The Interview: Andrés Cordero of CBS Sports
We’ve got one last post before Christmas! It’s the written Q&A of a really fun interview that Chris Wittyngham and I did this week with Andrés Cordero, the lead soccer commentator for CBS Sports. There’s so much good stuff in here, from Cordero’s meticulous game preparation routine to his advice for students to sharing his incredible story of getting out of Cuba with his family, spending a year in Noriega’s Panama, enduring the U.S. invasion of Panama and eventually emigrating to the United States. Enjoy!
Grant Wahl:
Our guest now is Andrés Cordero. He's the lead soccer commentator for CBS Sports and Paramount+ broadcasting Serie A games and the U.S. men's national team’s away World Cup qualifiers. He also does Inter Miami's local broadcasts with Ray Hudson. Dre, congrats on everything you're doing, and thanks for coming on the show.
Andrés Cordero:
Hey, thanks so much. I've been listening to you guys for some time now. By the way, adding Witty was just a master stroke, he's been crushing it. So thanks for the invite.
Grant Wahl:
Awesome. Lots to talk about here. You're just back for being onsite at San Siro to broadcast Napoli's 1-0 win at Milan over the weekend. What was that whole experience like being in the stadium and in the city for such a big game?
“We ended up being in Panama for a year. While we were there, the U.S. invades to remove Noriega, this was 1990. And so Panama turns into essentially a war zone. We can no longer go to school, there are American tanks rolling in the streets. For me and my brother, we were so sheltered from it, our parents did such a good job of making that a tolerable time for us, that I just thought, "Cool, G.I. Joe is downstairs near my building, this is awesome." But my parents must have been terrified.” — Andrés Cordero
Andrés Cordero:
I've got conflicting views. All of them are good, but part of it was, finally, after covering European football for a good 15 years now since 2003, 2004, when I started working at GolTV until now, getting a chance to actually do these games on location as opposed to halfway across the world, which just speaks to the commitment that CBS have to doing whatever they do at the highest level possible. I've worked for rights holders for Serie A, Bundesliga, La Liga, the Championship all of these years, and obviously it's easier when we're covering Major League Soccer, the U.S. national team, but to actually do these games from site with American voices as opposed to just from there with what's available, which is usually UK-style commentary, was a dream for me.
And walking up to the San Siro, hearing the sounds of that stadium, the fact that on a big game, from here, from the U.S., you've got maybe three, four games going on on a given day, they'll all feel big on Twitter, but you walk outside, no one's talking about them for the most part unless you're at a soccer specific pub or something like that. In Milano, you just hear in the train stations, in the hotel, a whisper of San Siro, a whisper of Napoli, a whisper of Ibrahimović throughout that day. So there's this big buildup to these games. And then you walk up to the stadium, and it's got its red iron gutters popping out and the big spires going up, you feel like this is a place where big games are played. And that was an absolutely massive one.
And I think the thing that sticks with me most, thinking about it now, is working with Christian Vieri for years, whenever his name was introduced either on camera or on audio, you’d say, "Christian Vieri," he'd go ahhhhh. What’s that about? When you actually stand in San Siro, and when you hear what that crowd sounds like, I don't blame him. I think he just wants to hear that over and over again whenever you hear his name.
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Grant Wahl:
I know you’d probably prefer to be in the stadium all the time, it's just not possible for a lot of reasons. What sort of things do you have to adjust to when you actually do call a game in the stadium as opposed to off a screen?
Andrés Cordero:
Yeah. So one of the reasons I said that I had sort of conflicting feelings about it because it was a big match, it felt like a big moment, but at the same time there was this normalcy about it. There was this sense of, "These are teams that I cover intimately that I know a lot about." There was that comfort factor that I think maybe comes a little bit from how much extra you have to prepare when you're doing games off monitor as opposed to being able to feed off of whatever's going on in the stadium.
And I mean, Chris can attest to this, he's seen the sort of sticker making that I go through. My stickers look like trading cards. I mean, I've got players’ faces on it. For example, you might be doing a team you're not so familiar with, and they punch up the substitutes, you can't see his number. It might be a kid that's making his debut, you can't see the number on the shorts or on the shirt, and so you need ways to identify them instantly. And so, I've just throughout the years, learning from Phil Schoen, from other commentators, seeing how they work, figured, "Okay, well, that works and this makes this easier." You learn little tricks when you're off monitor so that you can make sure that you're accurate.
I think the best trick and the one that I maybe struggle with the most is to just shut up. You're not going to get punished for the things that you don't say, so if you're not sure, don't take a risk. I think Ross Dyer was the first one to tell me that. Ross worked with us at BeIN Sports and went on to ESPN. And so, you just learn that discipline of if you're not sure, keep your mouth shut. Little tricks like haircuts, the color of boots, whether they're wearing wristbands. When you get to know players and the team a little better, you can identify their posture, the way they run.
A team like Napoli, for example, has a whole army of five-foot seven little playmakers who move the same way, look the same way, and have the same haircut. So you just find these little details, make notes of them in game. I'll have all these different color highlighters, and I will put little dot in the highlighted color of their boots because boots are so colorful these days to help just sort of lock it down in my brain, just little things like that that you just added throughout the years, and all of it came through making massive mistakes time and time again.
