By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Oct 6, 2011) US Soccer Players -- So we now know what a top-tier soccer game on network television draws. Even on tape-delay, it's about 1.5 million viewers. That's the takeaway from Fox's experiment in showing delayed English Premier League games on Sunday afternoon, and it's also a new goal for what counts as success with televised soccer in America.
That's probably not great news for Major League Soccer, who face a direct comparison with their new NBC deal. The number is higher if you include the live broadcast earlier in the day on Fox Soccer and the Spanish-language coverage. We're leaving those out because it skews things. Most games don't get three cable channels showing them and the cable numbers are a different category than over-air broadcast numbers. Even without those extra 600,000 viewers, it's still a very difficult number.
In the past, MLS has always managed to shirk direct comparisons. They normally play at night, the Euro leagues are early morning to mid afternoon. The audiences are different, and so on. The Premier League on Fox doesn't leave the same outs. This was a tape-delayed game that started at 5pm Eastern on Sunday.
Then again, maybe people expecting to see an afternoon National Football League game on Fox simply neglected to turn off the soccer. Stranger things, but we're still talking about an average over two games of around 1.5 million.
Would that hold if the Premier League was on Fox every week? Who knows. As it stands, the three Premier League games on Fox are necessary placeholders with no indication that this becomes a regular feature. Those of us old enough to remember Sunday night Premier League games on ESPN always assumed there was enough of an audience to keep them on the schedule. To some extent, Fox has proven that at a level no one should expected.
It's another open question what this really means. It's worth stressing the irregular programming schedule, cherry picking top tier games, and what any programming would draw on Fox at 5pm on an NFL Sunday. These aren't exactly replicable circumstances for MLS on NBC, but it's certainly the only direct comparison once the League launches on that network.
Again, the bar has been raised and it's going to be tough to downplay only hitting a small percentage of that Fox audience. The Arena League on NBC had three seasons to create a market, and they started about where Fox is with their EPL coverage. A 1.1 share is roughly 1.5 million viewers, and that's what the AFL on NBC averaged its first season. They ended up around a 0.7 share, not good enough for a network slot.
If 1.1 is success and 0.7 is failure, there's not a lot of room to claim a result with what we've seen from MLS ratings up to this point. The League signing with NBC means four games on the main channel, two regular season and two playoffs. That's the same limited number the EPL has on the main Fox channel. It remains an obvious comparison.
How MLS gets from a disappointing 0.5 share on cable - a smaller actual viewers number than network - for last year's MLS Cup to even that 0.7 network number is a very good question. There will be a boost simply from being on network television, but it's probably not going to be enough to get a marquee MLS game into that range between 0.7 and 1.1. How can we already be saying that with any certainty? Because MLS hasn't gotten a game over 1.0 on cable in five years.
As much acclaim as that NBC deal created when it was announced, there remains the downside of actually putting up the kind of numbers network television demands. It's surprising that Fox's Premier League games have managed it two games running, with two more to go. They're actively creating a new definition for club soccer on network television. This creates substantial pressure on an MLS product that is still trying to figure out what happened with last year's MLS Cup.
Make no mistake, the pressure on MLS to show an improved rating for this year's MLS Cup just increased substantially. ESPN is not network, but that number is going to be the one that gets compared to what the EPL is doing on Fox. Right now, it stands at around 1.5 million viewers.
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