Why So Little Coverage of Pro Soccer Championship?

[pimpdave]

Did you guys know that MLS had a championship recently? Yeah, seriously. ESPN didn't cover it AT ALL as far as I can tell. I have no idea who won. Why is that?

[Serbia]

Even people who like soccer don't pay much attention to the MLS. Nobody cares.

[chang50]

Did you guys know that MLS had a championship recently? Yeah, seriously. ESPN didn't cover it AT ALL as far as I can tell. I have no idea who won. Why is that?

Equally I have no idea who won the Guatemalan championship,because it is third-rate.Ask me about the Premiership,or Primera Liga,or Serie A or the Bundesliga where the standard of play is first class and worth discussing.You can't even get the name of the game right...

[luns101]

Hatred for soccer might be the single greatest thing that brings people together in this forum next to love of beer. I don't think the old conspiracy theorists from this site even liked it.

[Serbia]

BEER?!

[Gillipig]

I read an article a while back where the journalist hypothesized that within thirty years football not (american football) would be the most popular sport in the U.S.
Although unlikely, football is actually gaining ground in the U.S.
At the moment you do have a crappy league though. There are countries in Europe with less than a tenth of your population that has better second or even third leagues than your first lol.
With a league as worthless as the MLS, I'm surprised there are ANY football fans at all in the U.S. This is how undeveloped the football market is in the U.S; One european star player with his best years behind him came to play in the MLS, and interest for the sport shot up drastically lol. You have no homegrown star players, no star player in the best leagues in the world, and that's a country of 315 million people lol.

[Symmetry]

I read an article a while back where the journalist hypothesized that within thirty years football not (american football) would be the most popular sport in the U.S.
Although unlikely, football is actually gaining ground in the U.S.
At the moment you do have a crappy league though. There are countries in Europe with less than a tenth of your population that has better second or even third leagues than your first lol.
With a league as worthless as the MLS, I'm surprised there are ANY football fans at all in the U.S.

Back in the forties, the biggest sports in the US were baseball, boxing and horse racing. Change can happen pretty quickly.

[saxitoxin]

I read an article a while back where the journalist hypothesized that within thirty years football not (american football) would be the most popular sport in the U.S.

source:

Back in the forties, the biggest sports in the US were baseball, boxing and horse racing. Change can happen pretty quickly.

Horse racing lost out because people got sick of listening to singing by drunk debutantes and Delta Chis. i.e. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PRgWol5BrY&t=0m45s - at 1:50 you can see Mr. Hot Stuff rear and try to break out of the post parade when that one out-of-tune bitch started belting out the lyrics it gets to be too much for poor Mr. Hot Stuff oh, Mr. Hot Stuff, you're the stupidest horse ever there was I hate Mr. Hot Stuff

[GreecePwns]

Back in the forties, the biggest sports in the US were baseball, boxing and horse racing. Change can happen pretty quickly.

And back in the 20s, the biggest sports in the US were baseball...and soccer.

[Symmetry]

Back in the forties, the biggest sports in the US were baseball, boxing and horse racing. Change can happen pretty quickly.

And back in the 20s, the biggest sports in the US were baseball...and soccer.

That's interesting, but like I said- these things change quickly.

[GreecePwns]

They do, and they are now. NHL is pissing away their record revenues and fanbase with their repeated labor disputes, and NBC Sports (the biggest non-ESPN sports channel in the country, for the non-Americans here) was happy to slot in MLS regular season and playoff games where the NHL games would have been. It's also widely believed that MLS will triple is TV revenue from them come new contracts next year.

That's not to say it will become one of the "major sports" overnight, but there's a place for it as a niche league, just like there's a place for NHL as a niche league.

[tzor]

Did you guys know that MLS had a championship recently? Yeah, seriously. ESPN didn't cover it AT ALL as far as I can tell. I have no idea who won. Why is that?

ESPN doesn't cover a whole lot of things, actually. We have come a long way from the days of the major networks and the "Wide World of Sports." The lack of coverage is clearly due to a lack of MLS to make a case of the potential for a soccer viewership. I do know when the European teams came to NY (Yankee Stadium and Citifield Park) they tended to sell out. But that doesn't assure that you have the potential for nation wide viewership numbers.

There are a lot of sports out there that never get covered, both on the professional level and on the college level. Ever see a college hockey game? Do you even know who won the championship last year? What about minor league hockey? Independent league baseball? Why not even Canadian Football (it's only our northern neighbor)?

No, you won't see that stuff on the Exceptionally (not) Sexy People Network; the exceptionally (not) sexy announcers barely have a clue about the few sports they do cover.

And what about the ladies? The only time they ever got coverage was that year they won and the winning scorer removed her top. Had she not done so, no one in the sports media would have noticed.

[Symmetry]

They do, and they are now. NHL is pissing away their record revenues and fanbase with their repeated labor disputes, and NBC Sports (the biggest non-ESPN sports channel in the country, for the non-Americans here) was happy to slot in MLS regular season and playoff games where the NHL games would have been. It's also widely believed that MLS will triple is TV revenue from them come new contracts next year.

That's not to say it will become one of the "major sports" overnight, but there's a place for it as a niche league, just like there's a place for NHL as a niche league.

This isn't all that surprising- the way that boxing pissed away its appeal to focus on a small number of increasingly meaningless and brutal title fights seems similar. It adapted away from popular appeal toward expensive one offs, often without decent competition for prizes that few know or care or about, or get invented just for the fight.

[_sabotage_]

Soccer is hard to advertise for in the US style. They did cover Beckham and his retirement slightly, not that he was very good, but he is a pretty boy that looks good on tv.

[ManBungalow]

woah

[tzor]

Soccer is hard to advertise for in the US style. They did cover Beckham and his retirement slightly, not that he was very good, but he is a pretty boy that looks good on tv.

I strongly disagree. They just have never tried. And the Beckham event was just a name. It gets a good bump, but it's only a bump. He didn't drive news once he got here.

There are many forms of advertisement; but if you are not on a Yahoo fantasy league game you know your sport doesn't have any.

[_sabotage_]

I strongly disagree with your disagreement. Football, soccer, has no breaks in it. This means no TV ads every break. If you watched the SA World Cup, you may have noticed US companies advertising, such as Bud and Skechers. But you would have also noticed that the Bud ads, placed around the field, were in Chinese and that the Skecher's ads were due to their entrance to the Chinese market (my wife was responsible for setting up 300 shops for them around China and her direct boss was the PR VP, so please try to find another point than claiming the Skecher's ads were meant for the US market).

Soccer is a popular sport in the US and the lack of coverage cannot be related to lack of interest.

[tzor]

I strongly disagree with your disagreement.

Your original quote was, "Soccer is hard to advertise for in the US style." I assumed you were talking about advertising for soccer, not the placement of advertisements into soccer. Obviously the later is harder in soccer because of the lack of breaks, but not impossible. It also depends on the television model that adopts soccer as a sport it covers. You could also have the situation where, like football, television money could so dominate a sport that changes to the rules could develop for the insertion of commercials.

In show commercials are starting to become a legacy feature, channel surfing in real time and skipping them in recorded mode is resulting in them reaching less and less eyeballs, while in the game placement ads (the so and so special play of the game) get more eyeballs and name recognition. Soccer, without all those breaks, could result in more continual viewership and less going away and never coming back channel surfing. It is far easier to block the time because you know a game will be played in 2 hours (accounting for the standard stoppage time) and not constantly delaying sixty minutes or whatever show comes afterwards.