Inside ESPN’s pandemic-era Euro 2020 coverage
Jon Champion isn’t one for notes.
When the match on hand cries out for one of his signature rhetorical flourishes, the veteran English broadcaster depends on spontaneity. Never a script.
“I can tell from a million miles away – outer space – if I am listening to or watching a broadcast, and the commentator has prepared a line beforehand,” Champion told the Guardian. “It stands out like a sore thumb.”
Champion, who made his name in the UK with the BBC and ITV before starting a career on US TV, has worked at every major football tournament since Italia 90, a streak that continued this summer with his coverage of Euro 2020 for ESPN.
Champion says he does not adjust his approach for the US audience. “The reason I don’t see any need to change my style is that I think the soccer audience here is very mature,” he said. “If I was to change my style, that would almost be seen as a way to pander to them. It’s just not necessary because they understand the game every bit as well as their counterparts in Europe. This idea that American soccer fans don’t get it, don’t fully understand it, is just nonsense.”
He was on air last week for perhaps the competition’s most indelible match, Switzerland’s stunning win on penalties over France. After the Swiss goalkeeper Yann Sommer swatted away Kylian Mbappe’s attempt from the spot to clinch the upset over the reigning world champions, Champion once again let instinct be his guide.
“The thing is, in a moment like that, you can never script it,” he said. “You never quite know what’s going to come out of your mouth next, and so, this metaphor came to me about the walls of the French castle crumbling down.”
There was just one problem: the images on the screen didn’t quite align with Champion’s narration. Sommer walked anxiously along the goalline, unsure of whether it was safe to celebrate, while Mbappe awaited a do-over that ultimately would never come.
Champion forged ahead, even with the outcome seemingly still in limbo. The most perceptive of viewers might have picked up the slightest hesitation in his delivery. “The walls of the French castle,” he said on-air, before pausing a beat, “are crumbling down.”
Amid the pandemonium, Champion wondered, like Sommer, if he too might have been off his line.
“I’m in the middle of my Hallelujah call, trying to sum up what this moment means, and suddenly I think, ‘Crikey, this might not be what it appears to be in the VAR era. This might get taken back. We might have to go through it all again. This might not be the moment,’” Champion recalled. “I was taking a bit of a risk. I’m halfway through delivering that and I’m thinking, ‘Is it?’ It’s a horrible feeling. It sends a shiver through you when you think you might have gotten it wrong.”
Champion didn’t have to wait long for confirmation that he got the call right, but the experience made for a fitting snapshot of the moment, capturing just some of the dilemmas and impediments that come with broadcasting a major spectacle when much of the world is still grappling with the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.
For Champion, the uncertainty in that climactic moment reinforced his own personal frustration with remote work. While the instant-classic between Switzerland and France unfolded at Arena Națională in Bucharest, Champion was more than 4,600 miles away inside a studio at ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, watching the match off a bank of monitors.
Champion, who serves as ESPN’s lead commentator for MLS coverage, believes the task of calling matches remotely is more challenging than it is in other sports. Forced to ply his trade in America’s domestic league “off monitor” since the pandemic began last year, Champion is not a fan.
“You’re effectively putting on a straitjacket, or a pair of blinkers like
a racehorse,” he said. “You are focused only on the picture that is being presented to you by the match director. The joy of being at a stadium is that you can see everything else. You can see two players having a bit of a dustup that the camera hasn’t caught. You can see the tactical plan unfolding because your own eyes give you a much wider view. You can see if one of the coaches is angry at a particular player. You don’t see any of that unless the director shows that to you.”
Working off monitor has been a regular feature of ESPN’s coverage of the tournament. The network had each of its in-game commentary teams based in Bristol during its broadcast of the European Championships in 2008 and 2012. At Euro 2016, ESPN had commentators calling matches inside the stadiums in France for more than half of the matches, while other teams remained in Bristol. Even before Euro 2020 was disrupted by the pandemic, the network planned to have two commentary teams based in Bristol to call matches in remote host cities like Baku, which would have necessitated more extensive travel.
“Sometimes at tournaments it’s a combination,” said the Scottish commentator Derek Rae, who has worked on the Euros for ESPN in every edition of the competition since 2008. “Sometimes you’re at the venue one day, and then for logistical reasons you’re working from the international broadcast center the next.”
The studio in Bristol contains several plasma screen televisions on the wall. One beams out the main match feed, while another provides a continuous feed of the stadium so the commentators can still view what is taking place at the venue even when the live broadcast is showing a replay. A third TV displays general match information, from team sheets to disciplinary actions to substitutions. There are three chairs, two for the in-game commentators, and another for a researcher who feeds them nuggets via text message throughout the match.
