Disney+’s opening night of Women’s Champions League coverage has drawn criticism after a show built around a studio quiz, two content creators and a golden retriever. The programme, The Hangout, was hosted by Alex Scott, working alongside her fellow former England international Lianne Sanderson, the content creators Tyra Mills and Alex Bailess, and a golden retriever named Barley Boy — a dog who, as the Guardian columnist Max Rushden noted, has 82,000 more Instagram followers than he does.
Among the items on the running order was a quiz about Italy, which included guessing the Italian name for football and asking what pasta the reporter in Milan was cooking. It produced, in Rushden’s description, an incredible still image of the panel staring at a pile of farfalle on a big screen normally reserved for team lineups or key match incidents.
The immediate reaction was a mix of bewilderment and fury from seasoned lovers of the women’s game. Kathryn Batte wrote a critique for the Telegraph, while the broadcaster Flo Lloyd-Hughes posted on X that Disney’s new UWCL coverage was the closest thing she had seen to CBBC football, adding that she would not have been surprised to see someone gunged for making a wrong prediction or a cameo from Raven, and that she kept reminding herself it was not a dream.
Rushden argues that one thread runs through all of the criticism: the men’s Champions League would never be covered in the same way. He asks how the team arrived at the concept — why replace former pros with content creators, why replace tactical analysis with a question about the biggest city in Italy, why a dog. The broadcaster Marva Kreel made a related point on X, writing that in men’s football audiences can get analysis and entertainment, but in different shows, whereas in women’s football there is one show that is asked to do everything.
Drawing on his own career, Rushden describes having made a lot of bad television, a number of below-average radio shows and his share of podcasts, and having hosted programmes where he had almost complete editorial control alongside ones where he could have been replaced by a performing monkey. He says live football is significantly more straightforward to host than interviewing an indie band about their difficult second album, that the show Disney attempted is technically much harder than Super Sunday, and that this does not mean it was the right call. He can understand the thinking behind it — he imagines producers were told to bring in a younger audience, something he has been told himself — and acknowledges Disney may simply be being cynical, since people are talking and writing about the coverage while the hardcore audience will watch anyway.
He also places the show in a wider industry context: major broadcasters have less money to make the same amount of output and have spent around 20 years working out how to harness social media, a shift he witnessed at Sky, where a Facebook livestream filmed on an iPhone in the green room could draw as many views as the show itself, with all its studio, lighting, sound and producer costs. Rushden says he dislikes the phrase content creator — he suspects he is nervous they will eventually take his jobs — but that Bailess and Mills came across as very personable and fun, which was clearly the brief, and that nobody can be criticised for taking a job.
Much of his sympathy goes to Scott, who perpetually finds herself in the middle of some kind of culture war. He found the discourse around the end of Football Focus troubling, in particular suggestions that the show went woke and lost its way when she was appointed, and he says he imagines she did not propose having a dog in the studio or a round of guess the pasta — though he genuinely does not know how much editorial control she had, and notes that sometimes a host has to do what they are told and do it with conviction.
On the fundamentals, Rushden’s view is that live football coverage has not changed dramatically in 50 years: welcome, team news, managers, a bit of tactics or player focus, throw to the commentators, then analysis at half-time and full-time. People watch because they want to watch the game, he writes, and if they want comedy they will watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. The dog did not return for the second night of coverage, and it seemed to him that the show moved subtly towards a more traditional setup — a choice he frames as the alternative to doubling down. You cannot magic up an audience, he concludes, but you can make people feel you respect the game, and do it in an entertaining way without introducing animals.