Something that I have thought: That we worry too much about the television ratings.
This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to us. For decades, American soccer fans have used any and all means necessary to watch the games that they want to watch. For some, it was sneaking into bars and suddenly becoming 21 years old. For others, it was taping and recording matches (Kids reading this: taping is basically illegal streaming with giant rectangular boxes. Go ask your parents).
At some point though, the discussion shifted from “What games can we find” to “How many people are watching?”. I am not quite sure where or when this happened although the TV English Premier League, the Champions League, and Major League Soccer in the mid-2010s seem to be a good place to start. Whatever the reason, there seems to be a focus on ratings being a valid barometer of whether or not soccer is actually sticking here in the States.
There are a couple faults to this line of thinking. First, very rarely if ever do these reports include online streaming. Think about how many games that you actually watch on over-the-air versus how many matches you either watch on one of the many applications that currently streams soccer matches. It is quite a large number, isn’t it? Yes, broadcast television still carries a certain level of leverage but make no mistake about it: Companies like ESPN, Fox, and NBC are just as interested in just having the rights and the number of games that they can stream as they are in the ratings of a specific match. There isn’t any sort of fear that Major League Soccer games will no longer be available in U.S. households because the likelihood that some other media company of a similar size will pick them up is strong.
Ratings also become a bit misleading when one considers just how splintered the soccer watching audience is. Soccer is unique from all other sports in that the level of talent in the club system is relatively spaced out among different teams in different countries. That level of complexity opens up the possibility that different leagues can be with different television and streaming partners. Having that level of variety is a great in that it gives the American public the opportunity to watch different styles. But as a viewer a decision has to be made as to what exactly one wants to watch.
Second, we always seem to forget that most people who would watch games during the day here in the States are children. And what are children doing when games are on in the morning and during the middle of the day? They are either playing soccer or at school/work. Every Saturday and Sunday, millions of parents and players across the United States are hauling their kids around to different soccer pitches across the country. Watching the Liverpool-Manchester City tilt becomes a challenge when you are stuck in a remote part of Virginia watching your three children play from 8am-4pm. When one’s audience is quite simply unavailable, that makes traditional ratings a bit hard to gather.
A quick sidebar on this second point: After reading that you may say to yourself, “Well yes, Sean, I can see how that might impact the ratings of Liverpool-Manchester City, but how does that impact an MLS match or an NWSL match? Those games are in the evening.” To understand how that might impact their ratings, you have to put yourself in the mindset of a parent or a player. If you have been on a soccer pitch for multiple hours on a weekend, is the first thing that you are going to want to watch on a Saturday night is another soccer match?
Something that those of us who work in soccer circles often fail to recognize is that not every person involved in soccer thinks like us. There is such a thing as the casual soccer fan and many of the parents and players involved in the game fall in that territory. It is a tricky group to market to as they want to be involved in the game but they hate being saturated. They may like or love soccer but they don’t LOVE soccer to the point that it is the central focus of their lives. The challenge that the domestic leagues have is keeping these individuals invested after having already been inundated with hours of soccer action. The good news is that a.) television and streaming providers are always in need of content and b.) both have a foot in the door due to their successes in courting the casual fans to live matches. The trick now is keeping them interested or finding times in which their soccer bandwidth is high.
Perhaps the biggest question that isn’t being asked when discussing ratings is what is the point? Why are we discussing the ratings of a sport that we know cannot be discussed in a traditional sense and at a time when ratings for even the most prominent television shows are plummeting? It is a troubling trend within some circles of American soccer-the desire to see everything and everyone fail so that one’s personal opinion can be ‘right’. The need to have an opinion or a take seems to take precedence over even looking at the state of the market and a careful look at outliers. Or you know, watching it for fun.
What seems to be missing in the ratings debate isn’t a look at the raw numbers but how the American soccer public thinks. The different motivations and perspectives would be a far better study on how the market works and what they are interested than some match-by-match comparison that looks pretty on a graph and is good for a soundbyte on a podcast.
After all of these years and all of these efforts to legitimizing the sport to an American sports audience, we still seem to be missing the point: It is not about how many people tune in but rather who tunes in and why they are watching. There is still such a thing as watching a game for pure enjoyment and not getting wrapped up in the greater context of it all. It is time that we start watching soccer games for what they are: games.
