Things got a lot dimmer for the U.S. men’s soccer team with yesterday’s ugly 3-0 opening-round loss to the Czech Republic in the World Cup. But they’re looking pretty bright for ABC and Univision.

Through the first weekend of the 2006 Cup in Germany, both networks saw big increases in ratings versus the same weekend in 2002.

Saturday’s game between new Cup sweethearts Trinidad & Tobago and Sweden at noon on Saturday averaged a 2.9 overnight household rating on ABC, an 81 percent improvement over the 1.6 for an equivalent game between Ireland and Cameroon four years ago.

On Sunday, ABC averaged a 2.7 for Iran-Mexico, a 42 percent jump over 2002’s 1.9 for Sweden-England.

ABC also earned a strong rating for its opening game on Saturday between England and Paraguay, which averaged a 2.6 rating. There was no equivalent game in the ’02 World Cup.

Meanwhile, Univision averaged 2.6 million viewers for its first eight games, or nearly three times the 900,000 viewers the first eight games of the 2002 tournament averaged. That includes the Mexico-Iran matchup, which averaged 5.4 million viewers, becoming the most-watched sporting even in Spanish-language television history.

The main reason for the increases is fairly simple. In 2002, all of the games ABC aired on weekends were taped, as were those that aired in Univision in primetime. Though ESPN aired live coverage of some games that year, when it was played in Japan and South Korea, daytime games were all on tape delay.

By that time, casual soccer fans had already found the results themselves online. Only true diehards watched the taped games while ratings for the live games, despite airing between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., spiked.

“I passed on a lot of Spanish-language packages during the last World Cup,” says Karen McCallum, media director at Esparza Advertising in Albuquerque, N.M. “They were airing from the Far East, and what with the time difference, I didn’t feel that people would do live viewing in the middle of the night.

“They proved me wrong. It was a missed opportunity, and so I definitely expected ratings from Germany to be higher than they were from the Far East. It’s a more favorable schedule and American viewers have a better opportunity not to disrupt their schedules with live viewing.”

The opening-weekend ratings all outdid ABC’s 2.5 rating for the 2002 World Cup final, which aired at 7 a.m. The three-game 2.7 average nearly doubled ABC’s 10-game 2002 World Cup average of 1.4, all but one, the final, of which were taped. And the Mexico game outdrew even past World Cup finals on Univision.

In addition to airing live, this year’s World Cup has gotten more publicity in the States than any World Cup since the U.S. hosted the event in 1994, according to numerous sports marketing experts. Awareness of the Cup is at its highest point in that time as well, especially with more expectations for a U.S. team ranked fifth in the world, according to FIFA, soccer’s governing body.

So the next question becomes will yesterday’s dismal U.S. opener dampen enthusiasm for the rest of the tournament?

McCallum doesn’t think so. 

“I think that it has the potential to vary by region,” she says. “Here in the Southwest, people may be less interested in the U.S. than they would be in Mexico. With certain Latin American countries continuing on their quest [for the Cup], that has the potential to maintain heightened awareness and interest in the Cup.”

Another good story that Americans may latch onto is Trinidad & Tobago, the tiny nearby island country with fewer than 1.5 million residents that, in its first-ever World Cup, tied mighty Sweden. That has received lots of attention in the U.S. and worldwide press.