Premium: "El Chiringuito" Is the Year's Breakout Global Sports Show
Josep Pedrerol's Frenetic Ensemble Show is Undeniably Fun and Ridiculous. But Is It Setting Back Journalism and Catering to the Powerful? I Visited Madrid to Find Out.
MADRID — Whoever came up with the adage “nothing good ever happens after 2 a.m.” never watched El Chiringuito, the rollicking nightly soccer debate show that’s part First Take, part Men In Blazers, part Dan Le Batard Show, part telenovela—and fast becoming a cult hit not just in Spain but in countries around the world.
It’s 2:58 a.m. on a Thursday in a TV studio on the north edge of the Spanish capital, and I’m speaking offstage to show regular Edu Aguirre after a breathtaking three-hour episode when Josep Pedrerol, the star and host of El Chiringuito, stops by.
“Today’s show,” he says with a smile, “has been special.”
Just two minutes before El Chiringuito’s midnight start came word that Barcelona had fired manager Ronald Koeman. Part of the show’s appeal is that it’s completely unscripted, and the next 180 minutes contained signature moments of adrenaline-fueled zaniness. With flashing lights, a true-crime-style soundtrack and the word CRISIS filling the screen, Pedrerol led off with the news. Reporter José Álvarez came on live from Barcelona and analyzed video of Barça president Joan Laporta leaving club headquarters in a car as if it were the Zapruder film.
Jota Jordi, a well-connected Barça supporter, left the set to take a source’s call outside, and a portion of the screen showed the entirety of the conversation above the caption IMPORTANT CALL TO JOTA JORDI. Panelist Quim Domènech reported the news (EXCLUSIVA!) that the club had decided to hire former player Xavi. The sportswriter and rabid Real Madrid fan Tomás Roncero made a triumphant entrance, the dramatic background music almost never stopped, and a lot of people argued in the most theatrical of ways as a cameraman got superclose to their faces.
It was a tour de force, and Edu Aguirre can’t help but marvel at it in the moments afterward. A Real Madrid expert, Aguirre looks a little like Cristiano Ronaldo, with whom he happens to be friends (“I talk to him almost every day”), and he knows that Barcelona firing Koeman just before the broadcast couldn’t have been timed any better for El Chiringuito.
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“Today you’ve seen a very Made-in-Chiringuito day,” he tells me in Spanish. “Meaning that everything changes two minutes before the show starts. Because it was supposed to be about Real Madrid drawing and Barça losing tonight. But everything changed. We talked to people from Barcelona, we talked on Skype with people who have information about Barcelona, and the episode starts from scratch. That’s what El Chiringuito is: the information can change in a minute.”
Pedrerol pumps his fist. The clock just struck 3 a.m., and they’ll do it all again for three hours the next night.
El Chiringuito (“the Beach Bar”) has been on TV since 2014, but its global breakout came in 2021. On April 19, not long before the European Super League idea imploded, Super League architect Florentino Pérez, the Real Madrid president, chose to make his public case on El Chiringuito. It was hardly award-winning journalism—the show posted dubious statistics claiming the Super League had majority support among fans in Europe’s top five soccer nations—but it was still a major interview get and a window into the connection between Pérez and Pedrerol (who says he has known the Real Madrid president for two decades).
Two weeks later, Pedrerol went globally viral with a hilariously over-the-top diatribe against Real Madrid’s Eden Hazard for being photographed laughing with his former Chelsea teammates after being eliminated by them in the UEFA Champions League.
And in August, as rumors flew that Real Madrid would buy PSG’s Kylian Mbappé, Pedrerol took his transfer deadline “Tick-tock” countdown to such absurd extremes that the show created a special Mbappé clock. It almost didn’t matter that the deal never got done.
Not everyone loves El Chiringuito (more on that later), but for me the show is fun and ridiculous and more than a little, well, American. The same people who enjoyed seeing Stephen A. Smith screaming about the Euros last summer (AIN’T NO WAY!) are the ones who would get a kick out of El Chiringuito. What’s more, the gleefully low production values of Men in Blazers are also embraced by El Chiringuito, which has three hours to fill every night and doesn’t have the rights to show La Liga or Champions League highlights.
