4 ms·
You guys live in such a tiny bubble. Soccer is gaining popularity, yes. That's great, but the NFL brought in 11.6B last year. The MLS? 533M. Hell, Hockey brough
by EpicEng 10y ago
You guys live in such a tiny bubble. Soccer is gaining popularity, yes. That's great, but the NFL brought in 11.6B last year. The MLS? 533M. Hell, Hockey brought in seven times that. The NFL is the largest professional sports league on the planet.
Soccer is still very niche here and most people watching ESPN simply don't give a crap about it (myself included.)
ESPN is failing because their commentary is going downhill and they're trying to become a pop culture entertainment channel. More soccer would just hurt them.
- petepete 10y ago> The NFL is the largest professional sports league on the planet. True, but only just. By media income, the Premier League is projected to surpass the NFL in 2017.
- EpicEng 10y agoPremier league is not American sports. ESPN caters to an American audience, which is exactly what we're talking about here. How is that relevant? Few people here care about European sports. And why cherry pick media income? Premier league made 4B. The NFL is projected to bring in 13B this year.
- j1vms 10y agoAssociation football (as in football or soccer, depending on where you are), through its various leagues, has much higher combined revenues than the NFL. In fact, the European leagues alone have greater aggregate revenue than the NFL. The NFL is of course one tightly-coupled organization, so comparison might not be "fair game". And yeah the MLS is even quite small compared to several of its counterparts throughout the world. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_leagues_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le...
- jonathankoren 10y agoWhat's your point? Liga MX probably gets higher rating in the US than the European top leagues combined and it's what second tier? No one cares about watching a bunch of foreign countries with team names that don't even make sense play games at inconvient times on a third tier cable channel that makes it impossible to watch any single team because it's just random matches on random days. Seriously, its European sports culture doesn't fit American sports culture. The league change teams year to year. The names are incomprehensible (Juventis? "Children"? Is that what that means? Where is this team even from?) The clock is idiotic (Count down, and stop the clock when play stops. This is 19th century technology people.) Soccer's problem in the US is that it's niche and doubles down on its nichedom (I'm looking at you Real Salt Lake and Dallas FC.) The other problem is that US isn't good enough at it, and so we don't care. (Yes, USMNT's ranking has steadily improved over the last 20 years, but it's not a powerhouse.) Conversely, the only time most Americans pay attention to soccer is when the Women's World Cup is on.
- jonathankoren 10y agoAs I suspected, Liga MX is the most watched soccer league in the US.[0] [0] http://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-soccer-baxter-20160501-story.html http://www.latimes.com/sports/soccer/la-sp-soccer-baxter-201...
- EpicEng 10y agoWhat does that matter? You're combining a ton of separate professional leagues. We're talking about the US here, ESPN's primary audience. I know that Soccer is very popular around the world, but that's irrelevant in this context.