By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Sep 23, 2011) US Soccer Players -- Most of you are already well aware that Google's Google+ product and Facebook are engaged in a battle to determine where you post your day-to-day musings and make your connections. Their motivation is hardly altruistic. Both are in the advertising business, and tailored ads make them money. As such, they need to come up with things to keep their massive user bases engaged. Both are focused on limiting what used to be wide open streams of information.
As the thinking goes, make too many friends on the internet and you're inundated with content that no one really has the time to read. Without the short post limits of twitter, too much time is spent working through an always growing feed or no time is spent because the user gets used to ignoring that flood of content entirely. Neither are good business, so we have Google+'s circles to limit information and Facebook allowing users to subdivide their list of friends.
What does this have to do with soccer? When you think about it, quite a lot.
Soccer is the unwieldy Facebook account of professional sports. There are leagues literally everywhere, with a flood of games and information readily available across multiple platforms. Overlapping seasons and tournaments create a scenario where the number of days with no games available to an American viewing audience is relatively small.
Compared to the other North American sports, few baseball fans are trying to figure out a way to watch the Japanese leagues or Central America. National Hockey League fans normally aren't keeping up with the league tables in Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany. In the big picture sense, for them there's only the league they follow. That's rare in professional soccer.
In our version of normal, the average soccer fan has an interest in the major leagues of Europe, the Champions League, Major League Soccer, Mexico, and at least passing knowledge of where National Team Players are in the less high profile leagues outside of the USA. Put all that together, and it's a sizeable amount of content. We haven't even talked about that National Team component adding in more games, more tournaments, and more information.
Deciding what to follow becomes an issue. It can also easily become a problem. Sure, there are the diehards and Eurosnobs who like to pretend missing some midweek Championship game marks you as less of a fan, but for those of us in reality there simply isn't the time to commit. It's the reason the massive list of weekend games available in the USA normally follows with an appeal to comment on what you're actually going to watch.
There's normally overlap. The big name teams playing each other, the Premier League game available to the widest audience on ESPN2. The same thing for the ESPN2 MLS games. It's the other 40 or 50 games that are at issue. Add to that the glut of information available around those games and everything else concerning soccer, and that stream of information quickly becomes a torrent.
Google, Facebook, and the technology pundits that track those companies like to talk about curating. What that really means is accepting limits to increase engagement. It's Google+ and their circles of interest. If I'm engaged with a circle discussing vacation ideas in Mexico, I'm not going to share those things with everyone on my connections list. At least not in theory. In practice, it takes self-discipline on the part of the user as well as the web interface to really make a difference.
That might be what's missing in this move to curated sources, limited engagement, and turning that torrent into something more manageable. There's not much subtlety when it comes to the internet. It's normally all in or not at all, something that Facebook has been trading in since the site was launched. Choosing limits becomes difficult.
With the massive amount of soccer games and content, it's a question of how much is too much. We can't rely on the broadcasters to make that choice for us. It seems like any soccer rights package will show up on one of the soccer channels. Add in the online options, and there really are no limits. You might not be able to get the exact lower table matchup you want from a given league, but you've got a pretty good chance. All of Ligue 1 for instance, if you subscribe to Fox Soccer's online channel.
Again, it's back to the end user. You're the one deciding for yourself in a way that's unique in American professional team sports. Yet the pressure remains to know at least a little bit about a lot of soccer. Dip into La Liga, Serie A, the Premier League, and Mexico while keeping track of your MLS team and you're potentially committing yourself to more pro sports over a weekend than people who spend their Sunday's watching the early, late, and Sunday night National Football League games. And that's assuming you're staying soccer-specific. Deign to follow other sports, and you've filled your waking hours.
That might read like a bit of an exaggeration, but I'm not so sure. We've moved from an era of limited or no coverage of the biggest soccer leagues on the planet here in the USA to blanket coverage and unfettered access without having to leave your home. Some people see that as a great thing, but like what Google+ and Facebook are currently moving against, it might not be that simple.
I'll go ahead and say it isn't. The push for more has left us with a domestic league that doesn't get a clear stage for its games. MLS competes against every major and some minor leagues across the world for basic attention in their own country. It creates a false picture. We simply don't know where the League might be if they had a Saturday soccer-specific broadcast window to themselves. We also don't know what it would be like if the glut of non-US games was curated.
Considering the television ratings for a lot of these games, less could be more. Take a chance on one game from a given league rather than dumping every available offering and leaving it on the viewer. Build that game up, tell us why we should be watching, and see if it's possible to build an audience that way.
There are enough options for the diehards. Like our tech company giants, it's time to start thinking about the average user, the normal American soccer fan, and what will really speak to them. Ignoring that while continuing to push content in search of an audience does none of us any favors.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
