Commentary
Can Soccer Really Get To The Top Rung Of Major U.S. TV Sports?
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 15, 2023
With the rise of live sports programming -- as well as sports-rights fees paid by TV networks and streaming platforms -- all eyes are moving to what were previously mid-level sports that are looking to raise their profile.
Soccer -- or European football -- has for years been one of those sports knocking at the door.
Ampere Analysis conducted research that says nearly 20% of U.S. sports fans now say soccer/European football is their favorite sport.
The FIFA Women’s World Cup is still in full swing -- now moving to the semifinals round -- and there is a recent boost in interest around Major League Soccer (MLS), with international star Lionel Messi recently joining Inter Miami.
Some media sports analysts claim soccer is now the fourth-most popular American sport. But that may include a wide variety of reference points -- including in-stadium attendance and high school, college, and other soccer matches.
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But measures such as TV viewership can show other levels of popularity -- in relation to other sports.
Recent FIFA Women’s World Cup soccer has averaged around 2 million viewers. (When the U.S. has been a contender in years past, those big games can rise to 6 million viewers.
Average national TV Major League Baseball regular-season baseball can be around 1.5 million to two million viewers.
But there can be a supply-and-demand factor at work here, with a 162-game schedule for each team.
Still, MLB’s playoffs and World Series witness natural gains in interest. Last year's World Series -- where the Houston Astros won the championship -- averaged 11.8 million viewers.
The NBA averaged 1.6 million season viewers on ABC, ESPN, and TNT last season. Post-season playoffs rose to 5.5 million, with the NBA finals averaging 11.6 million.
At the top end, the NFL regular-season games averaged around 17 million last year. Playoffs can offer double this level.
By comparison to all of this U.S.-based Major League Soccer national matches on the Disney-owned channels (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2) averaged 309,000 viewers for the season. ABC was tops at 469,000.
So moving into the top echelon of the U.S. TV sports will take some work.
Indications of where this all is headed one needs no further than to look at what The CW network has been doing in recent months -- adding LIV Golf, NASCAR Xfinity Series, and ACC basketball and football -- all modest TV performers.
Upcoming new TV contract negotiations for the NBA -- expected to rise to new pricier levels -- will tell much about where the marketplace is going, and what may be left for other wannabe sports looking to climb up any TV ranking.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
Back in the late '70's we (Mizlou Television Network) televised all the New York Cosmos away games back to WOR-TV and WPIX-TV in NYC. We also televised Cosmos home games from Giants Stadium back to the visiting teams home markets. The Cosmos enjoyed an enhanced lineup of players with Pele, Giorgio Chinaglia, and Franz Beckenbauer, all internationally knows socker superstars. The Cosmos home games had sellout crowds but the away games were not as well attended. From a television standpoint, the NASL insisted that unlike other televised sports they would not allow inplay timeouts to air commercials. This created a problem as we had to incert spots live when ever the ball went out of play. Over the three years we televised the Cosmos we only missed one goal while we were away in a commercial. As I said all those years ago, if Soccer wants to become a major televised sport in the U.S., they need to conform to the format of all the major televised sports. The NASL also insisted that we shoot the games the way the were televised in Europe, etc., with wideshot coverage of all the action, vertually nothing from ground level or closeups of the players. That said, I wish them success.
One of the key factors---as Vic pointed out----was the practice of showing the games mostly as far- off panoramas with the players milling about but often melding together like a mob rather than being clerly seen---in frequent close- ups---as individuals. They seem to have made some changes in this recently but the impression I still get reminds me of the way movies were often presented in the twenties and thirties with many distant shots embracing wide spans of activity----like a whole nightclub dining area where a group of players are seated as opposed to many close-ups as they speak to each other, express feelings of love, humor, threats, etc. The result is that the viewer is held aloof as in a rear set at a Broadway play rather than being drawn in to feel the intensity of the activity and engage with the personalities. That, coupled with the general lack of key plays and scoring, makes for a fairly dull viewing experience for those who have not been ardent fans of the sport since they were kids and are conditioned to watch the games as they are traditionally shown.
Soccer is going to be the next big thing in ths country, or so I've heard since I was a kid, and apoparently it's been said since the 1940s when returning soldiers introduced it to friends and family.
Soccer is very popular in the US with boys and girls, but boys grow up and find football, and girls grow up and find boys. That's not gonna change.
It'll always be a secondary or tertiary sport.