Thursday, July 1, 2010

ESPN and the World Cup

An interesting piece from the WSJ about ESPN's extensive (and expensive) coverage of the World Cup.

Getting people who actually know about soccer / football to cover the matches is a good idea; I think I would have been inclined to have some more familiar faces and voices as well to make the enterprise seem a bit less foreign to US viewers.

I liked this bit:

If NBC managed to get a prime-time audience for curling at the winter Olympics, the cable network can surely generate buzz for the world's most popular sport.

My sense from the selected sample around me is that US interest in soccer is growing steadily over time. Now if only I could get my slingbox to work ...

1 comment:

Scott said...

In the 70's I was vaguely aware when the World Cup was going on, in the same way I was vaguely aware when the Davis Cup, or the America's Cup was going on. And if I ever learned who won, I certainly immediately forgot it. So it's definitely bigger now. How much of that is a function of modern communications, and how much some other change in tastes?

Would you rather see the UW win an NCAA football championship or the US win the World Cup? Given an equivalent question, my Mexican in-laws would take no more than an eighth of a second to answer the latter. I, on the other hand...