Chris Wittyngham:
Commentators love bleached blonde hair. We're big fans of bleached blonde hair. But I do think that we should talk a little bit more about your time in Milano because I don't think people really grasped… I remember, my first game in person was like six years into the beginning of my career. It was actually Inter Miami's first home game, which was in front of nobody. It was in an empty stadium and still for me, even commentating with a mask on, it was like, "This is incredible. I can actually see the players." So can you just take us through on a match day, what Milan is like, and how different it was to actually experience some of the things that maybe you talked about from having read them, but you actually can experience them because you're there?
Andrés Cordero:
I'll tell you what, one thing that really helped is when we did the Nations League Final in Denver, to do U.S.A-Mexico in a big NFL stadium with a massive crowd, so it didn't feel like the moment was bigger than anything I'd ever experienced before, even if it was because it's European soccer, because it's Milan-Napoli, because there's Scudetto implications on the line, but just having been in that sort of scenario where I thought, "Okay, this is one of those bucket list games," helped me out tremendously.
Beyond that, the willingness of Serie A and of Milan to help when you are there versus when you're halfway across the world and you've got all of these middlemen in between, and you're getting information second and third hand to just be able to sort of pull somebody aside pitchside and ask for, "Can you get us this interview? Where do we get this? Where do we get that?"
I felt like they think that what CBS is doing is special and different from what other networks have done with Serie A in the past. And it's not in any way a slight, it genuinely is a different approach to covering a league that is not the Mexican League, that is not the Premier League, it's not the number one soccer property in America, but we give it the same treatment that we would, say, a U.S. national team away game, which we do, which we know is a big occasion for us.
And so that whole setup of going the day before, of being at the actual venue, of watching that place slowly fill up. The moment when, for example, all the Napoli fans came in, it's a small section of Napoli fans that are all the way in the top and all the security that goes behind sort of making sure that they get there safely, and more importantly, that they get out safely eventually, there was this roar from the Napoli fans when they arrived, and it just felt like this invading army quality to it.
And so, five minutes in, Napoli score the opening goal off of a corner kick and a stadium of... it fits 75,000, there's COVID protocols in place right now, so you've got about 40-50,000 there, just goes eerily quiet. And this one little corner, this one little section is losing its mind. It's just a beautiful moment that just sounds and feels different when you're there, when you're in San Siro, given the history of that place, given the acoustics of it that you don't really get when you're in an eight-by-eight audio broom closet somewhere in America.
Grant Wahl:
And I know also too, you had one of the all-time great calls on the disallowed late equalizer. What was it? A goal at the death on the day of his birth? Something like that?
Andrés Cordero:
Yeah. Franck Kessié was celebrating his birthday. I don't script my goal calls, which is why so often it's just me yelling into a microphone, but yeah, this one obviously it was Franck Kessié's birthday, it's at the death, the game's about to end. And I think that was like the second part of my goal call and I was like, "Wow, I nailed that." And then, sure enough, they're looking at VAR, I thought, "Oh no, it got wiped out." I appreciate the sentiment; I appreciate that you enjoyed that. It's still recorded, it's there forever, it's just not going to make any highlight reels at the end of the season.
Chris Wittyngham:
It's the worst, isn't it? It's so terrible, it's wasted on a moment that, unfortunately, you just throw that one away, it doesn't make any highlight reels. You see it in American sports all the time where the great catches that are like a toe out of bounds in the NFL, it's like, "Well, that one's not making a highlight reel, it's unfortunate."
Grant Wahl:
But we know what happened, just want everyone to know that. You're obviously calling Serie A games on a regular basis. What are some of the things that have stood out to you so far about this Italian season?
Andrés Cordero:
So this season, in particular, is special just because of the sheer number of title contenders that we've seen. We're almost at the midpoint of the season now, right at the midpoint of the season. But I've been saying for the better part of a decade, going back to our coverage on BeIN Sports that Serie A was consistently providing the most exciting football in Europe. And I know people thought, "Well, if you're not watching it," you thought, "Well, Juve is winning every single year, how exciting could that be?" But regularly, just the number of goals, the quality of goals, the quality of play has been sensational for so long now. It's not your father's Serie A, it's not Catenaccio with the exception of Juve with a very defensive mentality being very, very successful.
And I think that's had an effect. I would compare it to what happened in La Liga with Barcelona, where Pep [Guardiola]’s Barca is playing tiki-taka, other teams, even [José] Mourinho's Madrid realized, "Well, we're not going to take the ball away from these teams and beat them at their own game." And so teams became more reactive, more defensive, more counter-attacking, and had their relative success in that style. So one team's success in one style led to this reaction across the league that did the exact opposite.
Marcelo Bielsa says that, and I'll paraphrase here, that the worst thing about Pep Guardiola is that he invented the system inadvertently to beat Pep Guardiola teams, which was teams hanging from the crossbar, teams counter-attacking. I think Juventus has had a similar effect just in the reverse in that they were so good, so solid defensively in that sort of old school Catenaccio style that other teams thought, "Well, we're not going to be able to take a 1-0 lead against Juve, and park the bus, and defend it. They're going to score again and they're going to try and do the same to us."
And so that's where you get the Atalantas now, the way Milan are playing, even Inter under [Simone] Inzaghi are a more fluid, more attacking team than they were under Antonio Conte. Empoli are a delight to watch, Fiorentina. You've got all of these teams throughout the league that are playing in the opposition's half, trying to win the ball back as high as possible, trying to hold on to possession.
