I mean its not like it was some rando hockey game its the season opener opening night on a new network. It's gonna garner a huge audience, get what you are saying if it was just a random run of the mill 300k-ish NHL game on cable that would be kinda just picking on NHL. Anyway the points mute as crookeddy was kinda trying to make a point that wasn't entirely correct? His typo I was replying to with what I thought was a witty reply was actually correct.
Yes just waiting for the end of year official release I normally track them but I didn't fully this year. So can't provide my data input.
In Australia this season we have new media contracts. I am keen to see the growth in MLS ratings to see if we can similarly increase ours. Our changes are light years improvements on what was before, and we are all getting excited about what it will finish up like. If interested I can summarise the new media deal...
Was the A league able to play the full schedule? The impression over here is that Oz was locked down for covid. If the games were played, I'd think the captive audience would give good ratings.
Only 2 states were locked down, so they could have moved the affected teams out of the states. The final only had 14k attendance btw. Edit- semifinal was indeed moved out of Victoria. Final was in Victoria with attendance limits.
During the chargers game the announcer said "they should throw more balls downfield, it's like shots on goal in soccer, if you don't try it, you don't score." A soccer analogy to explain a football play? We've made it folks!
Unless you're Orange County SC and Oakland Roots who only managed 4 shots on target between them in 120 minutes of futbol yesterday.
So EPL rights in the US are going for $333 million per season ($2 bn over 6 seasons). I don't see why MLS can't get $300 million per season, particularly with the 2026 World Cup upcoming.
I can think of a reason... MLS's ratings are significantly worse than EPLs. Particularly games involving the top EPL clubs.
They are pretty close this year. The NBC/NBCSN average in 2020/21 was 414k, MLS in 2021 was 384k through 18 matches. 384/414 x 333 mn is 308 mn. That's obviously an over-simplification. I know MLS can't match Liverpool vs. Man United but there are only so many big match ups. But I think it's the growth potential that the networks will be gambling on. I actually see EPL audiences falling. If NBC retains rights the loss of NBCSN will make games more difficult to find; ESPN tends to get smaller ratings than NBC for soccer; Paramount/CBS is an unknown quantity; while Fox in the past has been consistently s**t.
Those Premier League ratings are mostly early morning, Saturday / Sunday starts, so i imagine those are huge ratings relative to the time slot. MLS ratings are for afternoon / evening matches with much more competition from other sports/TV. Not sure how the ratings compare in their time slots.
Here we go - ratings in for the biggest non world cup soccer game this nation has. 1.315 million on ESPN2. 616k TUDN. 2.645 million on Univision. CONTEXT: 1.983M for Bulls/Warriors on ESPN on Friday. 1.175M for Bucks/Celtics Two big (but regular season) NBA games.
Good news: MLS has two games upcoming on broadcast TV.Bad news: both go up against NFL & Dallas Cowboys. At least the Thanksgiving match on Fox has an NFL game leading into MLS pregame.— Sports TV Ratings (@SportsTVRatings) November 15, 2021
That is certainly a factor. PL being among the best ratings in its timeslot is important, so there is likely going to be more competitions for networks looking to fill their early morning time slot with something other than infomercials/reruns of their talking head shows. With MLS's numbers at their timeslots, the networks can absolutely find something else to air at that slot that would get higher ratings.. Not only that, but the other things will have significantly more ad breaks. All of that comes down to less competition, so a smaller contract. Another factor to consider is that MLS won't be bundling with US national teams this time around. What impact that will have on MLS's tv bundle will certainly be interesting.
Also, the ad revenue may be higher in prime-time. MLS main sponsors include Audi and Target, EPL is more Ford and Burger King.
Now that the regular season concluded, we're getting some regular season YOY trends (from SBJ): https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/en/SB-Blogs/Newsletter-Media/2021/11/15 The SBJ reporting includes the following table:
Counter which throws out the entire line of thinking. They gave La Liga a $175m yr deal fully knowing that even with then star Lionel Messi La Liga still historically pulled in half the viewership MLS has and even that hald they were pulling was heavy skewed due to the El Clasico's pulling up the overall numbers. Another MLS is adding the 80 or so Leagues Cup games and also selling In market local rights as a package. So there's not just more inventory but presumably more value inventory. For all the EPL pulls higher numbers no one has looked hard at the fact that its hard for NBC to make money off the Premier League. The very reason why a bunch of games were put behind paywall which ticked off fans was because NBC was like hey I know you guys are loving all these free games and watching every one we aren't making money. https://awfulannouncing.com/nbc/nbc...ription-service-going-get-unpopular-week.html Here is a key blurb from the article t least NBC is open about the fact that this really wasn’t done to make fans happy, but to help offset rights fees and make more money. We have conviction that this is the right business model around the Premier League, and the other sports we’ve added to NBC Sports Gold,” Cordella said. “The media world is continuing to shift, and TV ratings aren’t what they used to be, and certainly subscriber levels haven’t been as high as they’ve been in the past. So [we’re] trying to figure out, how do we remunerate the rights we paid for? Direct-to-consumer [subscription video] with NBC Sports Gold is going to be an important part of that.” You might have noticed Cordella’s use of the word “remunerate.” It wasn’t accidental. In 2015, NBC paid the Premier League approximately $1 billion for a six-year rights deal, after an initial three-year deal worth around $250 million. The network then saw Premier League TV ratings drop by an average of nearly 100,000 viewers per gamefrom the 2015-16 season to 2016-17. Cordella said NBC “made no money to very little money” from streaming non-televised games on the free-with-authentication platform. So they tried something different. And they boosted the offering with nearly 1,000 hours of shoulder programming produced by the Premier League’s vast in-house production arm, as well as a Premier-League produced live studio show that airs in various forms across almost all 24 hours of the day. Unfortunately, sports fans usually won’t win whenever the word “remunerate” is involved. Cordella went onto say that the NBC Sports Gold package has a healthy number of subscribers (over six figures) and even points out the willingness of fans to pay for content that they had been previously given for free thanks to the support of hardcore fans.
That article is completely irrelevant now because NBC Sports Gold is no longer a thing. The EPL games that aren't on NBC/cable are on Peacock at the $5 monthly subscription rate along with all the other premium content on Peacock.
Not irrelevant to the fact that NBC doesn't make money of the Premier League but given the choice between keeping the EPL at a cheaper price than what they assumed it take to keep the NHL they went with EPL and the better demographics and save money by only paying one of those two and not both. The article is relevant to the fact that NBC losing money on the Premier League is what started the shift to paywalling it that the jist of things.