Fans of the show don’t really care about that. I have GIFs on my laptop of Pedrerol rubbing his hands together before his Hazard takedown and of the excitable Argentine panelist Jorge D’Alessandro imploring Hazard and all other players to “AMA EL FÚTBOL” (love soccer).
I follow the official show account on Twitter, as well as the unofficial English Twitter feed with subtitles, which featured a classic close-up rant from panelist and Barcelona supporter Cristóbal Soria after the club tweeted farewell to Lionel Messi in August:
It hit me not long ago, though, that I had never seen an actual three-hour episode of El Chiringuito, just social media clips, and that I wanted to learn more about the people who put the show together (including the masterful sound engineer and camera operator). So I decided to make a visit to Madrid.
In 2010, back when José Mourinho was at the height of his coaching powers, I interviewed him during his first season at Real Madrid. At one point I asked him: What’s different about the way the media covers the sport in the countries where you’ve coached? In Italy, he said, there was page after pink page of tactical game analysis. In England, he went on, you had to be aware of tabloid lurkers. And in Spain, where the culture is to eat dinner late, you had the popular midnight radio shows that often landed some of the biggest interviews in La Liga.
“It’s an easy stick to beat them with, but they’re entirely in the pocket of [Real Madrid president] Florentino Pérez. The show is beholden to power in a quite significant way.” — a Spain-based journalist
El Chiringuito has sprung from that midnight radio culture. Pedrerol, who started as a radio broadcaster in the 1980s, hosted an ensemble radio show called Punto Pelota from 2008 to ’13 that featured some of the current Chiringuito panelists, like Tomás Roncero. When El Chiringuito kicked off in 2014, Roncero recalls, “I told Pedrerol: ‘This is going to be a radio show, but with TV cameras.’”
“I don’t think they’re serious journalists [criticizing El Chiringuito. I think they’re boring journalists … A journalist has to have a good relationship with Florentino, with Laporta [of Barcelona], with [Atlético Madrid president Enrique] Cerezo and with everyone, right? That’s what I try. I have a good relationship with Florentino, it’s true, yes.” — Josep Pedrerol
Pedrerol, who’s 56, has longish graying hair and is almost always dressed in a sport coat, open-necked collared shirt and jeans. For a host who says he likes to switch from panelist to panelist as if he has a remote control and doesn’t want to be bored, Pedrerol has a deep voice and deliberative speaking style that give him gravitas. Sometimes he’ll even let a statement marinate by staying silent on camera for periods unheard of in U.S. television.
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As Roncero puts it, Pedrerol is “the voice, the leader, the one who knows us very well and knows how to handle us when we’re too upset. He knows how to calm us down, and when we’re a little down he knows how to cheer us up. He’s a TV beast, a TV beast. He understands television in a way that makes it very attractive, and he has gotten us to hop on his boat and won’t let us get off.”
Francisco Utrilla, 38, has been with El Chiringuito for four years and the director for a year and a half, but nearly everyone I interviewed called Pedrerol the director instead. “Pedrerol is a complicated person, meaning that he demands a lot, and you have to know him to be able to carry everything out because it’s so demanding,” Utrilla says. “When someone separates themself from the rest, he says, ‘Hey, be careful, this isn’t the way.’ It’s incredible to work with Pedrerol, because he controls everything, he knows everything. Before he asks you something, he already knows the answer. So when you answer something, he says, ‘Hey, I think this isn’t the answer. Answer again, come on.’ I guess that’s why the show is so viral in the world. It’s that it’s difficult to explain how his mind works.”
When I sit down with Pedrerol, it’s 11:30 p.m., 30 minutes before airtime—and 28 minutes before everything gets turned upside-down by Koeman’s firing. He’s remarkably calm for someone who’s about to do a three-hour high-wire act on live television.
How does he approach El Chiringuito? “It’s a show that goes on at midnight, very late,” he says. “People come to their homes after work, they may have family issues, some people don’t even have a job, right? Or even young people who study. And we’ve achieved that at midnight they have a moment of peace in front of the TV, and whether you like soccer or not, you get entertained. And you also get informed by top journalists. We have soccer people, people who can tell you what happens in a locker room, on the field, in the stands. So I think we’ve achieved the perfect mix.”
