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Forums - Sports Discussion - major league soccer slowly on the rise in North America

GO GALAXY!!!!!



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theprof00 said:
Augen said:
theprof00 said:
Not sure if it's been said yet, but the real reason why nobody likes soccer is because theyre not told to like soccer.


Except, of course, the millions of Americans and Canadians who do like soccer.  The biggest issue the sport has, as this thread shows, is perception.  

People think nobody likes soccer because they are told nobody likes soccer.  

Ignore the thousands of people every week who attend and watch league and international matches.  Ignore the fact that television contracts for foriegn and domestic leagues have exploded in past decade. Ignore that the World Cup is now one of the most viewed events in the country. 17 million people watched the US play England in 2010, 19 million watched the US play Ghana. The average viewer was in their 30s.

Massives companies like Nike, Adidas and Pepsi do not dump millions into a sport no one likes.  We are simply a massive country with enough space for multiple sports.  I think in the next two or three World Cups we will see the break through where the general public realize the tremendous progress made since 1994.

saying that nobody likes soccer is a bit extreme. Sure there's lots of people who dislike soccer for whatever reason, but in reality, there's just apathy to the sport, and it's because advertising isn't intrinsically linked to the sport.

Yes it's growing in popularity. Yes people watch it. Yes, there is demand. But without advertisers in on it, there's no push.

Just think of it like a video game without advertising. A good game will still sell well, but if there aren't any advertisers pushing it, it will never reach its potential. When you're invested in a medium, you do what you can to maximize your impact. Like coors, you'll have an ad on monday night football, produce beer coozies, and try to get your name on anything in the game. You invest in making a magazine for each game so that you can control your own advertising at a cheaper price with more impact. You fund the groundskeepers so you can have you brand cut into the grass. You might fund new chairs for a stadium that have your logo on them. Or you might buy jerseys, or sports-cards, or game-advertising rights, and what have you.

All of these things improve the quality level of the fan experience.

Now, with baseball, you have roughly an hour+ of commercials. Let's say that breaks down to 100-50 commercials. That makes every commercial very cheap, and you can have several. Then look at soccer, where there are like, only 4-5 commercial breaks (they sometimes go to commercial during play).  That makes commercials very expensive. More expensive means you have significantly less diverse companies. Less companies means less people involved, less people means fewer ideas. It's a snowball effect. With baseball so heavily branded, you can't find something that doesn't have a hand in it or an ad during its breaks. Calendars, watches, pens, bike helmets, motorcycles. You will see so much variation during a baseball game, it's uncanny.

Absolutely, we are going to see more growth in soccer...but I promise you it will come through advertising. They just need to figure out how to do it without interrupting the game.


One of the reasons I dont like watching American sports (and US TV in general) is the amount of ads during each broadcast. Having ads every few minutes kills any suspense,  tension and excitement built up by a game. I dont watch sport to find out what beer ot drink or car to drive, I watch it for the sport. It's refreshing watching socccer for 45 minutes without ad breaks. As for ad revenue, if there is enough interest in the sport it will generate plenty of ad revenue. The growing interest int he MLS will and has increased the ad revenue. The Masters golf tournament restricts the amount of ads during a broadcast and gets by perfectly well. Also, teams all over the world get by perfectly well with no ad breaks during each half of a soccer game and there is more than one way to increase revenue. 

Its good to see MLS doing so well and it has a lot of momentum around it also. The games are good quallity and there is great atmosphere at the matches - I have been to a number of timbers matches (go timbers!) and the atmosphere is great, better than some of the premier league matches that I have been to (Everton home games in particular are full of old people! XD ).



This is not an exit.

generic-user-1 said:
Kasz216 said:
SvennoJ said:

 


the police knows tat if they shoot at the hooligans they will spark a real riot, because the peacefull fans will not take those actions by the police, and u dont wanna have 20k angry guys running around in your town.

What kind of screwed up country supports violent hooligans who attack the police, other people and destroy property over the police in such cases?

Why, because they support the same soccer team?  The Police probably support the same team as well!



SvennoJ said:

Can't wait for some serious soccer hooligans in a country full of guns.

Yay football!

Can't wait for the media to blame the sport for the shootings.



If you demand respect or gratitude for your volunteer work, you're doing volunteering wrong.

drkohler said:
Kasz216 said:
drkohler said:

It may have been or it may not have been at the time. It was exactly the key agument I was told then (by a group of people I'd certainly consider with a higher than average education level. This included several sports teachers, including football teachers at various levels.).

Well that's a problem because there is no such thing as a football teacher.

 

Most likely, the people you talked to, just don't really know the history of the sport.

