The Champions League gave soccer a day like it had never seen before. Was it a success?

American sports fans have grown used to what the TV world calls “whiparound” shows: broadcasts that jump around a slate of games in a sport all played at the same time.

NFL Red Zone on Sundays is the most famous. Major League Baseball, the NBA, NHL, and MLS have them in their seasons. TNT does one for the men’s NCAA Tournament, and NBC did one for the Olympics last year — hiring Red Zone’s Scott Hanson as one of the hosts.

But there’s never been a show quite like what CBS Sports did last Wednesday and Thursday, for the final day of the Champions League and Europa League group stages. The soccer tournaments’ new format this season meant that on each day, there were 18 games at the same time.

How do you handle that? It helps to already have experience. CBS has done its Golazo Show since acquiring the tournaments’ rights in 2020, and host Nico Cantor has been in the chair the entire time. Pete Radovich has been the network’s Champions League coordinating producer from the start, and worked NFL and college sports broadcasts for years before then.

“Red Zone was an absolute inspiration for what we have [had] for four years, the Golazo Show,” said Radovich, who invited Hanson on for a guest appearance during the pregame show. “When I spoke to him for over an hour last Friday prepping him for his appearance, even he kept saying over and over to me, ‘I’ve never come close to anything [like] 18 games.’”

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The broadcast needed not just good on-air talent, but good staff behind the scenes. Radovich’s biggest fear before kickoff was technical glitches during games, with so many broadcast feeds going in and out of the London-based studio. He praised Patty Power, CBS Sports’ executive vice president of operations and engineering; and Charlotte Winter, head of live technology for IMG Sports (which owns the London studio), for their work on each side of the Atlantic.

“Eighteen games at once, broadcasting from one continent to another — never been done before,” Radovich said. “The technical team, both at IMG and at CBS, overperformed. So for me, everything else is gravy.”

There was definitely a lot of action. Wednesday’s games had 64 combined goals, and Thursday’s had 52. But unfortunately, on the Champions League side, there wasn’t much actual drama. Most of the teams qualified for the knockout rounds were already set. One of the few uncertainties that did exist, though, was a big one.

English Premier League juggernaut Manchester City had to beat Belgium’s Club Brugge just to make the playoff round. Late in the first half, Brugge took a shocking 1-0 lead. City tied the game early in the second half and ended up winning 3-1, but the upset was on for a few moments.

“For us as a neutral [watcher], that’s your best-case scenario,” Radovich said. “Obviously they got through it, but that becomes your story quickly. It was a story going in, and it became a bigger story once they went down 1-0.”

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Beyond that, the day didn’t feel as compelling as it could have. That led to some criticism in Europe that the hype was overblown. But there was also a widespread view that the Champions League’s old format became stale.

It had eight groups of four teams each, seeded by quality. Each team played the others in its group home and away. The disparities between teams meant a lot of easy wins, not a lot of upsets, and many years when knockout-round berths were clinched before the group stage’s final day.

The new format is quite different. There are 36 teams in one big table, which is now officially called the “league stage” instead of the “group stage.” Each team plays eight opponents, once each, that are randomly drawn by a computer with some seeding rules. The top eight finishers advance to the round of 16, while teams 9-24 go into a home-and-away playoff to fill out the 16s. The rest are out.

“I’ve done matchday 5’s and matchday 6’s when virtually nothing was at stake,” Radovich said, referring to the last two rounds of the old group stage. “We were just kind of trying to fill air with interesting storylines, with really not much jeopardy in play.”

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Earlier this season, it felt like some teams and fans didn’t know exactly how big a deal each game was. Would there be a better idea at the end of the league stage?

Yes, it turned out. Not only did Manchester City slip up, but so did Spain’s Real Madrid, France’s Paris Saint-Germain, and Germany’s Bayern Munich. They’re all in the playoff round, with City and Madrid set to play each other. Meanwhile, some relative underdogs made the top eight: Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen, England’s Aston Villa, and France’s Lille.

Radovich and the on-air broadcasters had to explain all the day’s stakes to American fans, while making sure to not miss any goals. Fortunately, there was an intuitive way to do this. Put a frame around the action, and put the live standings in it.

That might seem obvious, and it was to Radovich, too. Unfortunately, during Wednesday’s first half, the frame often showed other things. Radovich saw that, and told his crew at halftime to make sure the standings stayed up for as much of the second half as possible.

“I emphasized very strongly at halftime: ‘Stop [messing] around and just put the table up, it’s all anyone cares about,’” he said. “It was a very direct conversation that we need to keep it in, because that’s all that matters at this point.”

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Fans in Europe didn’t get to see CBS’ broadcast, as each country had its own. Not all the reviews of those shows were positive, in part because some European TV networks don’t value them like U.S. networks do. Radovich has gotten a sense of this in his travels over the years.

“When we first started the Golazo Show four or five years ago, working with British production, the pace was very slow,” he said. “And I was the guy standing over the shoulder like, ‘Come on, let’s go, let’s go. Move, move. Next game, next game, next game.’”

He acknowledged it was a “very American, very non-European” way of seeing things, but his colleagues came to understand what he meant.

“Now, after four years, five years of this, we’ve basically got it down to a science,” Radovich said.

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That doesn’t mean everything was perfect. Radovich will sit down with his team and discuss things they can improve, whether big or small. For example: the live table was shown as a set of stacks lined up horizontally on the bottom of the screen. What if it was shown vertically instead?

“We looked at it,” Radovich said, but he decided it wouldn’t fit right on the screen. “It’s tight, and you get into abbreviations and a lot of numbers in a small space. … We’ll look at the tape like any good coach would, and see where we can be better and reevaluate even little things like that.”

He stopped himself there for a moment.

“I say little — it’s really not a little thing,” he said. “All that matters is the viewers’ experience, and what they liked and what they didn’t like. If something’s confusing, to me that’s the No. 1 red flag in anything that we do.”

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