I notice there are no screenshots of these terrible UI's the author mentions. Probably because they are not terrible. They show a clock | team name | score | score | team name. It couldn't get much simpler to understand.
If there's one part of this you might want to "solve", it's the possible ambiguity with using three letter abbreviations for team names, which is the one thing the redesign doesn't attempt to change.
I like the abbreviated names, as they leave more room for actually looking at the game (an important aspect, often overlooked by makers of info graphics)
Also note how the BBC display places the score a long way from the left border to accommodate for viewers who still have 4:3 screens and upscale the display in various ways.
The proposed design looks better, but the score will be cut of for some viewers.
Agreed (and can't really see the abbreviations being a problem – I'd rather have more space to see the game). The only other thing I can possibly think to change in BBC's design is the colour contrast when Netherlands play in orange – NED is shown in white on orange[1], which isn't as easy to read as black on orange. But that's really nitpicking.
ITV, on the other hand (who have the other ~50% of games in the UK), does have pretty bad design in the top-left corner – flags instead of shirt colours so don't know who's who, red cards sometimes drawn on top of red flags without any separation ([2] – there is a red card poking out of the right-hand-side of the Belgium flag!)
One possible solution to the abreviations that I have seen some TVs do is that at the start of the game and every once in a while they show an expanded score with the full names and than after a couple of seconds it goes back to the 3-letter names.
Writing the full team name all the time wastes some space and is sort of redundant. Not only are most people watching the game already aware of who the teams are (they wouldnt be watching otherwise) but the commentators are constantly saying the team names anyway.
If there's one part of this you might want to "solve", it's the possible ambiguity with using three letter abbreviations for team names, which is the one thing the redesign doesn't attempt to change.