Laura Woods will be the lead presenter for the Champions League as TNT Sports enters the British and Irish market in replacing BT Sport. The former Sky and current ITV presenter heads a female-fronted presentation team for the new venture’s football properties.
Lynsey Hipgrave will continue to present weekend Premier League coverage, Reshmin Chowdhury will also anchor Champions League matches and Jules Breach will head up Europa League coverage, also acting as touchline reporter.
In a team that bears close relation to the outgoing BT regime there are few big-name casualties and TNT’s major football co-commentator addition is Ally McCoist, most recently Woods’s radio partner on TalkSport. Darren Fletcher and Adam Summerton continue in commentary roles, while Rio Ferdinand, Peter Crouch and Joe Cole lead names including Rachel Brown-Finnis, Owen Hargreaves, Steve McManaman, Joleon Lescott, Michael Owen, Paul Scholes and Robbie Savage in punditry and co‑commentary. Jake Humphrey announced his departure from his role as BT Sport’s lead presenter in May and Des Kelly, latterly a touchline reporter, stepped down after the Champions League final.
For £29.99 a month, the same price as its predecessor, TNT enters the fray, the Warner Brothers/Discovery media conglomerate having merged with BT for a joint venture in September 2022. In practice, wherever BT Sports was to be found, the new channel, and its magenta logo, will replace it from Tuesday morning. The new venture’s first live offering, fulfilling the Champions League rights inherited from BT until 2027, will take place on TNT Sports 2, Macedonia’s Struga taking on Lithuania’s Zalgiris at 4pm UK time. TNT also takes on BT’s 52 Premier League games until 2025.
The channel brings in Orla Chennaoui, currently fronting Eurosport’s Tour de France coverage, as a rugby union presenter and the former Blue Peter presenter Radzi Chinyanganya, snooker anchor on Eurosport, in a multisports role. Stuart Hogg, the recently retired Scotland mainstay, joins the rugby union punditry team.
Fans anxious to see BT’s Champions League Goals Show will be pleased by its return, though its placing on the Discovery+ app opens up a wider company plan. Andrew Georgiou, the president and managing director, hopes to deliver an “even more compelling offer that appeals to the whole household, combining more live sport together with entertainment”. For that monthly price, a TNT viewer will be able to access Eurosport channels and Discovery channels. The wider Warner Bros/Discovery universe stretches from Batman and Barbie Hollywood blockbusters to HBO and Succession, the CNN news operation to Discovery Plus’s Outback Car Hunters, where enthusiasts search remote Australia for cars to renovate.
TNT Sports’s aim, in the words of Georgiou and Scott Young, its production head, is to be “irreverent” and “relatable”. Its US sister channel won acclaim for its pairing of the basketball legends Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal and the new TNT team includes “content creators”, Crouch and Ferdinand both fitting that description, so developments may follow in that direction.
Georgiou told the Guardian that women’s sport was a TNT priority despite BT losing Women’s Super League coverage to Sky from the start of the 2022-23 season.
Taking on the role of competing as a largely secondary Premier League broadcaster to Sky has proved difficult since the yellow-tinged, Irish‑based Setanta Sports entered the market in 2006, financial difficulties in 2009 forcing it to hand the baton to Disney-backed ESPN, which spent four years failing to make an impression and the numbers add up.
Over 10 years, BT developed more of a legacy, though struggled for critical acclaim. TNT’s ambition is to better engage fan and consumer but the depth of its mothership’s finances faces an imminent test. Inheriting BT’s rights gave TNT a base-level of live rights, key to survival before success can be considered, but Premier League rights from the 2025-26 season onwards – with 60 extra games mooted, packages yet to be declared – are up for auction this autumn.
