i cared. it destroyed the gold cup. i have asked the "thesoccerdon" on twitter Don Garber the president of MLS to state if he is up to his old bullshit, but no answer. you guys take a shot or two at him.
I am not saying that everything needs to be a novela nor am I saying that ESPN's coverage would make this into a Euro Cup ratings fest. What I am saying is that ESPN can help the tournament ratings wise, marketing wise and getting the word out. Also as shown during the World Cup and Olympics our media LOVES sappy off the field stories to focus upon to get those casual fans excited. Most American fans and casual fans do not watch Univision/Fox soccer channel so they have no clue a tournament is even going on. ESPN would help.
i'm not sure what FSC pays for the Gold Cup but they wouldn't purchase the rights of the tournament if they couldn't make a profit from it. i pretty much agree that there's not that big of an audience for this tournament. But there's not that big of an audience for women's volleyball, bowling, lacrosse etc - all sports that ESPN broadcasts. I think ESPN would be more likely to want to broadcast the Gold Cup if it were every 4 years instead of 2. The Gold Cup that doesn't have the confed cup tie-in is even less attractive of a tournament and this confusion makes the brand of the Gold Cup difficult to market to an audience. Casual sports fan - "Is this the year we care about the Gold Cup? "no, the next one in two years". So, that confusion alone makes the brand of the gold cup weaker.
you make absolutely no sense when you say nobody wants to see a bunch of unknown players. Trinidad & Australia make it to the world cup with a bunch of fairly unknown players and had people cheering for them, why ? because people love to seeing the under dogs come out on top. im sure you could not name 5 players off the Australian team before the world cup. for example look at Guadeloupe they came into the gold cup a few years ago pretty much unknown, they beat Honduras and lost 1-0 to mexico. so speak for yourself, you may not be interested in seeing those teams but you don't speak for everybody else. if concacaf was not making any money from the tournament not only would they not have it every 2 years, they would not have it at all. i hate when people come on this forum and act like their opinion is a representation of everybody else's. i can say the same thing about golf but thats my opinion, my opinion does not represent the next forum member or anybody else for that matter.... so don't say people say YOU don't wanna see it. i like watching the unknown teams because some of those team's have hidden talent and you don't really know what to expect from them. thats why i watch a lot of uk league 1/ championship football.
Snap! jaja. I agree though. Fans of football like the game, and those unknowns. I love unknowns. This Gold Cup we're going to see lots of good unknown action.
Even if ESPN got rights to televise the Gold Cup it would be to televise the U.S. games (with the U.S. vs. Guadeloupe/Panama on a secondary ESPN channel) and the final. At most, El Salvador vs. Guadeloupe would be put on ESPN3.com. This probably helps U.S. soccer a bit, but the Gold Cup/CONCACAF as a whole, not really. Plus, ESPN getting on board probably locks the tournament to the U.S. as permanent host even more. ESPN covering a handful of the tournament's games when it's sending crews to Detroit, Tampa, Kansas City, D.C., Houston and L.A. during the course of a month, pretty simple and cheap for ESPN. It's the same thing as covering 3-4 baseball games a week. Sending crews to Saprissa for six or seven matches over a month? Now it's more expense with less revenue coming in since, at least in the short term, the U.S. playing a "minor" tournament in the U.S. draws at least some interest while the U.S. playing a "minor" tournament in Mexico, Costa Rica or Jamaica draws um, squat. Then, if U.S. hosting + ESPN equals a little bigger pie for Warner and the 35 Caribbean federations to divy up, now Warner tries even harder to keep the U.S. as host and he'll jump through whatever hoop is needed to keep ESPN happy.
What the Gold Cup needs is for Concacaf to at least try to pretend it was a real tournament: http://www.monumental.co.cr/noticia.aspx?id=90550435-9c03-4dcb-8515-c6c00847dc7f The winner of the Gold Cup gets a measly $200K prize? WTF? Just to compare, Copa América gives $650K just for showing up. What a joke.
You would think that having the tournament in the USA every year would enable them to have some decent prize money. Wow. Maybe they need to start bringing guest teams back.
Who is going to the Gold cup games? Who will boycott? Should the people that are going (me included) have banners, chants about "FIFA sucks"? Before? During? After? The National anthems, during the FIFA anthem?
Probably none at all. None on FX, Fox Sports, or regular Fox. The only hope would be a US-Mexico final, but I bet they'll choose to show a baseball game instead.
if Fox Soccer Channel got onto a basic cable tier of programming instead of sports packages, that would help a lot.
ESPN has shown a lot of Gold Cup highlights this year in comparison to past cups. They also had some segments about the Mexico Doping scandal during sports center. This is a good sign. They are actually acknowledging the tournament. I hope it leads them to bid for broadcast rights in the near future.
The problem is ESPN is not interested in watching Grenada get waxed by 5 or six goals each game. If they ever buy the rights they will probably choose to show one game per night in stead of both of them. The improved quality of the US, Mexico and to a lesser extent some of the Central American sides has made a lot of Gold Cup games unwatcheable. In both '05 and '07 the worst group stage goal differential was -6 (Cuba in both instances). This year there are two teams that will probably more than double that negative differential and Guadeloupe could also end with a really poor goal differential.
Well They can do what FSC does and just show the USA matches. They can take it a step further and show the Mexican matches too and have the ESPN Deportes guys (who speak English) hype it up. The rest they can stream on ESPN 3.
I remember the USA-Spain game. The Spanish chanel has a 30 pre-game show going. ESPN had College girls Softball up to the start of the game. That is how much respect ESPN has for Soccer. Good thing it wasn't an overtime champioship softball game, other wise they would have shown that and no the soccer game.
ESPN has given soccer a great deal of respect. I'd hardly pick at the lack of a pre-game show for a friendly as a lack of respect, particularly given the Spain game's being on ESPN proper as well. I mean the nerve of ESPN for broadcasting a softball game in accordance with its contractual obligations...
Exactly! I mean, Telemundo, Univision and those dudes will interrupt Telenovelas for a 1 hour pregame show for Mexico, yes that is right, they will interrupt Telenovelas
Today they had over an hour pre-game show for the USA match. And the second game ate deeply into some planned show they had to keep reminding viewers was "airing soon".