Napoli have been doing it going back to before Maurizio Sarri, even Walter Mazzarri, and that's made for just a really aesthetic, really fun product, and the only thing that was missing was a proper title race. Occasionally, you would get Roma to challenge Juventus, occasionally you'd get Napoli to challenge Juventus. Now Juve are struggling and are outside of the top four, and it's a genuine four-team race, I think it's more like three, but I wouldn't count Atalanta out yet.
Grant Wahl:
Can you alleviate my concerns that Inter might run away with it?
Andrés Cordero:
So Inter have been lucky in the sense that... they've been brilliant, by the way, they're the best team in Serie A at the moment, and they're arguably better now than they were last year. I thought it was a legit question to ask at the beginning of the season where those goals that left in the summer transfer market, [Romelu] Lukaku, [Achraf] Hakimi, where do those goals come from? And I don't think anybody could have foreseen the answer being everywhere, because they've had 15 different goal scorers, they’ve scored more goals at this stage than they did last year.
But where I say they've been a bit fortunate is unlike Napoli, unlike Milan, they've not had any serious injuries to contend with. They've had all their players, they're a deep squad, which if you look at, in Milan's case, players like [Davide] Calabria, like Rafael Leão, were breaking out playing at the highest level, they went the first 12 games without a loss and then all of these important key starters get hurt, their form dips. Same happened with Napoli, Napoli and Milan were the last two remaining unbeaten teams in Europe in the European big leagues until Matchday 13, both lost at the same time, both suffered injuries and they've had their dip.
And so if Inter continue to have this spell of good fortune where none of their big players are injured, they're not missing, then, yeah, they're probably going to run away with it. I don't think that's the case though. These sort of things, water finds its level, they balance out over the course of the season, and it's still just a four-point gap between them, Milan and Napoli who are level on points in second and third.
Grant Wahl:
I will say this because I got to see Inter in-person randomly in Moldova on my story for FC Sheriff during Champions League, came away really impressed with just how they looked in-person. And also Javier Zanetti sat behind me at the stadium. He really is as young looking as he appears to be, so it was pretty impressive. I've always been a huge Javier Zanetti fan and I'm just totally impressed with how Inter has handled what they lost and in what they're doing this season at this point.
I do want to switch gears just a little bit, you're going to be broadcasting the very big Canada-U.S.A World Cup qualifier in just a few weeks. Number one and number two in the Octagonal right now. Did you ever think there would be this much excitement heading into a Canada-U.S.A men's soccer game?
Andrés Cordero:
Eventually, yes. Did I think it would happen this soon? No. I think Canada didn't have a top division until not so long ago, basically their only exposure for big players was to come to MLS. They didn't really have stars, and now they have not one star but a legit number of players in that 11 that can really hurt you on a given day. They don't have to start all their best players; they can rotate even in this format of three-game windows and still be extremely competitive. We've seen them beat Mexico. And so I didn't think that it would come this soon. I don't know that anybody saw just how good Canada would be in this particular window, but it is the single best thing that could happen to soccer in our half of the world, that it's not just Mexico and the U.S., but Mexico, the U.S., Canada and a potential dark horse making life difficult for them.
And you go into these games now, it used to be that you'd think, "Well, if you can scratch a point off of Mexico, whether it's home or away, that's a good result." And now any combination of those three teams, Mexico, USA, Canada, you generally cannot predict it. You don't know who's going to win that game, and that just adds so much, given the stakes of world cup qualifying and given the still sort of semi raw scabs of 2018, it just adds this extra element of not desperation, but anticipation, and a little bit of doubt, and that's what makes our game great, isn't it? That you're scared for your life that things aren't going to go your way, and when they do, it's sublime.
Chris Wittyngham:
I want to ask you, because you do the away games for the U.S. in CONCACAF, and we talk a lot on our podcast with Landon Donovan about how difficult those games are, and whether or not away in CONCACAF is enough of an excuse for some of the performances that we've seen. So you don't really get to see the best of the U.S., in my opinion, except for when they come back from 1-0 down to win by four goals to one away in Honduras. But what have you seen in your games that is different about how the U.S. plays when they're away versus at home?
Andrés Cordero:
Yeah, if we're honest, the U.S. has played 45 minutes away from home at a high level, at a really good high level, so far this season, some good, some bad in the other ones, but the only one where you thought, "Okay, this is where a team is playing up to its potential was that second half comeback against Honduras." And Chris, I love that you went there, because every single time I walk out of one of those games, with the exception of that Honduras match, I get someone just looking at me saying, "The away games are tough to do, huh?" And they are, they're sort of joyless at times, you just want to get a result, because you know it's not going to be comfortable. It's more likely than not, not going to be fun.
For me they're all fun, in large part because of the group that I work with. I think one of the things that CBS have done just so exceptionally well, whether it's in the Champions League coverage, the CONCACAF coverage, the Serie A coverage, is they just know how to put good groups together. And so we really enjoy the time that we work on these games, win, lose, draw, play well, don't play well.
But sometimes it feels a little bit like a chore when it's minute 72 of that Panama game, for example, you know it's not going to go your way, and I got crucified halfway through that second half asking Maurice Edu, my color-commentator there, "Hey, would you take a point?" And people want just to bang their heads against the TV because, of course, you'd take a point with how badly things were going, but I just wanted to get him on record saying, "Yes, I'd take a point, this is not great." And you don't want to complain for 90 minutes, you don't want to be negative.
And it's not about homerism, it's about being entertaining at the end of the day, because what we do is entertainment television. And I come from the Broadcasting School of Ray Hudson where football is joy. Football is supposed to be fun; you're supposed to have a good time. And anything that you see, one team not playing well, making mistakes, yeah, you can focus on the mistakes, you can complain, you can say he should have scored there, or they should do better, or this isn't good enough, or you can give credit to the opposition that's out there playing well and doing the things they're supposed to be doing.
