Augen said:
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.
