How soccer became such a big deal for CBS Sports under Sean McManus

NEW YORK — When the son of Philadelphia native Jim McKay was growing up, soccer was part of the family’s life.

McKay was ABC’s play-by-play voice for the old North American Soccer League, including the legendary Pelé's years with the New York Cosmos, and the 1982 men’s World Cup final. Twelve years later, McKay led ABC’s coverage of another seminal soccer moment, the first World Cup played in this country.

Sean McManus had no idea back then that his impact on the world’s game in America would far surpass his father’s, and in far less time. Though CBS has only been broadcasting soccer regularly for 3 ½ years, it has vaulted to remarkable prominence for both quantity and quality.

In fact, almost no one saw CBS’s rise coming. For decades, the network has been famed for picking a limited set of sports properties and holding them for decades — especially the NFL, golf, and college football and basketball. Fans with long memories might still recall CBS airing U.S. Open tennis for 46 years, and NASCAR for 40.

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That ethos still reigns at the network’s Manhattan headquarters, whose walls are full of famous photos and prints of calls. But on a weekday afternoon, the TVs are showing soccer. And as McManus prepares to retire next month after 28 years at CBS Sports’ helm, he gladly places the world’s game alongside the network’s signature American sports rights.

“From a standing start three years ago, the impact, I think, has been remarkable,” the CBS chairman told The Inquirer in an interview. “And the progress we’ve made, I think has been remarkable.”

How did this all come to be?

“We were looking for something that would have an impact on our direct-to-consumer product, Paramount+, and that’s a different audience than the CBS traditional audience,” McManus said. “Not surprisingly, the average age for our soccer viewer on Paramount+ is 35, which is way, way younger than any demographic you would find on CBS for any sport. We were looking for something that had rabid fans, loyal fans, diverse fans, and younger fans, and soccer and specifically [the] UEFA Champions League fit that bill.”

McManus didn’t give much data on the scale of Paramount+’s soccer viewership, as CBS overall does not. But he noted that “the traffic and the new subscribers has exceeded our expectations,” fueled not just by the Champions League but by the NWSL, Italy’s Serie A, and a package of Concacaf national team tournaments. This year, CBS adds games from the USL’s lower leagues.

CBS has also committed to not just putting games behind a streaming paywall. The flagship broadcast network shows Champions League knockout games during weekday soap opera hours, and NWSL games on weekends — including the championship game in prime time. Other games go on the CBS Sports Network cable channel, and quite a few are on the free-of-charge Golazo Network streaming channel.

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“You have to make your product available on as many platforms as you can,” McManus said, in part, because “a lot of the younger viewers aren’t going to sit down and watch a 3-hour NFL game or 2 ½-hour NBA game.”

But putting games on broadcast TV is still the biggest deal of all. As popular as streaming has become, live games on the big networks still draw the biggest audiences for all sports.

“I think that the owners and the commissioners, and the rights-holders understand that part of the reason those events are so popular is because they are on broadcast television,” McManus said. “I think for the foreseeable future, big-time sporting events and broadcast television are going to be here for a long time.”

One could pick from many on-air moments when it felt like soccer “made it” at CBS. But one of the biggest landmarks came off the field in 2022, when the network renewed its UEFA rights package — the men’s Champions League, Europa League, and Europa Conference League — with an unprecedented six-year deal.

Before then, European soccer leagues had traditionally done three-year deals at home and abroad. U.S. networks prefer long-term stability, though, as the NFL has so often shown. The tide started to turn in 2016 when NBC convinced the English Premier League to renew for six years instead of three.

“I think we made a convincing case that if you do a three-year deal, two years into it you already have to start the renegotiation for an extension,” McManus said. “And when you make the kind of commitment we’ve made, from a marketing standpoint and a production standpoint and a talent standpoint, we just thought that three years was too short.”

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That wasn’t the only way NBC’s success inspired CBS.

“I would say for a number of years, mostly our digital folks, and then the streaming product folks, direct-to-consumer, started looking around at sports that they thought would have an impact — and soccer kept coming right to the top,” he said. “The loyalty of the audience and the calendar, and quite frankly we looked at what NBC has done with EPL, which I think has been really successful. … We took a leap of faith and we trusted our research folks at Paramount+ and CBS, and it turned out really well.”

Along the way, McManus saw a bigger shift.

“For decades, people have talked about, ‘Oh, you know, soccer is going to be the sport of the 70′s and the 80s and the 90′s,” he said. “I would say the perception [changed] because of what we’ve done with the Champions League and what NBC has done with the Premier League. And I’ll give ESPN and then Fox a lot of credit for the World Cup.”

“I think the excitement around the World Cup, obviously not just the men but even as much so — in some cases more so — for the women, I think that’s had an effect,” McManus said. “And the television ratings they’ve generated have been noticed by the C-suite. The corporate folks in American business have said ‘There’s something there.’”

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McManus has a long history of not just overseeing broadcasts, but going to them. He’s always at the men’s Final Four, the Masters, and so many of CBS’s big NFL games. He hasn’t gone to as many soccer games, but he’s gone to a few, and been bitten by the same bug that has made many Americans fall in love with the in-person atmosphere.

“I went to Manchester for a Manchester United game, and I went to Munich last year for a [Bayern] game,” he said. “I’ve been to a lot of events, but I had no appreciation for the emotion, and enthusiasm, and noise that takes place at a really big-time Champions League match. It was remarkable.”

McManus recalled telling colleagues “that we need to bring our sales people and our financial people here to see what we’re talking about.”

“It reminded me, in a very different way, of the Army-Navy game,” he said of the famed college football rivalry that Philadelphia regularly hosts.

And since McManus is a Duke alum, with a framed photo of a Blue Devils basketball title above his desk, another classic came to mind: Duke-North Carolina at a frenzied Cameron Indoor Stadium.

“It’s a good comparison also,” he said, “just the noise and the emotion that everybody shows.”

But there’s something about soccer, McManus added, “that I can’t really describe, that is amazing to experience.”