New Name, Same Game: How Kate Scott Became a Face of Soccer in America

A couple of years ago, Kate Scott (formerly Abdo) made a joke that went viral. The now-43-year-old British soccer host began an October broadcast of CBS’s UEFA Champions League Today by introducing her three superstar studio analysts. She hyped up Arsenal legend Thierry Henry as a “Champions League winner.” She did the same for Liverpool’s beloved son, Jamie Carragher. Then, without hesitation, she glanced at her third colleague and relayed a slightly different set of credentials.

“… and the man with five appearances in the Champions League: Micah Richards!”

If it was hard to hear the end of her punch line, that’s only because Henry and Carragher preemptively burst into laughter, teasing the usually boisterous and jocular Richards, who smirked in silence. While some ex-players might have bristled at the dig, the former Manchester City fullback took the quip in stride: He knew it made for great television—and an even better TikTok clip. “I never take it to heart,” Richards says. “There’s always something she’s ready to come with.”

Kate’s intro has remained a recurring bit throughout each subsequent Champions League season. Whether in the London studio or on location pitchside, Scott will share a pair of superlative compliments for Henry and Carragher before roasting Richards with a signature zinger that sets the tone for a show that is equal parts analysis and raucousness. “It’s the thing people always talk to me about,” Henry tells The Ringer. “Like, ‘Oh, my God, I love the intros.’ And you’re like, ‘Really?’”

The idea for the segment came from coordinating producer Pete Radovich, who implemented similar gags during his stint running Inside the NFL. “As the show organically took shape, it was clear to us that Micah was going to be the little brother that everyone picked on,” Radovich says. “And it just so happens he’s in the last chair [on set].” But he credits the intro’s success—especially on social media—to Scott, the self-described “sister” of this pugnacious on-air family. Though Scott and Radovich frequently collaborate to brainstorm one-liners to undress “Big Meeks” and spice up the show, they don’t work without Scott’s sly sense of humor, deadpan delivery, and impeccable sense of timing. “I think it shows she can be one of the guys,” Radovich says. “She doesn’t take herself too seriously.”

“Those laughs are all authentic,” Scott says on a Zoom call, sipping coffee in her kitchen in Los Angeles, where she’s lived since 2017. “We’re all so different, but we all respect one another.”

When we spoke in late August, Scott had just started preparing for her fifth year headlining CBS’s Champions League coverage. In that time, she has developed into one of the most popular, successful, and versatile women in sports media—and she is a primary reason that an American-produced soccer show has become a global sensation watched by millions, including by the sport’s top players and coaches. Like Ernie Johnson on Inside the NBA, Scott has grown into her own as a master facilitator: She anchors a group of big personalities, translates live player interviews using her multilingual abilities, and embraces the chaos and camaraderie of a mostly unscripted broadcast.

But Scott’s appeal isn’t confined to her delegation duties at the desk. In between her Champions League gig, she’s found time to host Kickin’ It, a long-form interview series on Paramount+ that highlights her conversation skills alongside former members of the U.S. men’s national team. She also frequently moonlights as a boxing presenter, a parallel passion she’s pursued since breaking into the industry. Her transitions between various sports and formats have been seamless. “If you were to go into a lab and create the perfect on-air personality for a sports show, you couldn’t do better than Kate,” Radovich says. “She’s sort of like the perfect combination of personality, class, talent, and likability.”

On the heels of her marriage last month to boxing trainer Malik Scott (hence a recent name change), Kate Scott has reached a new plateau of personal and professional contentment. But the two-decade climb to get there was anything but linear. Scott will be the first to tell you that her achievements are not part of a carefully orchestrated master plan but instead the result of random forces: academic aspirations, unlikely second chances, and a soccer-centric upbringing that has paid dividends in increasingly fruitful ways.

“I always feel super underqualified when people say to me, ‘How do I get to where you got?’” Scott says. “I’m like, ‘I have no idea. I didn’t think I was going to be here.’”

If there’s a reason Scott is a natural at moderating soccer debates, it’s because she spent her entire childhood doing it with her parents. Scott was raised in South Manchester; her father was a season-ticket holder for Manchester United. Her mother supported Liverpool. During the weekend, the couple would often clash in front of the television, arguing over results and tuning into BBC’s Match of the Day. Scott quickly adopted their soccer fandom (and her dad’s Man United allegiance).