Souping up the room proved less challenging than getting corporate approval, however. Champion said that “it took a lot of work” on his bosses’ behalf to persuade Disney, ESPN’s parent company, “that it was safe albeit for three fully vaccinated individuals to sit in the same room to call games.”
“We’ve had to face unexpected hurdles like that,” Champion said.
Rae and his broadcast partner, the former Nigeria international Efan Ekoku, called all matches for Euro 2020 from Bristol. It’s hardly been uncharted territory for Rae, who worked off a monitor as the lead English-language commentator for Champions League coverage in the United States back in the early 2000s.
“There’s a certain skill to doing games off tube,” Rae told The Guardian. “You have to be a little bit careful. You probably have to not commit 100% of the time in a way that you would from the stadium, but there are techniques we use.”
Rae’s technique happens to be relentless preparation.
“I’ll tell people, ‘Don’t bother me about 45 minutes before the game,’ because what I do is I become affixed to my monitor and I’m looking at all the angles of players warming up,” he said. “And people will say, ‘What’s that all about?’ What I’m doing is, I’m looking at every player. I’m looking at his hair style. Has he changed his hair? Has he dyed his hair? More importantly, I’m looking at the boots he’s wearing. I’m looking at the boot colors. When there’s a set piece or a crowded scene, I need to be able to, in an instant, say definitively, ‘That’s Player X.’ Sometimes the boot colors can be the all important factor in making that determination.”
“You need every little bit of help you can get when you’re doing it off tube,” Rae added.
No amount of preparation could have braced Rae for his opening assignment of the tournament, when he was on the call during Christian Eriksen’s frightening collapse in last month’s group stage match between Denmark and Finland. Throughout those disquieting moments, Rae kept his nerve.
“I think that’s when broadcasting experience really does come in handy,” said Rae, who has called eight World Cups. “There was a little voice that said to me, and I don’t know where this comes from: ‘Concentrate fiercely. Do not overtalk. Show empathy. Don’t be afraid of silence. Don’t speculate.’”
ESPN had five in-game commentary teams assigned to Euro 2020, most of whom called the action from the studio in Bristol. The exception was the pairing of Ian Darke and Stewart Robson, who were based in London for much of the tournament, calling matches either in-person at Wembley Stadium or off monitor at IMG Studios. Darke and Robson also traveled to Rome last week for the quarter-final between England and Rome.
Champion, much to his relief, was able to break out of the studio he likened to a “broom cupboard” after calling matches there from the group stage through the round of 16. When we spoke by phone last week, he was preparing to head to Logan Airport in Boston to catch a flight bound for Munich, where he and his broadcasting partner, the former MLS star and United States international Taylor Twellman, called Italy’s quarter-final win over Belgium at Allianz Arena. From there, the two went to London to call the Azzurri’s semi-final triumph over Spain on Tuesday.
The itinerary was heavily shaped by the now-familiar pandemic protocols.
At the airport, they had to produce proof of vaccination and a negative Covid test, the latter of which was secured the day before the flight at a Walgreens in East Hartford, Connecticut. After touching down, the two were subject to government-mandated quarantine, which they were allowed to break only to go to and from the stadium, thanks to an exemption granted to Uefa. Champion and Twellman continued to be tested for Covid in the leadup to Friday’s match in Munich, a prerequisite for their flight to London the following day. The same Uefagranted exemption enabled them to go to and from Wembley for Tuesday’s semi-final, but Champion said they were in for a tighter quarantine in the UK.
“You can’t go outside the hotel,” he said. “In fact, you’re meant to stay in your room and order room service.”
Those limitations are why Rae said he didn’t have much regret about calling the tournament entirely from the US.
“I’ll be honest, I think because we’ve all been living in a pandemic and we’re still living in a pandemic, I’m not unhappy to have had the vantage point I’ve had this time,” Rae said. “It’s not covering a tournament as we know it. One of the great things about covering a tournament is that you get the pulse of what’s happening in a particular city and you talk to people, but there aren’t many people to talk to this time. If ever there were a tournament not to be at, this is probably the one.”
Champion, on the other hand, was eager to escape the ESPN studio. On the call for his 16th major tournament, he said it “would have been quite galling to have called the entirety of this one in a broom cupboard in Bristol, Connecticut.” In an email from London on Tuesday night, after concluding his Euro 2020 duties with the Italy-Spain semi-final, Champion made it clear that, at least for him, the walls of the Bristol studio had officially come crumbling down.
“Let’s consign off monitor to history,” he wrote. “It served a purpose in a pandemic. On site is definitely the future!