You’ve pretty much hit the key historical differences on the nose here. In the U.S., the guys owning businesses got into sports as another way of making money before the local athletic clubs had a chance to become really established. American sports have always been about profits, even if it means sacrificing certain individual competitive advantages to make them. Euro sports seem to have a much deeper background of “our local guys against the local guys from the next town,” but became so popular that the capitalists inevitably got involved.
Americans probably cannot fathom Bundesliga, which I like best of all.
Pitch is how they refer to a field. Its no different than folks in the US calling a soccer field (but then you get some strange folks saying, no it’s ‘pitch’ in soccer).
You’re correct that it’s a fairly impressive number. Keep in mind that over 1/3 of that number was on Spanish broadcaster Univision so there’s clearly a strong draw in the Spanish-speaking community.
For comparison, the 2014 Kentucky Derby got over half that viewership (15 million) for a sport that I’m pretty sure 95% of the viewers don’t watch any other time of the year. Spectacle still sells, and the World Cup final has that. The average viewership over all the World Cup games in 2014 was just over 4.5 million. Good, but not in the area of a must see TV in the US.
I didn’t see anyone fully address this one - the biggest thing that keeps teams from falling into a downward spiral is the draft; the worst team gets the first pick of the best players out of college.
Also, in the case of the NFL, national TV money and licensing is the biggest revenue stream, far outpacing ticket sales. Teams get an even share of that regardless of record. Incidentally, thats the big difference between the NFL and MLB (baseball). For baseball, with 82 home games as opposed to 8, ticket sales are huge, and local TV deals are much bigger than the national deals.
As I understand it, teams even have to share most of gate. The one thing owners do not have to share is revenue from luxury boxes, those nice personal lounge places about mid level, with the glass windows and wet bar, that go for tens of thousands of dollars per game. Because of this, teams have declared their venues inadequate, threatening their city with abandonment if they fail to get better digs.
It’s nice to know. Soccer somehows trascends a mere game with a ball and becomes something much more engrained in a nation’s collective coscience. It often symbolizes historical or social events in ways that always surprise.
I did watch the Super Bowl and I didn’t find it much more action-packed than an average soccer match. Probably it was more American-ish as you had lots of funny commercials (which I didn’t see - NBC online streaming blacked them out!) and a halftime show for a broader public. Consider, again, that the World Cup is a wrong example: far more games end 1-0 or 1-1 than in normal club matches and there are many more penalty kicks than usual. It has an enormous quantity of pathos that is, that too, absent from other tournaments - being kicked out of the World Cup is much worse than being eliminated from the Champions League.
A good idea would be to host European soccer matches in the US. For example Italy played a Cup Winners’ Cup in Doha, Qatar to foster interest in those countries. A nation as rich as the US would have no trouble getting Real Madrid or Bayern Munich to show off some serious soccer. Matches like that can easily mount up five or six goals in 90 minutes plus stunning athletic feats.
I don’t know if this is feasible, but it could be an idea to have the United States play often with South Americans, both at national and club levels. At the beginning might be a curbstomp battle but surely better than being with Canada and Mexico (with all due respect).
PS: Sorry for the terminology. I’m not a native speaker of English, and the Italian lexicon for soccer is quite different from any other language. Using “field” instead of “pitch” is actually more familiar to me, as we call it “campo” (field). In this sense it’s easier to use “soccer” since we don’t call it football in the first place, but “calcio” (literally meaning ‘kick’).
It’s not a “pitch,” but in any case, there often is advertising on walls between the sideline areas and the stands. There are enough breaks in the game to show television ads for revenue instead.
Now all NFL and top college games have the head referee with a microphone to announce penalties and rulings. It used to be just the hand signals, which were invented by an announcer who was friends with a referee; they developed the signs so the announcer could explain what the hell was going on to fans. The officials’ involvement with football is much more complicated than in soccer and explanations are useful.
The on-screen graphics are getting a bit much, but again, there is a lot of information available for the situation before the play starts. Notice that most of it is not shown during plays. Maybe soon viewers will be able to select what graphics are shown. It’s nothing compared to the last America’s Cup boat race on TV.
That is part of the current American culture of worshiping our military, lest you get accused of supporting terrorism. The more conservative a sport’s fanbase is, the more you’ll see of that. The NFL kisses a lot of asses, and this is just one. No skin off my back.
I imagine this is just historical preference. Many NFL stadiums tout their volume, and most broadcast booths are open. The broadcasters put shotgun and parabolic mics on the field, and occasionally mounting small ones on players. The idea is to get you into the action, not like you’re watching with binoculars from the next highrise over.
The same could be said for American football or (even more so) baseball. It’s all cultural.
I don’t think you’d get too much interest among the general public for those matches. There just isn’t general interest in soccer and hosting a few games with teams we know nothing about and care even less about isn’t going to change that. Although interest is rising, there’s not much demand for top tier soccer in the US. It would help, but it’s a long way from paying off.
