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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ).
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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.
