By J Hutcherson - WASHINGTON, DC (Jan 23, 2012) US Soccer Players -- On Sunday morning, the Premier League on Fox gave us a glimpse of the immediate future of professional soccer in the United States. A live regular season game on network television treated the same way as the other North American pro sports.
Fox went first, and NBC will follow with Major League Soccer later this year. The potential for soccer taking its next step into the mainstream in this country is here, and there's no downplaying the importance of success at this level.
Those of us of a certain age remember when it was difficult to get up to date scores, much less same-day game coverage. The United States really was a professional soccer wasteland for a number of years between the end of the original North American Soccer League and the rise of easily accessible internet access, not to mention MLS. Television coverage? It was still nowhere near what we now take for granted.
Highlight shows, especially the two-hour Premier League show on the Fox regional networks. Those were the norm and that formed most of the discussion unless you happened to know someone with an elaborate satellite setup. Even then, you were just as likely to see some obscure game rather than that top of the table clash. At the time, even the random game on TV was more than welcome.
My first exposure to pro soccer was a re-cut of Match of the Day that was shown on the old Turner Sports South late on Sunday nights. There was no guarantee it was current. I remember an episode centered around a year-old FA Cup game. Hey, it was better than nothing, especially if - like me - you didn't know any better.
Pro soccer as I found it was a connecting point to something different, not necessarily better than the North American sports leagues at the time, but different. In many ways, the appeal was similar to hockey in non-Northern markets. Few people played the sport at any highly competitive level, so it lacked the former athlete focus of baseball, basketball, or football.
I grew up in the South when the closest National Hockey League team was in DC. Watching a game on ESPN live from Winnipeg or some other city I was never likely to visit had its own unique appeal, a difference that can pull you in. That's certainly what happened to me with pro hockey and later pro soccer. I wanted to know more about what I was watching, the teams and their stories as much as trying to figure out a sport that was several steps removed from my own experience. People played soccer, sure, but it didn’t look like what I was seeing once a week from England in the early 90’s.
But how to get into it when there weren’t a lot of options? It was difficult in a way that sounds like someone talking about a different world. Short-wave radio to pick up BBC World Service, two month old magazines when I could find them, and PAL format video players. The internet changed things even before the graphic browser became common in early 1995. The old telnet and newsgroup days meant the ability to get information from people that knew, people who lived there.
By the mid-90’s, it was possible to spend some cash on Saturday and Sunday morning to see closed circuit games. Another game changer, especially since the closed circuit games were normally the biggest games on offer. It wasn't easy and it wasn't cheap, something that made following soccer increasingly difficult when money wasn't exactly flowing in grad school. Fortunately, the Mexican League games were available over the air along with a friend who recorded that Premier League highlights show. Make no mistake about the importance of Fox Sports and their commitment to spending two hours rounding up what happened over the previous week in England. To this day, I’ve never seen anything better and that includes Fox Soccer’s current offerings.
Now? It's not just readily available web video, it's what anybody can stumble across on easily available television. That's a generational shift, the kind of availability that makes what once was rare common.
With that in mind, we could be talking about a lot of things in the age of the high speed internet. On a music forum near you, someone is probably arguing that downloading mp3's can't possibly replace buying albums. The hunt is part of the point. There’s pride in ownership of the physical product, once upon a time in my case boxes of magazines and video cassettes to go along with obscure replica shirts ordered out of the back of one of the many print soccer magazines that used to exist.
I don’t agree. I gave up most of my collection a few moves ago and it’s not something that sends me to an auction site trying to rebuild what I once had. It served its usefulness, even if I was wrong about the relative availability of some of those titles in the age of multiple video on demand services.
Yet it’s still not as easy as it is for other North American sports. There, you turn on a broadcast network for the biggest games of the season. It focuses even the casual sports fan on a few moments simply because it’s so immediately available. This is one of the reasons the NBC deal became so important for MLS. Though it should’ve rightly irked them to see a high profile network broadcast of a foreign soccer game with no mention of Major League Soccer, that’s the deal they made. NBC over Fox for less money but the opening for far greater exposure.
What Fox is doing with the Premier League is normalizing it for an American audience. It’s the next step, succeed or fail, and it needs to be taken.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
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