And I tend to, in those games, shift toward praising the team that's making the U.S. look bad rather than complaining about how poor the U.S. are. And it's the little tricks to the trades so that I'm not getting overly negative. The fan at home sees what they're seeing, I'm not lying to them, they know it's a rough go of it, but I feel like maybe they're not focused enough on some of the things that the opposition is doing well, and if I can highlight that, then I think the broadcast is better for it.
Grant Wahl:
I do think it's a really interesting topic that Chris brought up, and I'm glad you talked about it because did anyone ever try the slogan, the official broadcaster of mediocre to bad U.S. men’s national team soccer? [Laughs]
Chris Wittyngham:
I don't think that branding is going to stick. [Laughs]
Andrés Cordero:
If marketing brought that one out, it didn't trickle down to us. [Laughs]
Grant Wahl:
I mean, you talked about this a little bit earlier with your preparation, and every broadcaster has their own routine, and what are some of the other things, I guess, that you always do when you're preparing to call a game, and how did that develop over time?
Andrés Cordero:
I feel like at this point in my career, it's a bit like players who, when they tell you don't get paid to play, you get paid to train, that's sort of what the profession is like for me now where I am so comfortable on-air, where I've worked with such a variety of different color commentators and try to think I know how to get the best out of them, that it does feel like 95% of my work is the research, and it's meticulous, and it's joyless.
And I mean, I find joy in it, you have to, but it's the part that nobody thinks about when they think about the life of a sports journalist or specifically a play-by-play commentator, just how tedious so much of it is. The stickers that I make for teams, I make them exactly the same, with the same level of detail, with the same attention, and the same time spent on it, whether it's Juventus after winning their ninth Scudetto or it's Venezia in their first season in Serie A after 19 years.
And I know all of this stuff that I'm putting on the Juve stickers off the top of my head, and I'm probably wasting my time by doing all of that, but it's just part of the process, part of my zen, in the buildup to it, that I want to be able to make sure that I have everywhere they've played, everything they've won, all the interesting stories that I’ve told about them in the past, just the little bullet points, they're not necessarily scripted, but they're things that are easily accessible so that when they come up in a match, and they most often don't come up and you have to be prepared to throw away 90% of your research and 90% of your prep, in every single game that you do. But when it does happen, when Franck Kessie does score that equalizing goal in stoppage time of a big game in Serie A, you've got the information in front of you to make it a big call, to make it informative and entertaining, and then for it not to count. [Laughs]
Chris Wittyngham:
Oh God, I feel like you'll be living that one down for a while, that damn VAR, but yeah, I mean, you’re spot-on certainly about, in some ways, the things that require the most prep are the things that are less familiar to you. We work for Inter Miami, and realistically, doing all the games is the prep. I just have to write it all down at some point. But I wanted to follow on the Ray Hudson school of joy because I don't think, given how much commentary we're exposed to, I don't think people understand what that means, because very often you hear a lot of picking apart of the things that went wrong, and Ray's philosophy is picking apart the things that went right in a play.
And I feel like that's such a different approach than most people have, and I think it's cool that he's influenced people like you and even myself, albeit at times I do find myself probably harping a bit too much on the negative. That's a really different thing that not a lot of people know about. So I'd just be curious to hear kind of like how you came across that and how Ray's effervescence in the office spread to you.
Andrés Cordero:
So I would give both Phil Schoen and Ray Hudson a lot of credit there. I've worked with Phil since 2003, 2004. Phil is probably the main reason I went into this industry. I was the FIU radio station sports director, and I was writing for the FIU sports paper doing general sports where on a trip to Nacogdoches, Texas, hometown of the very famous Clint Dempsey, FIU against Stephen F. Austin, Phil was doing the games professionally at the time for radio and said, "Hey, when you get to Miami talk to such and such at GolTV." Because he was a big Arsenal fan, I was in love with Spanish football, they were the ones who were covering it, and he just sort of pointed at a direction at a door, and from that moment I thought, "Well I better absorb everything this guy knows, I think he's the best voice I've heard in American soccer broadcasting." His mantra was just don't be boring.
And then you meet Ray Hudson, who is just that phrase sort of materialized into a human being, a Geordie who grew up in a Newcastle pub and has all of these beatnik-style comments about the game in front of you. Polarizing, I don't think everybody loves him, but I think if you don't love him, you're in the wrong, it's my personal opinion. They both, but Ray in particular, had such a positive attitude toward the game. And I contrast that to the way that I heard other broadcasters who seemed to take it so seriously at times, and not just in our game, but in all sports, and almost without criticizing anybody specifically, just lose sight of how this is supposed to be fun, how fans are taking time out from their jobs, from their daily stresses, to watch their team play. Whether it's a national team or a club team, and they know everything that's wrong with their team and they don't need you to go into a five-minute spiel about how their star player is about to be sold to some Premier League club for I don't know how much money.
And if that's where your focus is on those big storylines, then, I think you lose people and you miss the point of every single game being potentially beautiful. And so I do try and just spend my time to be present in those games, to spend my time in what's happening in those 90 minutes in those matches and a lot of that comes from Ray Hudson. Ray told me once, It was a Rayo Vallecano-Real Madrid game, and Rayo had just played Madrid out of the park and ended up losing 3-1 or 4-1 or something like that as they always did under Paco Jémez, just inexplicable. The way that Rayo played that game, they should have won. And ours is the only game where you can play better than the opposition and lose, or you can play worse than the opposition and win, there's a certain magic to that.
