After the Real Madrid-Partizan match on Wednesday, ESPNNews came on for their 5-minute update and led with soccer. In fact, the announcer and Tommy Smyth talked for what seemed like 5 full minutes about the Champion's League in general and Man U in particular. Smyth gushed about the game Timmy had (leading me to hope ESPN might rebroadcast it on American TV some time this week). Discussion of 'Who's the best team in Europe right now'. Conjecture on the order of the US Keeper depth chart. And finally to wrap up they talked about Claudio Reyna's current situation and his last game, including his current season stats. They had promised to have Reggie Jackson talking about the world series, but I never saw him and they went immediately from soccer to the regularly scheduled program. It would therefore seem that Americans Abroad (they talked very little about the CL) news pre-empted a Hall of Famer talking about the world series. Of course, Reggie may have just been late to the office...
Even if Reggie were late to the office or just not available when he was supposed to be, the fact that they chose to do a piece on soccer, when they could have used anything from the World Series or NFL (or even hockey or upcoming NBA season) says something. I'm still not ready to annoint ESPN the "network of world football", but that is a positive step.
Guys, they've been doing this since the spring. Tommy on for a 5 minute segment right after the CL game.
Not just after CL games. Tommy has been in the Zone in NY each Wed and does 5 min each week. It a great segment on football from around the world.
And we're likely to keep seeing this for years. They'll have this dichotomy of doing some news on them when they can cuz at the end of the day they're about sports and about ratings. As a result of that, they'll still have yahoos like Rome on their being a pompous 8ss and blindly spouting some crap about xyz. And that crap will once and awhile be something along the lines of "soccer sucks". At least we have fox sports world, soccer on pay per view, some CL on ESPN and ESPN2, the MLS on 2 different networks ABS/ESPN/ESPN2 & Fox and all sorts fo stuff like this. We didn't have this stuff even 10 years ago.