As she got older, her parents, both physical education teachers, encouraged her to get into athletics, but soccer never felt like a real option. “If you were a girl and playing at that time, you were a total trailblazer,” she says. Scott committed to track and field instead, discouraged by the absence of a female soccer infrastructure within England throughout the ’90s. It subconsciously shaped her initial pursuits. “In terms of what I saw on the field or what I saw on television, it was always men,” Scott says. “There was never somebody I looked at and thought, That’s what I want to do. That’s who I want to be. That didn’t exist for me.”

Scott instead set her sights on studying new languages. She’d enjoyed learning different languages in high school and intended to study French and Italian in Birmingham for college. But as she neared graduation, Scott felt a stronger urge to learn Spanish. “I told my parents, ‘I want to move to Spain for a year,’” she says. “They weren’t crazy about the idea, but they went with it.” That summer, at 17, Scott signed up for an intensive study-abroad program in Málaga that placed her with a Spanish host family for six months. She loved it enough to stay there, earn a fast-tracked high school diploma, and then enroll in the city’s university.

The goal was to become a translator, fluent in English, Spanish, French, and even German. She wanted to connect people of different cultures and backgrounds. But the latter two languages proved tougher to crack living along the sun-soaked shores of Andalusia. “I could read it in a book, but as soon as somebody German actually talks to you, or you’re doing those listening tests, I can’t keep up,” she says. “I thought it would help me to go over there.”

Thanks to a flexible program at her university, Scott paused her studies and moved to Munich for six months, living with another family and working at Coffee Fellows (a Starbucks equivalent) to master the language. She did the same in Paris, finding a job at Zara and roaming the streets along the Seine. The experiences were better than the classroom. “I was kind of just around French people and German people nonstop,” she says.

Scott had never considered using her skills in the media, but after graduating with her interpreting degree, a professor suggested she take a translator internship at Deutsche Welle (DW-TV), a German news station based in Berlin. After six months working on the business desk, she requested a transfer to the sports department, where she would have more fun and expertise translating scripts about the Bundesliga. Not long after, when the channel’s sports anchor quit unexpectedly, the station director began an internal search for a replacement. He quickly asked Scott to audition.

“I’m not interested in television,” Scott told him. “I like what I’m doing.”

The station started the casting process without her, but nobody popped. The director returned with a second plea. Scott persisted with her disinterest, but eventually she relented. “They did the casting and, off the bat, they offered me the job,” she says. “I was like, ‘But this isn’t really what I want to do.’” Then she learned the salary she’d be making as an on-air talent. “I said, ‘OK, that sounds interesting,’” Scott says with a laugh. After just one day of training, Scott began her broadcast career. She was just in her mid 20s, still honing the language, and reciting German sports news off a teleprompter for 15 minutes every hour.

Looking back, Scott feels lucky to have gotten reps when and where she did. Deutsche Welle operated at a high, professional level, but it didn’t have the mainstream impact of a major broadcast company, where the bar to perform as a sportscaster would have been much higher. “I’m grateful for it,” she says. “In many ways, it was the perfect place to learn.”

As Scott developed her broadcast skills, she started to pay more attention to various news channels. She remembers being attracted to CNN’s rolling news coverage, which presented headlines with more flash and character. “American TV always felt like the example of how to do personality-led television,” Scott says, “how to make TV feel alive that in other countries and environments felt dry, even though you were still delivering the same content.” She began looking elsewhere. “I wanted to be part of that,” she says.

Soon, she got her chance. In 2009, CNN hired Scott to anchor its World Sport program, a 15-minute news segment similar to the one she anchored at DW-TV. Two years later, she received an offer she couldn’t turn down and returned to Munich to become the face of Germany’s newly launched Sky Sports News network. There, she presented headlines and covered European soccer—all in German. “Initially, reading a teleprompter in German was hard, but then it became second nature,” Scott says.

