Curt Menefee has become a fixture on fall weekends as the host of “Fox NFL Sunday.” But if the current lockout doesn’t get resolved, he’s got a good backup plan, as he’ll host his second straight UEFA Champions League final pregame broadcast on network television (Saturday, 2 p.m., Fox) at Wembley Stadium in London.
“I think I would put it in the category of a World Series, of a Super Bowl, of a Final Four with even more along with it,” said Menefee, whose last work at Wembley was covering a Dallas Cowboys/Detroit Lions exhibition game in 1993.
But he’s been to three different World Cups and soccer matches all over the globe, including the famed Superclasico between Buenos Aires arch rivals Boca Juniors and River Plate.
“It’s like the Yankees and the Mets on steroids,” Menefee said.
As a mainstream network sports anchor, Menefee’s task — taking Europe’s annual club championship, an event normally reserved for cable outlets, and presenting it to a mainstream American audience — isn’t an easy one. Pleasing core fans and those less familiar with the sport requires a delicate touch.
“I think part of the problem with where we are in soccer coverage is that there’s a fight between am I going to use soccer terms, am I going to use British terms, am I going to Americanize this,” Menefee said. “People like to go, ‘The score was two-nil,’ because it makes them sound like they have a lot of soccer knowledge. Nil is not a soccer term. Nil is a British term. But if you watch in South America, it’s ‘dos a nada.’ So here, when we give the score, I’m fine with saying the score is one-nothing or two-nothing, because that makes people more comfortable.”
Menefee likens the sport’s growth in the U.S. to U2’s as a band. But he knows there’s a difference between last year’s final and the epic clash of two of the top-five richest teams in the world in any sport, Barcelona and Manchester United.
“No offense to last year, when the ratings were good,” Menefee said. “But if you’re just an average sports fan in America, you’ve kind of heard of this thing, you’re flipping around, and you see Inter Milan and Bayern Munich, maybe you’ve heard of them, maybe you haven’t. But you know FC Barcelona, Lionel Messi, Manchester United, Wayne Rooney. I think this year there’s a lot to draw the attention of the American sports fan.”
