|
|
bid for attention
Swaps World Cup rights for ABC/ESPN airtime
By Carl Bialik
The World Cup is the premier event of soccer, the indisputable king of world sports. Yet in a sign of how far out of step U.S. sports fans are with the rest of the world, ABC and ESPN have secured broadcast rights to this summer's cup and that of 2006 without having to pay a cent.
The arrangement is part of a risky move by Major League Soccer, the U.S. professional league, as part of its larger plan to turn pro soccer into a major TV sport in the U.S.
A group of MLS investors formed a league-affiliated company that paid approximately $40 million for the U.S. rights to the two cups, as well as the 2003 women's World Cup in China.
The company, in turn, signed a deal with the networks that guarantees them an unspecified amount of revenue in exchange for providing airtime for all 64 men's cup matches, 11 women's cup matches, and about 30 MLS matches per season through 2006.
It is an ambitious plan.
In a media conference call after the deal was announced, MLS Commissioner Don Garber said of the new company, "It is our intention to seek other soccer properties, both domestic and international, to further our plan to ultimately own soccer in America. It is ultimately our goal to make this new company one of the premier soccer organizations in the world."
Owning soccer in America is of dubious value.
Analysts say the MLS's move shows what little progress soccer has made among the U.S.'s English-speaking TV viewers since the MLS's debut six years ago.
Yet those same analysts believe it is a worthwhile risk for the league to take.
"The MLS has an opportunity to package itself with a high-profile entity," says Don Hinchey, director of creative services at The Bonham Group, a sports-consulting firm.
"The MLS should be able to parlay its involvement in the World Cup into greater exposure for its product and an elevation of its status in this country with mainstream sports fans. I would expect to see a spike in MLS viewership."
Marc Ganis, president of sports consulting firm Sportscorp Ltd., expects that the TV deal will include promotional time for MLS.
The deal, he says, is "certainly a financial risk but one that makes sense for them to take to build the sport.
"The MLS will use the World Cup and the quality of play that will be exhibited to drum up interest, both in terms of television audiences and fan attendance," Ganis predicts.
Yet Ganis sees the entire deal as a "double-edged sword."
"The quality of play in the World Cup is so superior to that of MLS play, so athletic, so balletic, and in many ways so physical, that it will likely attract an American audience," says Ganis.
"That’s the good news. The bad news is that the quality of play diminishes so significantly when you get to league play, and that might have the potential to turn off fans."
The best defense against that double-edged sword would be a successful performance by the U.S. team, many of whose stars are MLS players.
"The huge question for domestic TV audiences is how the U.S. team does," said Lynn Kahle, professor of sports marketing at the University of Oregon.
Unfortunately, the U.S. team's draw at this point is weak, both in terms of matchups and scheduling.
Its first two games this summer are against powerhouse Portugal and host South Korea, and they take place on a Wednesday and a Monday, respectively, so they are unlikely to be tape-delayed for a prime weekend time slot.
The third game is against Poland, which dominated in qualifying play. That game is more favorable from a scheduling standpoint. It will be played on Friday, June 14, and ABC might show the game on tape delay the next afternoon.
The league's fortunes have always been tied to those of the World Cup in this country. Its origins can be traced to the 1994 World Cup, hosted by the U.S. At that cup, both the U.S. team and fan interest exceeded expectations, raising hopes that a U.S. professional soccer league could succeed.
However, mainstream sports fans have never fully embraced the MLS. Last year's broadcasts on ESPN and ESPN2 averaged an audience of only about 200,000 households per game.
The week after the league announced its new deal with ABC and ESPN, it announced that the MLS's two Florida franchises, in Tampa Bay and Miami, were ceasing operations.
The Miami team's demise was particularly troubling because it had the best regular-season record last year and attendance at the Fusion's games had risen 33 percent.
In 1998, as MLS's fortunes were floundering, domestic TV ratings for the 1998 cup, hosted by France, dropped 50 percent. The time difference did not help; neither did the U.S.'s embarrassing last-place performance.
With this year's cup to be hosted by Japan and Korea, many of the games will take place in the middle of the night in the U.S. time zones, leaving little hope for a ratings increase.
Ganis says that if the MLS had not bought the rights for the cup, some networks would have bid for them, but "at a minimal fee."
This is in sharp contrast to the rest of the world; an average of 578 million people watched each game of the 1998 Cup.
Ganis points out the great difficulty the MLS faces in marketing the event, what he calls a Catch-22, in light of U.S. fans' tepid interest.
"Do you market by promoting the American team and American stars--even though the team is not expected to do well and the stars are not household names--and market the U.S. of A. and patriotism in a world competition?" Ganis asks.
"Or do you market to the core soccer audience in the United States, people who have emigrated from other countries?
"If you do the latter, you don’t really hit the core U.S. market, but if you do the former, the ratings are not likely to be very high," Ganis concludes.
Many of the recent immigrants whom Ganis calls the core soccer audience are Spanish-speaking, and for previous cups many of them have gravitated to the broadcasts on the Spanish network Univision, which reaches 70 percent of U.S. television households.
January 23, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Carl Bialik is a New York writer and regular contributor to Media Life.
Printer-Friendly
Version | Send
to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact
Us