Though she kept progressing and taking on more prominent roles, Scott struggled with imposter syndrome. “I felt underqualified to be doing what I was doing,” she says. “I was the lead anchor in this group of way more experienced German hosts, and I was trying to do it in my imperfect German. I remember feeling that way at CNN too, with so many people I respected. I came from German television. I had no training. How did I end up here?” And yet, she realized, those insecurities evaporated once the cameras turned on. “When I’m on air, all of that goes away for me,” she says. “It’s a kind of peace mentally for me, and I’m able to enjoy the moment.”

It wasn’t until 2014, when she accepted an invitation to host the FIFA Ballon d’Or awards (effectively the sport’s Oscars), that she announced herself to the larger soccer world. As the ceremony’s first solo host, Scott held her own, speaking in multiple languages to some of the most prestigious players in the game—Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Manuel Neuer—and displaying her soccer IQ in front of a variety of figureheads. “As a woman, you can often be reduced to physical appearance, or you’re there to check a box or whatever the assumption is,” Scott says. “I think it was the first time that I got to prove why I had value in that arena.”

Later that year, while still working for Sky Sports, she hosted coverage of the 2015 women’s World Cup in Canada for Fox Sports. After a successful stint, Fox promised Scott more substantial duties that included hosting the men’s World Cup, Champions League, and Bundesliga coverage and ultimately convinced her to move to the U.S. permanently. She liked the culture shift, especially within television. “You actually get to be yourself to some extent,” she says. “You’ve got to make everything clean. You’ve got to make it flow. You’ve got to stick to timings. There’s all those responsibilities, but there’s also the demand to actually be interesting, to connect. That’s what was missing for me in European television.”

Despite Scott’s growing media presence, Radovich had never seen her until he tuned into the 2018 men’s World Cup. The producer had his hands full at the time with NFL coverage at CBS, but he was immediately drawn to her. “I remember actually saying it out loud: ‘Who the hell is this?’” he says. Even without prior experience working in soccer, he knew talent when he saw it and made a mental note. Two years later, when CBS secured the rights to the Champions League, Radovich told the network she needed to be their first hire. “We have to get Kate Abdo,” he told them.

At first, executives were skeptical. Scott had hosted the Champions League at TNT over the previous few years, but they wanted a completely fresh face. Radovich, now in charge of building out the coverage, remained determined to give her a shot. When he eventually called Scott to discuss the role, she “had no idea what to expect,” but the pair hit it off over Zoom. Radovich was curious what kind of show she wanted to host. What did she like? What was her style? “In no uncertain terms, she conveyed her frustration of never being able to show her real personality and just kind of being a prompter reader,” he says. “Everything I threw at her, she was like, ‘Yeah, I would love that.’ It was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna work.’”

In the summer of 2020, Radovich and other execs brought in a handful of former players and coaches to a London office, hoping some of their personalities could mesh well. They went through a variety of chemistry tests, identifying Carragher, Richards, Belgium manager Roberto Martínez, and former Manchester United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel as the best candidates. (Henry wouldn’t join full time until the following year.) It didn’t take long to see that Scott could handle the group’s star power, lead them as a well-oiled crew, and deftly go off-script if necessary. “I like surprises,” Radovich says. “Once you have buy-in from the ringleader, everything else gets easier.”

On their first official broadcast that August, Radovich threw his new host into the fire. Over the previous few weeks, the producer had conducted lengthy Zoom calls with Scott to prepare for the pandemic-squeezed season and to learn about her language background. “It was kind of like, ‘That’s cool,’” he remembers thinking. “But how do you use it?”

He got his answer midway through the show. On a monitor in the control room, Radovich noticed a Barcelona player giving an interview and asked live producer Matt Curtis to queue up a sound bite. “It’s in Spanish,” Curtis told him. “We can’t use it.” So Radovich hatched a quick idea. “Kate speaks Spanish,” he explained. “She’ll translate live.” Curtis thought he was joking, but Radovich insisted. “If she doesn’t understand it, we’ll have some good laughs,” he said. “She told me she speaks fluent Spanish.”

Curtis obliged and nervously rolled the tape.

“She killed it,” Radovich remembers.

The next two match days, he tested her again with German and French interviews. She had little trouble. The translations quickly became the show’s first viral moments and an example of how the broadcast would operate differently from previous incarnations. “Imagine what a footballer’s like after a game—you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re probably speaking quicker than normal, you’re emotional,” Carragher says. “To be able to take all that in and then give it a whirl. I just sat there going, ‘Wow.’”