And Ray tells me at the end of that game, "Listen, if we ever figure out why any of this happens, we just turn out the lights and go cover horse racing." And I thought, "Yeah, 100%, these are the things that make our game special." And I've always tried, sometimes failed, but always tried to just maintain that level of shining the spotlight on the joy of our game, because that's what makes it different from everything else.
Grant Wahl:
It's really cool to me to see the impact that Phil Schoen and Ray Hudson have had on you and other broadcasters too, because there's so much history with them. Phil called the first MLS game in the history of the league on ESPN. Obviously, Ray goes back to the NASL, which he played in, it's what brought him over here in the first place. He was coaching MLS teams in the '90s when that league was first starting. And so it is really cool. I guess one question I would have for you is because you work with different analysts like Matteo Bonetti, like Ray Hudson, like Mo Edu, do you do anything differently calling a game depending on whether you're with one of those guys or the other?
Andrés Cordero:
100%, every color commentator will be different, and I find that it's not their job to adapt to me, but rather my job to adapt to them. They are the personalities, they are the former players, they are the experts if you would, and I'm just the guy sort of driving the bus, making sure it doesn't go off the rails. So in the case of Ray Hudson, you sometimes just get out of the way. I would not get that Franck Kessié call in in a game with Ray, because if the ball goes in and I've got a few seconds to get what I want to get and he will run you over and you want him to, he's the reason people want to listen to the broadcast. And so you're a lot shorter when you're doing a goal and you're sat alongside Ray Hudson than you are with say Matteo Bonetti or Mo Edu.
And they all have their strengths. I think Matteo's encyclopedic knowledge of Italian football is just incredible. And so, with him, I really try and get the stories out. This is one moment where I do think it's worth sort of, at times, going away from the 90 minutes in front of you because I know that he'll have some gem that is relevant to what's going on, that's relevant to a player that's just come on, and I try and find those moments in that space, for him to tell those great stories.
Mo Edu I think has the potential to be the best American analyst voice in the U.S. I think he's got the perfect combination of having played the game and the credibility that comes with that, but also being humble enough to want to learn from the people that he's working with, having good presence, having a good voice, looking and sounding good on camera.
We've been working together since I guess the Nations League finals. I've done fewer games with him than I have with the other two, but from the first time that we called a game together, that Honduras-USA semifinal, which was not a great game in Denver, it felt like I was catching up with an old friend and calling my 400th game with him as opposed to my very first. So we just sort of clicked in a way that felt natural and I didn't have to adapt too much, I could just sort of be myself and found that he was willing to work off of that, and I think we have a really good dynamic in that way. But you're 100% right, I think every play-by-play guy should be adaptable to the personalities alongside them, and when you have personalities that are as dramatically contrasting as Ray Hudson and Matteo Bonetti, you have to have that flexibility.
Grant Wahl:
Kind of a random question here, but how old are you, how many years have you been calling games, and how many games do you think you've called?
Andrés Cordero:
So I'm 39, which is old enough to stop asking people how old I look because it'll hurt your feelings. I was born in Cuba, but soccer was not my first love, baseball, I was a general sports guy. I fell in love with soccer in my late teens, which is really late for people who do what I do and are in this world. I realized very early on just how bad I was at the game and how much catching up I had to do both in playing it, which I still do two times a week if I can, and in understanding it, which for example, when I started working with Phil and Ray and noticed with Ray, in particular, him having played the game and coached the game, that he was seeing things that I couldn't see, that I didn't know to look for. And I made it my mission to find out how to get into that perception. How do I get to a level where I'm seeing the game the way that players and coaches do.
And so, now if you get a compliment from someone who played the game, "Hey, I love the way you call the game." Usually for me, if somebody tells me whether it's a fan, a family member, somebody's like, "Hey, you had a great call." I think that means it was a good game, and you didn't fuck it up for him, you didn't mess it up, so they enjoyed it and you didn't get in the way of it. But when it's a former player that tells you that, and you know that they can see things that other people don't, it means a little extra, I think, whether it's a coach or a player. And so I just strive to get there, to get to that level.
And I've made countless mistakes on air, high profile, and low-profile ones. It was, I'll say it again, Phil and GolTV, that gave me that first sort of direction of where to go, went from GolTV, which I thought was just an incredible university for soccer, especially on the Spanish side. If you see the talent that GolTV had in Spanish and where everyone ended up after that, it was just an absolute all-star team with broadcasters, learned a lot from them. In a sense, my style of commentary is a blend of Hispanic soccer and American soccer. I've been able to pick out the things I love from those two very different identities. I'm not going to be screaming and lying to you about what you're seeing, the way that some Spanish broadcasters do, but I'm also not going to be as dry, and I let the game breathe, but not quite as much as some of, for example, the British broadcasters.
And so I learned a lot of that at GolTV. BeIN Sports was a launchpad for me, especially early on, they had the resources, they covered big tournaments. We went and did the Copa América onsite, the World Cup in Brazil 2014 on-site. And that was another place where, if you look at where a lot of those people have gone now, I'm just so incredibly proud of that group. I feel like if I start naming names, I'm going to leave people out, but you know who I'm talking about when I say this BeIN Sports family, people have compared us to Ajax in terms of this is where talent gets developed and then goes and does things elsewhere in big time. And yeah, I'm incredibly proud of what I learned there, the work I did with them. And yet it wasn't I think until I started doing Inter Miami and MLS that CBS, ESPN really started to take a much closer, a more serious look at me.
