ESPN Deportes Kicks Off Portuguese World Cup Coverage

ESPN Deportes, ESPN's Spanish-language sports network, is moving to address demand from an underserved part of the Latino community, with its first Portuguese­-language telecasts of World Cup soccer championship matches -- or "futbol" to several hundred million Spanish- and Portuguese-speakers.

According to ESPN, the new content offering targets Brazilian immigrants living in the United States, capitalizing on Brazil's recent qualification for the World Cup -- usually a given, but still a publicity-intensive event.

Lino Garcia, general manager, ESPN Deportes, stated: "We are leveraging our multi-language rights to better serve the passionate Portuguese-speaking fans."

In addition to the TV broadcasts, ESPN360.com will offer Portuguese-language coverage of World Cup matches; the TV and online coverage will focus on matches featuring Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Mexico and the USA.

The Portuguese-language broadcasts of the matches will also be complemented with Spanish-language news coverage and summaries from shows like "SportsCenter" and "Futbol Picante," including on-site reports from dozens of correspondents in South Africa, the site of this year's World Cup.

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The decision to broadcast games in Portuguese is especially interesting in light of the fact that ESPN Deportes doesn't currently have the Spanish-language rights for FIFA events, which are held by Univision.

While Spanish-language telecasts are off-limits, it's worth noting that the similarity between Spanish and Portuguese would allow Spanish speakers to get the basic gist of the Portuguese-language broadcast -- especially important text content like scores, fouls, referee decisions and player stats.

Linguists say that Spanish and Portuguese, which diverged by the 16th century, share about 85% of their grammar and lexicon, although it is much easier for Spanish speakers to understand written Portuguese than the spoken language.

There are over half a million Portuguese speakers -- mostly of Brazilian descent -- living in America, compared to about 31 million Spanish speakers, including immigrants from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

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