The early tests distinguished Scott as someone capable of being more than a traffic controller. It also gave Radovich confidence in what the show could become with Scott at the helm: fun, flexible, and multifaceted. Ever since Henry became a permanent fixture on the panel in 2021, UCL Today has “leveled up,” according to Scott, and grown into a more cohesive package, meshing Henry’s stern approach with Carragher’s confrontational edge and Richards’s youthful energy. Scott conducts it all in harmony. “I think Pete has a really good eye for putting people together, figuring out how chemistry will play out,” Scott says. “We kind of offer something of everything.”

To pull off a seamless show, Scott has to “know the playbook,” Radovich says, reverting to an NFL analogy. But her preparation is one thing the producer never has to worry about. Ahead of midweek broadcasts, Scott meets with the production staff alone on Monday to work through the general structure and rundown before an all-hands meeting the morning of the show. “When we turn up, she’s been there hours before,” Carragher says. “She’s involved in email chains that we’re not involved in about what she’s going to say and where she’s going to move the show.” But everyone is clear about one thing: “What we don’t do is rehearse answers,” Scott says. “[Rehearsing] can help it be clean, but you can’t replicate that live energy.”

True to her original aversion, Scott has largely operated the show without using a teleprompter. It’s an approach not only comparable to Ernie Johnson’s on Inside the NBA but directly inspired by him. Scott shadowed the basketball production when she hosted the Champions League for TNT and seized the opportunity to ask Johnson specific questions about his preparation and script memorization. Outside of some sponsored elements, “the only thing that he had in the prompter was the introduction with everybody’s names,” Scott says. It seemed like a terrifying challenge at the time, but it also motivated her. “I just remember feeling like that’s where I have to get to,” she says. “I have to get to that point where I’m comfortable going into a show and just not having that crutch.”

Scott’s comfort on-air has progressed swiftly. In 2022, when she broadcast the men’s World Cup for Fox, the network wanted to give her scriptwriters. Scott refused them, penning a few intros instead. “It’s supposed to be a fun nighttime show,” she argued. “Let’s not script it. Let’s not go heavy.” At CBS, Radovich has afforded her more opportunities to engage in debate and spark humorous, impromptu moments. “One of the things that I enjoy about working with Pete is that his ultimate aim is not a clean show. His ultimate aim is a good show,” Scott says. “He would rather have something that can create great moments, and we can be a bumpy ride along the way.”

Some of those bumps can be lighthearted in nature. Scott has occasionally missed a cue or flubbed the name of the network that employs her. It’s all fair game for the group to point out. “When you’re on live TV, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to say the wrong thing at the wrong time,” Carragher says. “The way she navigates that and gets us back on track without losing a step stands out most for me.” That even applies to a moment in May, when Scott couldn’t stop laughing (and interrupting Carragher’s analysis) after Henry made an all-too-serious Pretty Woman reference. “We are allowed to be ourselves,” Henry says. “When you do that, it can go in a lot of places.”

But occasionally, those places aren’t so lighthearted. Last March, after Arsenal defeated Porto in the round of 16, Carragher made an insensitive joke questioning Scott’s loyalty to her now-husband, Malik. The awkward moment spiraled into tabloid headlines; the Liverpool legend had overstepped and started a small media circus. The following morning, Carragher personally apologized. But during the next broadcast, Scott ended the controversy with a more solemn introduction that she wrote about her three panelists: “Does [Carragher] go too far sometimes? Absolutely. Does he apologize? Yes, he does. But all of us have that one annoying family member that we still love.”

Scott had leaned into her role as the group’s big sister (or, as Carragher admits, sometimes his mother) and extinguished the flames. “I think the reason that we function well is because we needle each other,” Scott says. “That’s like a sports team, right? I feel like those inappropriate conversations should be had in the locker room and kept in the locker room. You deal with them internally, and then you move on.” By the end of that night, the whole crew’s admiration for Scott had deepened. Richards was impressed by the way she refused to make anything personal. Carragher mostly felt relieved. “We never ignore the elephants in the room,” he says. “I was a little child. I was just getting a little smack and getting put back in place, and rightly so.”