And this summer, I was in this privileged position where ESPN hired me to do a couple of games for MLS, CBS hired me to do just the Nations League on a short-term thing. And for someone like me who had just been working at these, lower rung is really great places for soccer fans, if you're a soccer fan, you had to have GolTV, you had to have BeIN Sports. But I think when you're talking about ESPN, CBS now at a different level, a different profile, that was just an absolute dream.
And I got my pick. I worked with CBS, I saw what that was like, I saw the treatment that they give, where you could be Clint Dempsey, or you could be me. You're going to get sort of the same love and the same accountability for everything you do. I thought this is where I take the next step. This is where I continue to grow. And this past weekend, being in San Siro in the booth with Matteo Bonetti, who was a partner of mine at BeIN for all those years, just validated all of that, that this is the place where I take the next step.
Chris Wittyngham:
There was one bit of Grant's question you didn't answer, and it actually leads into what I wanted to ask you about, which was, the number of games that you've done, the sheer tonnage. And that I think is the most interesting part. Because I've talked to a few people that work down here in Miami, both at BeIN and at other places, that would do four and five games a weekend, and you almost get like this Stockholm syndrome of getting used to it and almost enjoying it and thinking that's what the work is supposed to be, as opposed to what most normal commentators do, which is one, max two games in a weekend. So first off, can you just describe what that experience of doing that many games was like? And then, has it almost been an adjustment to do less in a way, and in some ways be in a bigger and better position as a result?
Andrés Cordero:
Yeah, it is. You get accustomed to almost the abuse. Because for a long time, when I started doing commentary, we would do three to five games a week, and it wasn't three to five games in one league. In any given week, you could do Serie A on Friday, Ligue 1 on Saturday, two La Liga games on a Sunday, you could do the Turkish Süper Lig and the French Ligue 1 on the same day, it's almost too much to really be able to do your best work. It's not almost too much, it is too much to be able to do your best work, but there aren't that many jobs in this profession. If you wanted to be a play-by-play commentator, if you want to be a commentator, period, you essentially have to pay your dues.
It's not like, color guys or analysts where you’re a former player or former coach offers you certain shortcuts. You don't get that, I think, as a play-by-play, or as a TV host in our game in the U.S. And so, in terms of how many games I've done, if I'm just lowballing the number of just Serie A games before joining CBS, a very conservative number would be around 700-800 Serie A games, just that league. But I've also covered La Liga for a good 15 years now. This is the first season of my career where I'm not working for the La Liga rights holder. And these are the leagues that people like and love and watch regularly, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Bundesliga, which we had at GolTV for some time. I've also done the Africa Cup of Nations, I've done the African Champions League, we've done South American and CONCACAF World Cup qualifying.
Chris Wittyngham:
Do you ever get dragged into NASL?
Andrés Cordero:
Sudamericana, I did a little bit of NASL, and the access to NASL was great. I'd love the idea being able to, for a change, speak to the coach right before a game and get to pick his brain as opposed to doing an African Champions League game between a team from Ghana and a team from Tunisia, which you have no access and the amount of information you can find is pretty limited.
Chris Wittyngham:
You're lucky to get a correct lineup before kickoff.
Andrés Cordero:
Ray and I did a game one time, it was Chad-Egypt, and we did not have lineups. The only lineups available were in Arabic. And it was a nightmare, the level of anxiety that we went through, we basically rebaptized every player, we figured we found an old lineup and kind of just, "Yeah, maybe it's him, maybe it's not." And just called it, with confidence just called it. And a few people realized we had no idea what we were doing and they weren't the right names. I think a good 60-70%, maybe more, thought, "Yeah, whatever, these guys have to know what they're doing." So it's too many games to actually know how many, but it's literally well over a thousand, probably in the thousands.
Chris Wittyngham:
But in some ways it's valuable experience. You get everything thrown at you so that, like you said, when you are at San Siro, when you are at the destination that you're arrived at, in some ways, you're not overawed by the occasion, because it's something you've done thousands of times.
Andrés Cordero:
Right, in every way it's valuable and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I thought in the time that I was at BeIn Sports, it's hard for me to imagine that there was anybody else in this country who called as many games as I did. Because Phil and Ray would get whatever the biggest game of the week was, one, or two, maybe three games tops, and myself or before me, it was Ross, would get virtually everything else. And so you did end up doing three to five games every single week across all of these different leagues. And I think that to do what we do, whether it's on-camera or off-camera, you have to have this feeling of just not being afraid to look like an absolute ass on air, to just embarrass yourself in the worst way possible, and that's happened plenty.
And so I think a big reason why I'm just unfazed by somewhere like the San Siro for Milan-Napoli, is I've been to all of that. The things that could go wrong have gone wrong. I've walked away feeling like a fraud. I've walked away feeling like the best commentator in the country. And I've found this happy place now, where I just know that it's the effort that's going to matter because I've reached levels where I can be confident about my work.
Grant Wahl:
So you mentioned by the way you were born in Cuba, you came to the U.S., how old were you when you came? Is there a story there?
Andrés Cordero:
Yeah, I think it's an interesting story. So everyone has the story about the moment that they decided to get out, that they'd had enough. And most of my family came in the '80s, I didn't leave until 1989. Me, my parents, and my younger brother all left together. And my dad's story, because my mom's family was all here, was I'd come home from school one day, I was seven years old, so daycare school, whatever it was at that time.
