber, still weren’t quite convinced.
“I said, I'm going to find a clip of him,” Radovich remembers. “We'll show it to our wives tonight, and we'll ask our three wives, ‘Do you understand this man?’ And he won on a vote of 2 to 1.”
Thus did one of Britain’s foremost football pundits secure a job on American TV.
“What Sky gives me and what CBS give me are almost completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of punditry,” Jamie Carragher said from an armchair in a makeshift living room under a tent. It was the green room for a special live broadcast of Champions League Today from Watson Island in Miami, Florida. A chunk of the city skyline served as the background of the set, while off to the right was backstage. “I love honing in on small details, analytical stuff that you get with Sky,” he added. “With CBS, it's more off-the-cuff, probably not as rehearsed. We just go with the flow, because we've got a relationship with each other. We can just bounce off each other.”
Carragher’s role alongside Gary Neville on Sky’s Monday Night Football has been massive in the football mediascape for years, but he says this gig with CBS has changed things for him. They still talk tactics here, but he gets to goof off a bit and mostly get a break from the highly serious debates.
“I don’t think you could do this show in England,” he says. “The rivalries between football supporters are so tribal. It’s probably less so in America. And it’s the Champions League—not everybody’s team is involved. So we can be a little bit more lighthearted. But people actually see me with a smile on my face now.”
Radovich says Carragher is well aware of how he got the job, and whom he has to thank for this additional paycheck. “We joke about that all the time,” the producer adds. “He says that when he meets the wives—the two wives—he's going to buy them dinner.”
MICAH RICHARDS “WAS A QUICK NO”
