Oh, for the glory days of yore when yonder time listed there on the schedule was a kickoff time and not the start of the pre-game show. Does NFL say games start at 12 and then run a half to a full hour of the studio? No, you're told the pre-game starts at 11 and the game at 12. Depending on eagerness and obligations you can tune in when it makes sense for you. I can understand Fox saying tune in at 630 (central) for the show but why doesn't US Soccer say on its own schedule 7 or 730 or whatever reality is? TV can play its games, but shouldn't USSF not want to manipulate its own fans? I will be home at 630 to watch but this is just odd.
you still have faith in ussf being honest and transparent and good-hearted etc?? theyve revealed what they are already.... a marketing arm for sum/mls owners.
I don't like it. Maybe they're taking advantage of Americans being used to MLB games with most times 5 to 10 minutes after the hour; and NBA, MLS, and NHL games that may average starting 8 minutes into coverage. Soccer in Europe rarely starts more than 2 minutes after the announced time, and the Premier League has started games when one of my clocks said 9:59 A.M. Furthermore, Americans are used to regional sports networks and pregame shows specific for their team. As far as I know, regardless of what country the game is on TV in, the European soccer leagues don't have pregame shows targeting fans of one club.
Even the club-owned cable networks (MUTV, etc) don't have team-specific pregame shows? There's an opportunity there...I haven't lived in Philadelphia in 15 years but still tune into the Eagles pre- and post-game shows on CSN Philly, which I can get out of market on Playstation Vue.
Yep, it's maddening. I've been complaining about this for years, but it seems to only be getting worse. (I think I had previously complained that the kickoff time is often off by 15-30 minutes, but now it's more like 45.) And yes, the most frustrating thing is that you often can't find a consistently reliable source for kickoff times anywhere, including on the official US Soccer website. I'm not aware of anyone outside of US soccer that has this problem.
Steve Goff has the kickoff times. He'll either post it on his twitter account or in one of his articles.
Friendly reminder that the USA-MEX friendly Tuesday in Nashville is listed on the schedule for 8:30 ET but will not kick off until about 9:10 on ESPN and Univision. #usmnt #eltri— Steven Goff (@SoccerInsider) September 10, 2018
What I usually do for the matches I want to watch live is tune to the feed/channel when the game/pregame is scheduled to start. Then if the game is not kicking off right away I mute the TV and play an audio book to keep me entertained. Right now I am in the middle of "Les Miserables" (second reading) and I often find the matches to be an "interruption" to whichever novel I am listening to, particularly the US men's matches for the last several months. But I am nothing if not persistent so I will keep interrupting my reading in order to watch the continuing bad fiction of the US men's national team's search for an identity.
Is MUTV a 24/7 channel? I don't know what TV is like in Europe. I do know that most clubs top level European leagues are in cities with smaller populations than the cities in the USA with top level teams in any sports, so the European clubs have fewer potential local viewers. YES, which has Manchester City, might start replays with a few comments by announcers, and there are the shows CityLife and Inside City, but the replays do not include a pregame show. When I read in the TV, Satellite & Radio forum, that Sky and/or BT has X amount of Premier League games, I don't read about Y amount of games also being on club-owned channels. The fact that the 3:00 P.M. local games are not on TV means that clubs could have consecutive weeks without being televised, giving the club-owned channels less content. If there are club-specific pregames, I admit that I'm wrong.