And I was like, "Oh dad, I learned a poem." And I'd recited just straight-up communist propaganda, and my dad was like, "All right, we're out." And so, at the time, it was difficult. In the '80s, it was easier to leave, by this time it was harder, especially because both my parents were engineers. And if you're an engineer or a doctor, if you're really valuable to sort of the fabric of the society, it's a lot more difficult to leave Cuba.
And so at the time there was this racket, essentially it was legalized human trafficking, for lack of a better term, between the Fidel government in Cuba and the Noriega government in Panama, where families living in the diaspora in the U.S. could pay officials, government officials in Panama, to then bribe officials in Cuba to give you visas to get out of Cuba. You can go into Panama, you weren't allowed to work, but you were allowed to have legal status there. And so, my parents who were both, as I said, engineers, who had reached high levels in their careers, are now... We flew to Panama, and there my dad's working as a mechanic, a carpenter, whatever odd job he can get to try and feed us until we can figure out how to get out of Panama and into the U.S. to rejoin the rest of my mom's family. My mom, a structural and civil engineer, is now selling trinkets to tourists.
We ended up being in Panama for a year. While we were there, the U.S. invades to remove Noriega, this was 1990. And so Panama turns into essentially a war zone. We can no longer go to school, there are American tanks rolling in the streets. For me and my brother, we were so sheltered from it, our parents did such a good job of making that a tolerable time for us, that I just thought, "Cool, G.I. Joe is downstairs near my building, this is awesome." But my parents must have been terrified.
And the four of us shared a two-bedroom apartment with another Cuban couple who were in a similar situation. Because again, you had a legal status, you left Cuba legally, you arrived in Panama legally, you could be there, but you couldn't work. And you had no guarantee that you'd ever end up in the United States. A lot of people went instead to South America at that time.
The U.S. invades, all of this happens. There's this one moment, to give you an idea of what that experience was like for me versus for my parents, where I thought we were at a party, we lived in this big apartment building, we're all on the roof of the apartment building. And I thought, "This is cool, all my friends are here. The people I know from the building are here." But all of the men are actually hanging off the edge of the building with guns. Because at this point, the shops had all been looted, and looters had taken to robbing apartment buildings, and they just go floor to floor taking whatever they can. And the front of the building had been barricaded, the men of the families are all trying to make sure that nobody can break in, but there was this armored vehicle that was like a modified Jeep that was trying to break into our building.
And again I think, "This is the most fun party I've had all year long." Me and all the kids do, everybody else is terrified. We were lucky enough to be close to the Swiss embassy. They saw what was happening and dropped something like a mortar shell, something next to that Jeep, and that Jeep sped off. But the juxtaposition between how I felt, how when my little brother's birthday came up, I had some micro machines to give him as a present, how when my mom homeschooled us during that time and we were happy and what that must have been like for my parents at the time was just absolutely wild. Eventually, the U.S. realizes, "Okay, we've got 5,000 Cubans that are just stranded in Panama." And many of us got political asylum to come to the United States. That's how I ended up here.
Grant Wahl:
Thanks for sharing that. It's a pretty incredible story, so I really do appreciate you sharing that. You were at an age where you weren't like a baby or anything, was the adjustment to the U.S. difficult in any way?
Andrés Cordero:
Yeah. So I was a terrible student. I don't know if that's the fault of the uprooting and all that or whatnot, but I always did struggle with school, I struggled caring about it. When we got to the U.S., we had family here. I think it's easier for us than it is for immigrants who come from a lot of other places and maybe don't have the same infrastructure that Cubans have built for themselves in South Florida. And so maybe in that sense, there were a lot of advantages. My parents are both just incredible people and go-getters, my mom quickly was able to reinstate her engineering degree. My dad opened up his own business as an electrician. He went from being an electrical engineer for the main power company in Cuba to having his own electrician company so that my mom could go and revalidate her degrees and whatnot.
They slowly but surely sort of climbed in a way that maybe other people with the same infrastructure couldn't. And so I don't know that I felt that I struggled because I don't have any point of comparison really. So it was just, I recognize that now I have two little boys who are four and two years old, and that I can already give them a life that I didn't have it four, or two, or seven, or eight, or 15, and that part of it does feel like the American dream where my parents have done better for us than they had done for them. I'm doing better for my kids than I had done for me, and hopefully that continues.
Grant Wahl:
Weird transition here, but I'm going to go ahead and do it. I know you've known Chris Wittyngham for a long time. When someone asks you for stories about Chris, what do you say? And Chris, when someone asks you for stories about Dre, what do you say?
Andrés Cordero:
That's interesting because, so when I first met Chris, this Chris that you've seen blossom before your eyes, that is super outgoing, and is working with you, and is working on the Le Batard Show and all of the soccer world knows him, he's practically a celebrity, I barely know that Chris. That Chris is a Chris that I'm just coming around to getting to know. Because I met a very shy, very polite Chris, who just seemed to soak everything up. I don't know that I have a particular story, although I'm sure we shared a lot of moments in the bowels of the BeIN Sports building, talking before games, sort of swapping stories about what we would be covering and probably laughing about some of the ridiculousness of it. So I would just say that my story of Chris Wittyngham is this meteoric rise to a national soccer personality that I'm just starting to get accustomed to.