I think you REALLY underestimate the popularity of soccer in the US. When there was a preseason tour of teams like Manchester United and Real Madrid this past Summer they played to sold out stadiums everywhere they went.
And, of course, international friendlies tend to be massive crowd draws, esp involving the USMNT or Hispanic teams (last year the Georgia Dome was full to bursting when Mexico played Columbia).
Most of the graphics appear between plays. There was a time when they didn’t even have the game clock on the screen most of the time (occasionally, it would appear, usually late in the game); I think the Fox network tried it, and everybody else liked the idea - another thing to thank Rupert Murdoch for.
Randomly? Aren’t all European leagues double round-robin (each team plays every other team in the league twice - once at each team’s home ground)? You can’t do that in American football; the players already feel that 16 games in a season (the teams in the Super Bowl play 19 or 20) is too many.
There is a formula used to determine a team’s opponents:
(a) A team plays the other three teams in its division twice - home and away
(b) A team plays the four teams in one of the divisions in the other conference; two are home games, and two are away games (so each team will have a home game against each team in the other conference once every eight years)
(c) A team plays the four teams in one of the other divisions in its own conference; again, two are home games and two are away games
(d) A team plays one team from the other two divisions in its conference; the specific teams are the ones that finished in the same position in their divisions last season that this team did in its division (so, for example, all of the division champions in a conference will play each other). One is a home game, and the other is an away game.
As for the specific dates and times of each game, this is based on a number of things, including what other events might be in those cities on those days that could cause traffic problems. For example, usually the Super Bowl champions play their first game at home on the Thursday of the first week, but there is a One Direction concert in New England’s stadium two days earlier. Also, there is still one team (Oakland) that shares its stadium with a baseball team.
The NFL has sold out Wembley Stadium for two games the last two seasons, and are expecting to sell out three games each the next two seasons. I don’t think that implies that American Football will ever be too popular in the UK. There is a built in ex-pat market, there’s spectacle, and there’s fans.
I don’t deny that soccer is somewhat popular in the US and growing, but at this point it is still a 2nd tier sport. More European teams are coming to the US. The owners of the Boston Red Sox baseball team also own Liverpool FC and brings them over to Fenway Park for games some years. Last year it was AS Roma and by all accounts the game was well attended and well received. Some cities have strong fan bases and are interested enough in soccer to make it viable. MLS is viable, and these top tier teams coming to the US to play is only going to help.
But I think there’s a ceiling on how popular soccer will be in the US for a long time. We’ll see how things pan out over time.
The 1994 World Cup was a success from that point of view, stadiums were full at every match.
Can I ask how does player recruitment work for MLS? I’ve researched on it and it seems to be a mix of a draft like NFL or NBA and an European-style transfer market and youth programs. It’s just not clear how practically it works.
In these days we learned that Toronto FC have bought Sebastian Giovinco from Juventus so it appears possible to conduct normal negotiations like in Europe.
Question: how does the TV transmission of the NFL work? Are all matches televised for free or on subscription-based channels? I get that the Super Bowl is televised by a different channel every year - does it work the same for all other matches?
No, the NFL broadcasting rights are pretty complex, with games being broadcast on a variety of networks, but mainly on two major ones. Currently, CBS and Fox have the NFC and AFC “packages” although it’s not exclusive. Those cover the 1:00 PM games and one network each week gets the doubleheader game at 4:00. I think; it’s complicated.
In addition there is one Sunday (NBC), Monday(ESPN), and Thursday(NFL Network) night game each week, that are separate packages.
Playoffs go CBS, NBC, and Fox, and the Super Bowl rotates between those networks.
There’s also the NFL Sunday Ticket cable package which essentially gets you all the games being played. But that costs quite a bit.
I’m no expert on this, but suffice it to say that it’s a complex broadcast package and it can even change during the season depending on some built in flexibility.
There is the Arena Football League (much much smaller) which has boards along the edge of the field. Players run in to them instead inattentive other players which never struck me as a better idea. There’s substitution between plays by both sides. Some teams run fast paced offenses (no or short huddles) to make swaps harder on the opposing defense. I could see it being harder to make those swaps over the boards. Hockey does substitutions that way but… I have a hard time seeing a lot of linemen rolling over the boards hockey style. It would make for great humor watching them try though. I can almost see the first time one of the 300+ lb guys levels the board trying to go over.
I’m old enough to remember when they generally didn’t. It honestly was not any less of a recipe for protest. If anything there was more protest when you didn’t know which aspect of the rule in question was driving the decision. For penalties away from the ball it could be even worse since people might be angrier since they think the penalty is on someone/something else.
I have a tendency to have a tablet or computer nearby for occasional extra information. Done well I like the extra information. Mostly they get it right and are just crowding the screen in between plays.
As someone who’s been military both pre and post 9/11 things got weird after. It became an almost kind of fetishism that was almost uncomfortable at times. I’m assuming it will mellow some as the pace of operations goes down.
It’s an immersive thing. It’s closer to being there IME. Maany fans tend to not like some of the announcers babbling on and on… and on… and on…