With all of the changes in American TV soccer rights in the last few years, it can be daunting to keep track of what is broadcast on what channel, especially when it comes to European midweek matches, which are on in the middle of the workday in the U.S. Sometimes you don’t need to see the full matches or maybe you don’t have time to sit down for 90 minutes during the middle of the day. So this leaves a lot of us wondering: Are Champions League highlights on TV in the U.S.?
The Champions League TV rights switched hands ahead of the 2018-19 season, leaving the bumbling fools at Fox for the painfully avaricious monsters at Turner Sports. This has meant just a single Champions League match is shown on TV at once, on TNT, despite Turner owning two other stations that never have anything valuable on during weekday afternoons. The other matches are shown on the streaming service B/R Live, which is by no means cheap.
But the question is, are Champions League highlights on TV in America?
Are Champions League Highlights On TV?
The short answer is yes, if you know where to look.
As part of Turner Sports’ Champions League broadcasts on TNT, the station airs an hour-long pregame show as well as a postgame show, which isn’t quite as long. The pregame show has plenty of highlights from past Champions League matches, while the postgame show has highlights from the matches that just took place.
However, if you can’t get to a TV in the middle of the afternoon to watch these Champions League highlights — which is probably why you’re in this position searching for highlights in the first place — you have a couple options.
The first is to turn on SportsCenter on ESPN and hope something interesting enough happened in the Champions League to preempt the avalanche of year-round NFL coverage and boring MLB stories. But that’s a crapshoot and will waste a lot of your time.
A slightly better option is to turn to social media.
Some Champions League highlights can be found on Bleacher Report’s various Twitter handles (@brlive, @brfootball), posted soon after the goals themselves are scored. Checking the feeds is a good way to catch up on the best goals of the day.
Bleacher Report also posts Champions League highlights on YouTube for every match. However, these typically aren’t put up until the following day.
Another good option is to turn to Univision, which owns the Spanish-language rights to the Champions League in the U.S. Univision tweets out more highlight clips. Even better, Univision Deportes posts its highlights packages to YouTube on the same day as the match, because it actually seems to care about the fans.
But really, your best bet is to just follow The18.com. We’ll have all the best highlights and the most engaging stories posted as soon as the matches end. More importantly, we’ll also have the worst highlights and dumbest stories, such as Ajax scoring moments after a Bob Marley song.