Chris Wittyngham:
For me, I've always been blown away, even in this conversation. I describe you, Dre, as an academic, and I don't mean that in a bad way, just the sheer amount of information that you've absorbed about the game and all the time in the office, you just have anecdotes about something that we were talking about at the ready. And I presume that you had not experienced most of them yourself, I feel like you had researched and gone down rabbit holes. I don't think that there's a person in the American game, or in broadcasting generally, that just has soaked up as much information as Dre Cordero has. In terms of stories, a legend on the football pitch, I love playing a five-a-side game with Dre. Bosses the midfield, knows exactly what to do.
When I talk to people about Dre, it's just about what a knowledgeable commentator he is and how thoroughly well researched he is. And that's for me the number one skill, the number one compliment that I can pay to someone, because, like you said earlier, it is about the prep, it's about the information, it's about knowing as much as you can't about anything so you can be prepared on a moment's notice to have it at the ready. And I think Dre is top of the line in that respect.
Andrés Cordero:
That's all extremely kind, but I'm not going to correct the record on any of it, so just let it stand there [laughs].
Grant Wahl:
I will say, that's why I'm surprised to hear you say that, at any point in your life you were not a good student, because academic is the word that Chris has always used when talking to me to describe your approach to broadcasting, and preparing, and studying and all of that. So if there was ever a point when you weren't a good student, I don't know, I guess I'll believe it, but I kind of don't.
Andrés Cordero:
So it's the opposite, there was never a point where I was a good student. So I am a good student of the game, I love the game and I've been able to work in the things that I enjoy and love. And I was always a good writer, that was the only sort of honors classes that I ever had. This is an interesting story, actually. So coming over from Cuba and I didn't do second grade, took a test, they put me in third grade, my parents took me out of the school where I was because I had a teacher that made fun of me for not being able to speak English.
Imagine this is sort of level that we were living in at the time. I go to another school, wonderful teacher, that was third grade. Fourth grade, they marched me to the principal's office, I think I'm in trouble, they put me in honors English. We had to all write poems, and my poem blew my teacher away and she's like, "No, you can't be in a regular class." This happened in the span of a year.
And so, it wasn't until I left GolTV, I started working at BeIN Sports, I recognized the opportunity that that afforded me, that I said, "There's something just off, there's a reason why I wasn't able to be able to study the way that I wanted to, why I couldn't just sit down and get the work done." And I remember being a high school kid, frustrated with myself that I couldn't just get the stupid essay done on time, and every single time, it was like putting something together the morning after to turn it in to just not get a zero.
And then the test would come around and I'd ace the test. So I spoke with a psychiatrist, and he told me, "You are a classic case of ADHD, you need help for ADHD." So I started taking Adderall, and it was genuinely a miracle drug for me. And it's a difficult thing I think to talk about with most people because we live in a time when everybody believes that they're something, and everybody is literally ADD and attention spans are short.
But I do feel the me, professionally, before and after I got help for ADHD, are two people with dramatically different ceilings. And the me before it would not have been at the San Siro this past weekend, would not have been able to put in the work required to be a play-by-play commentator at this level, even though I love the game. The fact that I got help for it, genuinely, it felt like my mind had just opened up and I was able to do all of these things that I wanted to do, where it was a physical impossibility before.
Grant Wahl:
Just to wrap up here, and thanks for all the time, you've addressed a lot of things in this interview that I think would be good for students who want to do what you do eventually someday, but are there any other specific things, pieces of advice, that you would share with anyone who's a student right now who wants to do what you do?
Andrés Cordero:
Yes, also in the course of that last answer, it occurred to me that it would make for a very funny Ted Lasso character, to have a commentator who was ADHD and doesn't have any help, and is just like permanently distracted by what's going on around. But that aside, yeah, in fact, it's always flattering when college, high school students who want to do what we do reach out and they ask for advice or they ask for time and I'm always happy to hop on a Zoom call or a phone call, time permitting. I think we are in a point now where they have so many opportunities to do things that we couldn't do when I was getting started. And to find your microphone voice, and to get comfortable with hearing yourself, and to make mistakes, even if nobody else is watching. The best we could do is put a game on, and mute the game, and pretend to call it in your living room. Whereas now, be it a podcast, YouTube, whatever it is, get the reps in because you're going to be awful at first, and you're going to be awful for a while.
The first game that I did, Ian Joy had harassed me for like a week and a half because his commentator at the time had left to go somewhere else. He didn't like the other options, he wanted me to work with him. I was like, "All right, fine." I walked out of Rayo-Atlético, which are two teams that I absolutely love, having done a terrible job, but feeling like I need to get good at this, this is what I want to do.
So I would say, keep your options open, because thought I wanted to be a writer and ended up in television. In television, I figured great, I want to be on camera and realized that I just wanted to be in a dark room or a dark stadium somewhere and call games. So keep your options open. You don't know what you're going to fall in love with. Grind, because there literally are no shortcuts, especially if you're not a former player or former coach. And get started now, don't wait for the interview, don't wait for whatever, just anyway that you can get reps, record your voice, record your face, get out there and work on worthwhile projects to you. Do it immediately, do it yesterday, because we didn't have those technological advantages back in the day.
Grant Wahl:
Andrés Cordero is the lead soccer commentator for CBS Sports and Paramount+, broadcasting Serie A games, and the U.S. men's national teams away World Cup Qualifiers. He also does Inter Miami's local broadcasts with Ray Hudson. Dre, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Andrés Cordero:
Oh, thanks so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun.