Why 'The Golazo Show' is the smartest way to watch UEFA Champions League games
How 'The Golazo Show' host Nico Cantor tells the story of the UEFA Champions League season, one goal and fun fact at a time
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9 min read
"Almaty is closer [to] the Great Wall of China than it is to Buckingham Palace. It was a major stop on the Silk Road. It's a football-mad city and the temperatures get way below freezing."
Welcome to the mind of Nico Cantor, where every Champions League goal is a passport stamp and every matchday is a crash course in world trivia. As the conductor of The Golazo Show, Paramount+'s whiparound broadcast that stitches together Europe's most chaotic afternoons, Cantor doesn't just keep up with the action, he elevates it.
With each goal, he drops a cultural nugget or historical gem that makes you smarter without slowing the pace. By the end of each matchday, you'll know who scored in every game, and why a goal in Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, might matter just as much as one in Madrid.
Until the latest stages of the competition, the Golazo Show moves at breakneck speed with one simple promise: No goal goes unseen once the action begins every matchday in Europe, be it the Champions League, Europa League or Conference League. The experience is designed to be seamless for the viewer, even if it is unpredictable for Cantor and the production crew that are essential in the show's creation, especially so at the early stages of the competition, when a goal might come with a reminder that Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels, and that matters more than you'd expect.
"We're a pretty malleable show at the front and back end, but we adapt to everything that happens in between and it could be anything from a crazy goalfest to, I don't know, a pretty boring show with lulls galore," Cantor said.
Even on days where the show is at full throttle, Cantor finds the time to set the scene each time the screen transitions to a new stadium in time for a new goal.
"I think just being on the continent of Europe, I think we'd be doing a disservice if we wouldn't be dialing into that history, because it's not only about the soccer," he said. "You're bouncing around so instead of just bouncing around from one football game to another, let's understand exactly where we're going."
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'Like people flying the Enterprise'
Six seasons into his run anchoring The Golazo Show, Cantor admits there is no such thing as a typical day, the cadence of the show almost entirely decided by whatever the teams on the schedule that day choose to deliver. The production team behind the Golazo Show are in a rhythm after years of working together, though the process of getting ready for an unpredictable show is a days-long process.
"I'm in constant communication with my statistician and the production team throughout the day," Cantor said. "When I sit down, it's running through starting 11s with our statistician and research team and then it's going through the motions of the intro of the show, bouncing around the grounds, and then, afterwards, we're ready to go. We go to our main game and then we wait and react. It's on the fly. You do all the prep from the weekend before to sit in the chair in this moment and when you go, you go. You kind of just let the energy take you a little bit."
While The Golazo Show is the easiest way for everyone else to follow the action, it takes a transatlantic team to keep up with the goals as they happen -- a monumental task during the 18-games-per-week league phase -- to make it all happen.
"I think for the fans, it's an awesome tool," Cantor said. "It's an awesome add-on to their Champions League experience that I don't think we had before, and it's a privilege to do it and kind of be the conducting voice to all of that. It wouldn't be possible with[out] the incredible production team that we have in London. They're so dialed-in and they're so sharp. … Two people are the voice of it, I feel like there's people flying the Enterprise behind me when the show gets up and running because the control room in London is full of people. It's all hands on deck. It's pretty incredible."
What do Audrey Hepburn, Giorgio Armani and the Silk Road have in common?
The Golazo Show is a perfect way to keep up with a busy Champions League day, but Cantor's speciality is layering in the context of the action as it happens. His daily cheat sheet has the information one would expect in a set of broadcaster notes -- each team's key players and recent form, among other things -- but he mixes in fun facts to make The Golazo Show as unique an experience as possible. References to the capitals of the Roman Empire go hand-in-hand with information about Hepburn and Giorgio Armani's birthplaces, Cantor uniquely telling the story of every Champions League season along the way.
The self-proclaimed culture vulture carefully spreads out his fun facts, equally intentional about their usage as he is about his research.
"I didn't get funky with my fun facts until maybe two seasons ago," he said. "Once I really got a hang for the prep and I could spend some time making my rabbit holes in my research worth it, I started adding the fun facts and they'll get quirkier as the season goes on because I think in the league phase, there's so much action happening at once, you don't really have time to settle in and I don't use them [all]. I've got all of these ready to go under my sleeve, but I try not to waste them all in the league phase because I kind of don't want to use it just for the fact of using them. I try to weave it into the show and give it a little bit of meaning."
The pieces of trivia evolve as the season progresses, the challenge of offering fresh information mirroring the difficulty that teams face advancing from one round to the next.
"The reason why they get a little bit quirkier towards the end of the season is because we're so familiar with these teams, even if they're new teams," Cantor said. "We spend an entire season diving into the cultures of these clubs -- who they are, what it means -- and I try to do a really good job of that, to paint the picture at the beginning of the season, to understand the nuances of every club and what it means for them to be in the Champions League, for it to resonate in the broadcast if there's an upset or a player scores a really important goal that for us, might seem like any other random goal on a Champions League night.
"I do a lot of this research to meet the moment, but sometimes I catch myself going down these crazy rabbit holes about the city that they're in and when was the last time they were in Champions League football or how much football's consumed in that country and you learn a lot in the prep process."
The fact that the league phase is eight games long, though, means there is ample time to spread out the nuggets Cantor has for the teams that may not reach the knockout stages. That could include Champions League newcomers like Cyprus' Pafos and Kazakhstan's Kairat, though Cantor has a bank of information to pull from for both sides -- he covered Pafos during their UEFA Conference League run a year ago and Kairat's home city of Almaty was host to fellow Kazakh side Astana, who played there in last season's Conference League. There is one detail Cantor has to consider, though.
"My only fear … is that because it's so far east, I doubt that any of [Kairat's] games at home are going to be on The Golazo Show," Cantor admitted before confirming as much.
Kairat will play all of their home matches before The Golazo Show's usual 3 p.m. ET time slot, including an unusually early 10:30 a.m. ET kickoff time on Matchday 6 against Olympiacos in December. No good fun fact gets left behind, though, and Cantor may have something ready to go in time for this week.
"I think I'll be able to drop something in on Matchday 1 against Sporting, the amount of distance they covered," he noted. "The furthest away trip in European competition proper history, FC Kairat will travel from Almaty, Kazakhstan -- the easternmost city to have a team in European [competition] proper -- to Lisbon, Portugal to face Sporting CP. That's 4,291 miles … and that'll be Matchday 1. It'll be the furthest away trip."
Champions League Matchday 1 schedule
| TUESDAY, SEPT. 16 | TIME (ET) | HOW TO WATCH |
|---|---|---|
UEFA Champions League Matchday | 12 p.m. | |
PSV vs. Union Saint-Gilloise | 12:45 p.m. | |
Athletic Club vs. Arsenal | 12:45 p.m. | |
UEFA Champions League Today pre-match | 1:30 p.m. | |
The Golazo Show | 3 p.m. | |
Juventus vs. Borussia Dortmund | 3 p.m. | |
Benfica vs. Qarabag | 3 p.m. | |
Tottenham Hotspur vs. Villarreal | 3 p.m. | |
Real Madrid vs. Marseille | 3 p.m. | |
UEFA Champions League Today post-match | 5 p.m. | |
The Champions Club | 6 p.m. | |
Scoreline | 7 p.m. |
| WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 17 | TIME (ET) | HOW TO WATCH |
|---|---|---|
UEFA Champions League Matchday | 12 p.m. | |
Olympiacos vs. Pafos | 12:45 p.m. | |
Slavia Praha vs. Bodo/Glimt | 12:45 p.m. | |
UEFA Champions League Today | 2 p.m. | |
The Golazo Show | 3 p.m. | |
Ajax vs. Inter | 3 p.m. | |
Liverpool vs. Atletico Madrid | 3 p.m. | |
Bayern Munich vs. Chelsea | 3 p.m. | |
Paris Saint-Germain vs. Atalanta | 3 p.m. | |
UEFA Champions League Today post-match | 5 p.m. | |
The Champions Club | 6 p.m. | |
| Scoreline | 7 p.m. | CBS Sports Golazo Network |
| THURSDAY, SEPT. 18 | TIME (ET) | HOW TO WATCH |
|---|---|---|
UEFA Champions League Today | 12 p.m. | |
Copenhagen vs. Bayer Leverkusen | 12:45 p.m. | |
Club Brugge vs. Monaco | 12:45 p.m. | |
UEFA Champions League Today pre-match | 2 p.m. | |
The Golazo Show | 3 p.m. | |
Eintracht Frankfurt vs. Galatasaray | 3 p.m. | |
Sporting Lisbon vs. Kairta | 3 p.m. | |
Newcastle United vs. Barcelona | 3 p.m. | |
Manchester City vs. Napoli | 3 p.m. | |
UEFA Champions League Today post-match | 5 p.m. | |
The Champions Club | 6 p.m. | |
Scoreline | 7 p |
