The Champions League final was on TNT Sports: the football telly equivalent of being press-ganged into watching a relative’s am dram at the village hall. Great laugh for the participants, great pain for the audience.
BT Sport became afflicted with a similar problem, the error of thinking that the viewer was tuning in to see the famous ex-professional footballers glad-handing and yukking it up. One suspected in those days that this Saturday night light entertainment vibe was somehow attributable to the whole Jake Humphrey of it all. But one must now conclude that the A-Level results bounce-backer was, on this score at least, not to blame. We are happy to correct the record. May his performance be ever high. The fault lies with the people running the show at TNT, as it did when what is essentially the same production carried the BT Sport livery.
Rio Ferdinand and Steve McManaman were both special players but allowing or encouraging them to bounce about like teenage Real Madrid superfans after a third can of Red Bull is far from a great watch for anyone who is not committedly Madridista. At the end of the match, McManaman was proudly showing off a signed Jude Bellingham Real Madrid shirt; Ferdinand’s contributions throughout basically amounted to gushing about anything and everything the England midfielder did. Analysis, context, insight: forget about it. Bellingham seems like a smashing lad and is a terrific player, although not necessarily in this match, but this was like asking 12-year-olds outside a Taylor Swift gig for critique about the Pennsylvania-born queen of pop.
It might be that TNT is going for an antidote to Sky’s argumentative, forensic deconstruction approach and that’s fair enough, but there is informal and jolly when it comes to punditry and then there is mindless cheerleading. There was an option via Discovery Plus to watch the CBS coverage, whose use of Jamie Carragher, Thierry Henry and Micah Richards worked better for a fun evening’s company: light but not sickly.
TNT’s left you needing a peppermint tea and a lie-down. Jose Mourinho, an excellent booking on paper, was okay but looked like he found it all a bit much. Indeed, he wandered away from the coverage to have a chat with the Borussia Dortmund manager, Edin Terzic, after the whistle, and who can blame him. For this viewer, the most amusing exchange of the evening was when host Laura Woods asked him if he thought that Manchester United “had failed” Jadon Sancho. Mourinho seemed to sidestep the question by interpreting it as if he had been asked if the player was solely culpable for his Old Trafford floppery. Woods, to her credit, cut in to clarify and Mourinho apologised with perfectly on-brand faux humility “my English” before declaring the situation “multifactorial” and launching into a professorial, urbane dissection.
It is not so much that one objects to the talent taking sides, although many viewers who grew up with neutrality as a sine qua non would dispute that, but rather it is that the pundits seem hellbent on inserting themselves into the story and the action with outbursts of “passionate”, performative fandom. Social media has definitely not helped this hyperaware aspect of telly talking, rewarding emotion, no matter how ersatz, above wisdom. If you want blinkered, supporter-style yelling, why not just get actual supporters? It would certainly be cheaper than this fanzone-in-designer-trainers hybrid.
The TNT feed on X, formerly Twitter, had a clip of their pundits’ reactions after Vinicius Junior scored; Ferdinand barked “Ballon D’Or” not once, not twice but nine times. Initially one wondered if something had gone wrong with him, had he been possessed by the spirit of Father Ted’s Father Jack? Would Woods have to unplug Rio and reboot him? It feels like Ferdinand always has half an eye on how his punditry is going to look when he watches it back on his phone in the Addison Lee afterwards. He is not alone in this, to be fair: of course it is a gig for big egos. But the overall effect of the performed partisanship is of watching famous people gaze upon their own wondrousness, oblivious to everything around them. Not serving as a companion to our own viewing, but making the event about them and how they are watching it.
Sorry Rio Ferdinand, your nauseating partisanship is all a bit much
TNT Sports pundits can learn from CBS – be light but not sickly