One of El Chiringuito’s most polarizing figures is Roncero, who made the decision as a formerly “impartial” sportswriter in the mid-1990s to declare publicly that he was a hardcore Real Madrid fan. “I didn’t understand why a journalist has to lie about their feelings,” Roncero tells me. “I can understand covering politics because it’s different, but sports means passion. Everyone who likes football has a team. Those who say, ‘No, I don’t care who wins’ are lying.”
Traditional journalism has a “no cheering in the pressbox” rule. But when Real Madrid won the 1997-98 Champions League title in Amsterdam, Roncero celebrated. “I had been waiting 32 years as a Madridista for Real Madrid to win the Champions League, and I was so happy that I started to sing We Are The Champions,” he says. “At El Mundo, the newspaper where I worked at the time, people told me, ‘If the boss heard you, he would’ve fired you.’ And I said, ‘Let him fire me, I don’t care, I’m happy.’ Then the boss said, ‘It’s logical, he’s from Madrid, the kid is happy.’ So on the radio I started doing the same. Many of my friends in the field now admit that I was a bit of a pioneer. Look, I work the same way, and if I have to criticize, I criticize. Why not? It’s compatible.”
A bunch of other sports journalists disagree, of course, and argue that Roncero has become a hysterical circus caricature. But his “pioneer” claim isn’t without merit. It’s similar, in fact, to what Bill Simmons started doing in the United States by declaring his Boston fandom loudly and without apology in the early 2000s as The Sports Guy.
Even with all the public-facing figures of El Chiringuito, the show’s unsung stars are Edu del Val, who’s in charge of the music soundtrack, and Javi del Ser, who carries the 20-pound camera all over the stage and gets close-ups of people’s faces when they’re angry. During the show I attend, I sit next to Del Val and stare in wonder at a master of his music board reacting in real time to what’s happening onstage.
Del Val started his career playing piano in orchestras and on cruise ships. For the past 13 years, though, he has been with Pedrerol’s shows. “I’m the person in charge of the soundtrack of the show, as if it were a movie but live, in real time,” he says. “I have a good time because it’s fast-paced, it goes through multiple states of euphoria, of tension, a little bit of humor to make it fun. And then there are moments that are also melancholic. I really like to set the scene through music, through feelings.”
For his part, Del Ser prowls the stage with his camera ready to pounce on a dramatic moment. The shaking camera and his uncomfortably close proximity to the subject only increase the effect.
“Normally when there’s controversy and a lot of tension in the show, someone gets angry,” he says. “The director wants to show people that anger. So I’m the one who gets closer to that person and does close-ups. I show the eyes, so people can see the frustration that they’re feeling in that moment. We say that if you’re a cameraman and you work well at El Chiringuito, you can work at any other show. It’s like you drive a Ferrari, and then they give you a Citroën. And it’s like, I just drove a Ferrari.”
Remember how Pedrerol likes long, exaggerated silences? The music and the camera shots make that possible. Consider the moment in June when panelist Juanma Rodríguez reported that Sergio Ramos had been offered a five-year contract by Sevilla. No less than two and a half minutes of non-verbal communication followed (starting at the 1:20 mark in the clip below):
“There was a fantastic silence, and we all looked at each other,” Pedrerol says. “Silence on television is so exciting, right? People are used to a show in which they scream, because passion sometimes gets us. Soccer is passion, it’s a debate between you and me, from Madrid to Barça, from family, from colleagues at the restaurant. But silences are fine. And we have Edu del Val, who plays the music and creates a fun atmosphere.”
Nor is the three-hour midnight TV show the only place where you can find El Chiringuito. Pedrerol also hosts an afternoon TV program called Jugones (Gamers). And there’s a live video stream on Twitch most days for at least three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon and for the hour before midnight. The show has a working newsroom and a nine-member social media team that posts regularly on Facebook (more than three million followers), Twitter (more than two million), Instagram (1.5 million), YouTube and other networks.
“We’re crossing borders because of social media, because a lot of these people have not seen the show,” says Fermín Canas, El Chiringuito’s community manager. But that’s changing too now. Television channels have picked up El Chiringuito on Fox Deportes in Mexico and the United States and on platforms in Central and South America as well.
How many people watch El Chiringuito in Spain? In September, the three-hour midnight show averaged 242,000 viewers. And in November the shorter afternoon show, Jugones, averaged 900,000.