You are interpreting the term "violent" too literally. We are not talking about people pulling knives and guns out of their pockets. (Btw, the teacher I remember actually was a teacher (math I think) who was asked to be a soccer coach as well. Not every school had/has coaches for their sports teams. But that is irrelevant to the discussion). I'd term a sport violent when the players are packed into something resembling an armour and the basic goal is to try and crash into other players, leading to injuries (and quite frankly, to serious mental problems after a few years of head banging). The "non-violent" equivalent sport everywhere else is called rugby and has considerably less problems with "violence". Then again, rugby is considerably more popular than football (outside the States). So the three simple reasons for the increase in soccer's popularity can be summed up as:

1. Everybody can do it - even women - pretty much everywhere

2. You don't have to pay a fortune for an armour

3. It's a lot cheaper for a family to watch a soccer game than (probably) any of the more prominent games

Of course part 3 is only true as along as soccer is not too successful. Once big business sees profit things can change, usually to the worse.

In what way does that apply to baseball and basketball?

As for Rugby everywhere else...   Rugby is very different country to country.   Austrlian Rules football and New Zealand Rugby have a number of differences for example.

Hell Football is Rugby (Rugby Football), or a form of it, this can best be shown by Canadian Football, which people likely would think came from American Football but actually was adapted independantly from a local Rugby code.

and again, Canadian football is more popular then soccer, as is Hockey,  are the Candians supposed to be all bloodthirsty?

 

And yeah, teachers do coach the sports teams, they aren't Football teachers though, they're usually health teachers or teach another subject, then also coach.  They don't just "Teach" a sport though.  Not unless they run one of the athlete mills.

 

As for anyone playing soccer and not just roided up people etc.    That's not really true.  You need to be physically talented just in different ways to make it far in Soccer. 

I mean anyone can play football too, i've never been physically gifted and we used to play tackle football all the time.  Without any gear, as kids.  With a few modifications, afterall you couldn't convince anybody to play the line.



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Augen said:
Kasz216 said:
Oh and as for actually watching Soccer. I'll pass on MLS games.

It's the premier league for me. I want to watch the best teams I can in english.


Sorry you feel that way. Nothing beats the sport live singing with fellow supporters and be happy to have newcomers along.

I've been to Saint James, Old Trafford, White Hart Lane, Anfield and others.  It's nice, but it is not mine and to me the sport is about community and my friends in DU and BB. 

See, that's probably my problem.

I don't watch sports as a supporter really.  Despite growing up in  a major city with 3 proffesional sports teams, for me, the fun in sports is watching the strategy of the games, and the flow of it, and to see the best at their sport play.

I pick a favorite from game to game that i root for, but I don't really have any allegiances beyond knowing that if certain teams win it will make friends and family happy.

 

Me I'd rather see a unique game where an underdog forces a close game by running a full press all game, or just watch two teams adapt and change strategies, follow the flow of the game, make predictions and see if I can point out where the turning points happen correctly.

 

As such, I actually prefer a televised game to just going to see a game in most cases.

Can't be beat.

Though soccer is second in that regard for my money anwyay.

That's why basketball is my fafvorite sport.  It tends to have the most adjustments, allow for strategy changes, and even different positional moves by playing a "small" or "Big" lineup, switching your star to another position to lock somebody down, the effect fouls can have on games, or forced time outs.

 



NightDragon83 said:
 Mark my words... by the end of the next decade MLS will be in the top 5 leagues world wide.
Top 6 is likely in my opinion, but Top 5 will be very hard to do. Imho the current top 5 leagues worldwide are from the following "countries":
Brazil, Italy, Germany, England and Spain. So the MLS would need to surpass one of those (the most likely being the Italian one).

 



i_p_freely said:
theprof00 said:
Augen said:
theprof00 said:
Not sure if it's been said yet, but the real reason why nobody likes soccer is because theyre not told to like soccer.


Except, of course, the millions of Americans and Canadians who do like soccer.  The biggest issue the sport has, as this thread shows, is perception.  

People think nobody likes soccer because they are told nobody likes soccer.  

Ignore the thousands of people every week who attend and watch league and international matches.  Ignore the fact that television contracts for foriegn and domestic leagues have exploded in past decade. Ignore that the World Cup is now one of the most viewed events in the country. 17 million people watched the US play England in 2010, 19 million watched the US play Ghana. The average viewer was in their 30s.

Massives companies like Nike, Adidas and Pepsi do not dump millions into a sport no one likes.  We are simply a massive country with enough space for multiple sports.  I think in the next two or three World Cups we will see the break through where the general public realize the tremendous progress made since 1994.

saying that nobody likes soccer is a bit extreme. Sure there's lots of people who dislike soccer for whatever reason, but in reality, there's just apathy to the sport, and it's because advertising isn't intrinsically linked to the sport.

Yes it's growing in popularity. Yes people watch it. Yes, there is demand. But without advertisers in on it, there's no push.