“To put it to rest and make everyone feel good, including the audience, is everything you need to know about her,” Radovich says. “That was just Hall of Fame stuff.”

A few weeks before the Champions League began its newly formatted season, Scott entered a new phase of her life. After a little less than a year of dating (and 12 years after separating from her first husband), she married Malik Scott in Malibu. The ceremony took place on a helipad, surrounded by candles, beside a mansion overlooking the ocean. The only guests were Malik’s children. The couple rented an Airbnb for the occasion, danced down the aisle, and hired a private chef for dinner. “We changed into our pajamas. We danced, ate, and laughed all night long,” Scott says.

The pair met onstage at a Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury event that Scott was broadcasting in 2021. (Malik is Wilder’s head coach.) Scott had first caught the boxing bug while at Sky Sports a decade earlier, but she recommitted to trying to cover the sport when she moved to L.A. She found it addicting. “[Boxing] is very noble to me,” she says. “When you lose, you lose with a bunch of other people at your side.” As Scott looked for boxing commentary gigs in between her soccer responsibilities, her agent connected her to a gym where she could spar and study the mechanics of the sport. “I think I cared less about the fitness part,” she says. “It was just something I wanted to learn.”

Over time, Scott became a fixture of Fox’s boxing coverage, interviewing the sport’s biggest personalities while continuing to refine her own technique. After her brief encounter with Malik, she invited him onto her Amazon boxing podcast. They hit it off and began communicating over Instagram. Scott can’t remember the precise details, so near the end of our interview, she picks up her laptop and joins Malik on a couch in their spacious backyard to jog her memory.

“First of all, I complimented your heels,” Malik reminds her, picking up where she’d left off.

Then he noticed her boxing videos. “Who do you train with?” he asked her. It just so happened that Scott’s trainer had recently moved to New York. She hadn’t replaced him yet. Sensing an opportunity, Malik offered to coach her instead. “I was like, ‘You’re too elite. I’d be too embarrassed,’” Scott says. “‘You work with a heavyweight champion of the world—that’s ridiculous.’” Malik eventually persuaded her to meet him in the gym, and a connection formed. “She has a real love for boxing, which means she has an open mind to learn,” Malik says. “She picked up on things really well, and our chemistry just grew.”

“I’ve been extremely fortunate professionally,” Scott says. “The one area of my life I felt I could never get right was the personal. To have both of those things is incredible.”

In between Malik’s travels and Scott’s broadcast schedule, the couple still manages to train together. They’ve even toyed with the idea of entering her into some real fights. But Scott is too focused on what’s in front of her right now. UCL Today has become more popular, with more celebrities and players watching and engaging with the show. Its quick growth has also provided her with some perspective and caused her to reflect. “I didn’t see [women in the industry] growing up; it was never a reference point for me,” she says. “Now I get to be that for other young women because of the position I’ve had. They can look at me and think, ‘Oh, that’s something I want to do. That’s a door that can be opened to me.’”

There’s some weight that comes with that responsibility, but Scott has remained authentic in the way she advocates for other women and expresses her own vulnerabilities. On an episode of Kickin’ It earlier this year, she teared up while discussing her dad’s passing last winter, a moment that led to a deeper conversation about loss. And with a handful of rowdy, macho athletes on set, “she’s got to keep us in check,” Radovich notes. “There’s topics that come up, and she helps us handle it the proper way.”

Still, Scott’s aware that women in the industry have different time frames attached to their careers. “Male broadcasters can go into their 60s and 70s, but I just haven’t seen women do that,” she says. “Women are often perceived in the context of their looks, and there are traditional viewpoints that influence that. I always think there will come a time when maybe I’m not the right fit anymore.”

But her colleagues don’t have any doubts about her fit. “I think just keeping her in football is great for us and great for our show,” Richards says. “But for CBS going forward, I think she can do whatever she wants. I think she’s that good.” At least in the near future, Radovich thinks Scott could graduate to hosting more prime-time American sporting events and launch an interview show outside of soccer. There are plenty of possibilities

For what it’s worth, Scott hasn’t looked too far ahead. How could she?

“I’ve been fortunate enough to achieve almost everything I’ve wanted in this industry,” she says. “There’s not much left on my list that I didn’t get to check off.”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times.