Dan Bean

Confession from an England fan: there’s one thing in this whole US vs England war the Americans are just better at, and it’s time someone on our side said it. Not stadiums - Craven Cottage vs MetLife is two different conversations, 130 years of history and a billion-dollar engineering marvel can both be impressive. Not the football - England is the authority there, the most watched league in the world, where the stars play, same way the US is the authority on baseball whether or not they win the World Baseball Classic. It’s sports coverage. Any English sports fan who’s been to the States knows the feeling - wall-to-wall sport, endless channels, proper production, and you think: why don’t we have this? Even our players feel it. Marc Guehi in England camp this week: “Waking up, turning on the television and seeing ten sports channels in a row is top. It’s amazing.” And that’s exactly what CBS bottled. The best Champions League studio in the world is American-owned, European anchors - Abdo, Henry, Carragher, Richards - built by a producer who modelled it on Inside the NBA. They took the thing we envy about American sports TV and pointed it at our game. And it works better than our own product. The rest - the Tampa pitch outrage (it was a dodgy pitch), the USMNT record graphics (one knockout win ever, lads), the atmosphere wars (you like Coldplay concerts, we like limbs) - is noise. Let’s argue about something real instead... World War II.

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