for most soccer highlights in the 1 hour show. Outside the "men's" world cup, I've never seen so many soccer highlights in one sportscenter show. 3-4 soccer highlights in top ten plays 1 segment talking about college soccer (that's a first) 3 segments on UEFA Champions league 1 segment on DC United vs Portland Timbers Not sure where all this came from, but I hope it continues. Or maybe it's just something more sinister like a temporary soccer coverage boost to land WC rights. Even though they botched just about every players/club name, and got Timbers playoff scenario wrong, at least they are making progress, lol. Maybe ESPN is regrets losing the UCL rights, after seeing the ratings FOX got. I'm just curious who is responsible for the content that is on SportsCenter. Does one person call the shots? Do they base it off twitter feed? Maybe if a bunch of us spam ESPN's twitter, we could get more soccer highlights on SportsCenter. That is the fastest way to legitimize the sport.
I wonder if the recent tv ratings have anything to do with it. A lot of their recent soccer broadcasts got pretty decent ratings. USA vs Ecuador got around 588K, and Brazil vs Mexico 489K. Both of those ratings were the highest rated programming on ESPN2 that day by quite a bit, especially in the 18-49 demographic. Jim Rome got 140K . Even Manchester United vs Liverpool on ESPN2 got 456K at 7:30 am EST (yep, that is 4:30 in the morning west coast). EPL probably deserves to be on the main ESPN channel since it gets far higher ratings than whatever else they air that early. The fact that a soccer match can get almost 500K viewers that early says something. Someone should tweet Jim Rome, that a 4 am soccer match gets 4x the tv ratings his show gets. MLS of course has flat tv ratings, with a few notable improvements. I think it is pretty clear which MLS teams draw the highest ratings (LA, Seattle, Portland).
perhaps, but what else was going on in the world of sports on a Wednesday in mid-October. 1 World Series game some NHL games (no NBA, no mid-week NFL games, no NCAA football mid-week, and NCAA hoops hasn't started yet.) just a quiet night for the most part and a good opportunity for SportsCenter to fill their program with (more) soccer (than "normal"). Lucky night for the soccer fan who wants to see (more) coverage of the sport on SportsCenter. come Nov (or any weekend really), and soccer gets placed back in line (and with less coverage) behind all those other more popular and lucrative sports on which ESPN and SportsCenter are based.
It was a "slow" night for domestic highlights. Nothing major besides baseball World Series Game 1. No NFL, no college football, no NBA, just one NHL game involving Canadian teams. Back to normal on Thursday night, when college football returns.
Wonder how many of those soccer highlights would've been shown had the Yankees been in the 'Fall Classic'?
Canadian Sportscenter had a lengthy soccer segment too! First was the Leafs/Jets game, which after highlights, interviews, and analysis takes 15 mins, 5 mins for the world series, then they had the rest of the time for everything else, so soccer was important for filler haha
yeah - I remember back when I used to watch Sportscenter, the first time I saw them show an EPL highlight from FSC. It was a very slow night - probably after the Final 4/Masters week/ends.
really? a few mentions on Sportscenter and people think that it'll legitimize the sport in America when a number of SportsCenter announcers are on record stating how much they hate soccer? .. grasping at a straws - IMHO