Spain’s media community, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not responded to El Chiringuito with universal praise. The primary complaints boil down to a few things: One, while the show does do some level of journalism and sends reporters on-site to clubs and events, it also gets a number of reports wrong. Two, the style of El Chiringuito is too much of a shoutfest circus that debases the industry. “The show is founded upon and foments confrontation, aggression, nastiness and a conspiratorial mindset,” one journalist tells me. “And look, soccer in a way, I suppose it’s like that. The very nature of the word fan is fanatical. But I think it deepens divides in that sense. And it creates a desire to always ratchet it up an extra notch.”
And three, journalists bristled at a recent speech Pedrerol gave to university journalism students:
“He told them don’t ever let people tell you what journalism is, and then proceeded to tell them what it is, saying, ‘We break news on Chiringuito,’” says a Spanish journalist. “So, Pedrerol, please don’t give us lessons on what journalism is, especially when you are the puppet of Florentino Pérez, and that’s why he comes to your show to present the European Super League. Young people are getting into journalism thinking that is journalism when your anti-Barcelona prejudice is obvious, and you’re defending Florentino as well. The show used to be fun. Now they’re taking themselves too seriously.”
“It’s an easy stick to beat them with,” says another journalist, “but they’re entirely in the pocket of Florentino Pérez. The show is beholden to power in a quite significant way.”
When I ask Pedrerol about the criticism El Chiringuito has received from serious journalists, he fires right back. “I don’t think they’re serious journalists. I think they’re boring journalists,” he says. “Boring, settled, thinking that one article a week is enough. Now you have to go to a press conference, take a picture, tweet something, share information on Instagram and then write the article. We think we saw that coming. I think we’ve managed to make El Chiringuito the place to inform people every moment. If something happens, El Chiringuito is there. So here’s what they criticize about the show. They’re not serious journalists. They’re boring.”
Pedrerol does not pretend that his show never has reporting errors, but he makes it sound like part of the success El Chiringuito has had connecting with the audience. “We’ve managed to get into people’s homes and make them feel that we’re part of the family,” he says. “They feel that we make mistakes like them, that we are right from time to time, that we ask for forgiveness, that we cry, we laugh.”
“But the biggest soccer news is announced here, produced here,” he says. “A colleague announced that Ronaldo was leaving Madrid before anyone else. We also said [Zinédine] Zidane was signing [to manage] Madrid, that the Boca-River game from the Copa Libertadores [final] was going to be played at the Bernabéu [in Madrid]. Here we announced that João Félix was signing for Atlético de Madrid. There are so many things.”
As for Pérez, Pedrerol says the Real Madrid president made his case for the Super League on El Chiringuito because it’s “the most international show in Spain,” adding that he has been interviewing Spanish club presidents for two decades and Pérez is one of the few remaining from the start of that period.
“A journalist has to have a good relationship with Florentino, with Laporta [of Barcelona], with [Atlético Madrid president Enrique] Cerezo and with everyone, right? That’s what I try. I have a good relationship with Florentino, it’s true, yes.”
At the end of every episode, El Chiringuito brings its studio audience on camera. On the night I visited, there were 18 mask-wearing attendees, all men, most of them young. They stayed engaged for all three hours—no small task after midnight—and appeared excited to have a voice at the end of the show and get a photograph with Pedrerol and all the panelists.
El Chiringuito is a populist’s show. It doesn’t care about winning awards. It wants to appeal to the masses, to connect. Whether a big audience outside Spain will want to do that remains to be seen. But the year 2021 has produced major global gains.
What does Pedrerol want El Chiringuito’s future to be?
“My goal is to have fun,” he says. “I have fun every day. And I say that what we do is very important. It’s not a joke. Sit and talk? No, what we say is very important. The rhythm that we manage is very important. The information is very important. Because people make a great effort to stay up until midnight to see us. We have to make an effort so that people feel they haven’t wasted their time. The only goal is the show and the audience.”
Pedrerol remembers a time not long ago when he was walking on the Calle de Serrano in Madrid and a woman stopped to hug him. “She thanked me because her husband, who was ill, smiled at night thanks to El Chiringuito,” he says. “That’s the best. It’s the people’s show.”
Pedrerol’s defense of his journalism seems weak to me. He lists off major announcements that the show had first, but reporting what’s announced is only the shallowest part of journalism. Have his reporters really broken news that clubs didn’t want people to hear, or to hear yet?