Just think of it like a video game without advertising. A good game will still sell well, but if there aren't any advertisers pushing it, it will never reach its potential. When you're invested in a medium, you do what you can to maximize your impact. Like coors, you'll have an ad on monday night football, produce beer coozies, and try to get your name on anything in the game. You invest in making a magazine for each game so that you can control your own advertising at a cheaper price with more impact. You fund the groundskeepers so you can have you brand cut into the grass. You might fund new chairs for a stadium that have your logo on them. Or you might buy jerseys, or sports-cards, or game-advertising rights, and what have you.

All of these things improve the quality level of the fan experience.

Now, with baseball, you have roughly an hour+ of commercials. Let's say that breaks down to 100-50 commercials. That makes every commercial very cheap, and you can have several. Then look at soccer, where there are like, only 4-5 commercial breaks (they sometimes go to commercial during play).  That makes commercials very expensive. More expensive means you have significantly less diverse companies. Less companies means less people involved, less people means fewer ideas. It's a snowball effect. With baseball so heavily branded, you can't find something that doesn't have a hand in it or an ad during its breaks. Calendars, watches, pens, bike helmets, motorcycles. You will see so much variation during a baseball game, it's uncanny.

Absolutely, we are going to see more growth in soccer...but I promise you it will come through advertising. They just need to figure out how to do it without interrupting the game.


One of the reasons I dont like watching American sports (and US TV in general) is the amount of ads during each broadcast. Having ads every few minutes kills any suspense,  tension and excitement built up by a game. I dont watch sport to find out what beer ot drink or car to drive, I watch it for the sport. It's refreshing watching socccer for 45 minutes without ad breaks. As for ad revenue, if there is enough interest in the sport it will generate plenty of ad revenue. The growing interest int he MLS will and has increased the ad revenue. The Masters golf tournament restricts the amount of ads during a broadcast and gets by perfectly well. Also, teams all over the world get by perfectly well with no ad breaks during each half of a soccer game and there is more than one way to increase revenue. 

Its good to see MLS doing so well and it has a lot of momentum around it also. The games are good quallity and there is great atmosphere at the matches - I have been to a number of timbers matches (go timbers!) and the atmosphere is great, better than some of the premier league matches that I have been to (Everton home games in particular are full of old people! XD ).

This is not actually true though. Soccer is one of, if not the lowest paid televised sports. Right now, the world cup attracts 1.2B euros in marketing revenue.
The NCAA does that every year. And that's just college....the superbowl does 150% of that number in just one game. The masters, by comparison, made 20m last year over the course of the whole tournament.

It's not that they aren't doing well. I'm not sure if maybe you have my point skewed because you seem to be defending it a bit. I'm not attacking soccer, I'm saying that because of low ad revenue, it doesn't get as much coverage. As popularity increases, so will the costs of having the game on your network. To compensate, networks will need to either charge advertisers MORE, or simply allow more advertisements. Further, I'm not sure what you're talking about in terms of "increasing revenue". Are we talking about the same people? I'm talking about the networks, but it seems like you're talking about something else. There is not "more than one way to increase revenue". It's ads. Networks ONLY make money on ads.

You seem to be thinking that I'm saying soccer isn't profitable. That's not what I'm saying.

Soccer is a great game, and general interest is increasing, and investors are looking to jump in to a burgeoning new league....but that still has little to do with the networks. I agree that soccer is refreshing in that it doesn't take breaks. I enjoy that as well. But without ads, it's going to be harder for it to grow. The other sports grow because there is big money behind them. Hundreds of companies. Soccer has adidas and nike....who are also in EVERY other sport. When such a huge number of companies are involved, it creates an evironment that pushes the game to do well. Soccer needs this, and I'm not saying they need to go ahead and break up the action with ads, but they need to come up with something. Picture in picture, scroll bars...something.

 





DirtyP2002 said:
vivster said:
I guess if the US would put their mind to it they could be one of the leading football nations.


I heard this before...

Is there any team sports that America is always in the top 5 of the world that is actually played by Europeans / Asians?
Basketball, handegg, Baseball are pretty much US only.



There are actually more then a few professional Basketball leauges in Europe.  All the European players that a currently playing in the NBA played professionally in Europe before they got drafted.  Even Dirk played professionally in Germany before he was drafted by and joined the Dallas Maveriks.



amp316 said:
DirtyP2002 said:
vivster said:
I guess if the US would put their mind to it they could be one of the leading football nations.


I heard this before...

Is there any team sports that America is always in the top 5 of the world that is actually played by Europeans / Asians?
Basketball, handegg, Baseball are pretty much US only.



There is hockey.  I'm pretty sure that Europeans play that....

And I'm pretty sure that baseball is pretty huge in Japan.

There are actually more then a few professional basketball leagues in Europe and in Lithuania basketball is just as popular as it is in the US.  China also has a professional basketball leauge that is pretty popular.