Haven't seen it anywhere yet. The overnight is usually slightly over 1, but once the full national numbers come in, it usually drops a bit. Previous final national numbers for MLS Cups: 1996 - 1.4 1997 - 1.4 1998 - N/A 1999 - 1.0 2000 - 0.7 2001 - 1.0 2002 - 0.8
I wish. I had to flip back and forth between MLS Cup 1st half and Patriots-Texans in overtime. That will be a serious draw from the ratings.
It would have been a 4.2 if Mia Hamm had her wedding with GarciaParra during halftime. Instead she had a private ceremony.
It would have been 4.2 if Wynalda tackled Michelle Branch on stage and spent the half-time show dry-humping her.
at least it beat LPGA! from the article: "Nationally, the MLS championship game only did a .9 rating, just barely beating the season-ending LPGA tournament."
Well, that's a tad depressing. Aren't the overnight higher than what the ultimaate number ends up to be? Hopefully we won't go lower than the .7 of last year. If it was anyonen other than Neilsen counting it would have been a 4.2.
Don't expect any stellar increases in ratings until this league has a much larger national footprint. 16 teams then you'll start seeing 4.0 or higher for the final. Money will start to pour into the league via advertisments. Until then, lets hope Garber stays on track with his expansion plans. It's the only way this league can survive. Keep the expansion going and keep the current team intact.
I'm not so sure. The NASL got as high as 24 teams and its ratings on ABC were in the 1-2 range. As a result, the ad rates were never that great. This despite the fact that the matches had commercial breaks.
Yes they were all on crack if the way they ran their business is any indication. Seriously though they made many bad mistakes, on top of the fact that soccer was new to the country. MLS is pulling those numbers now. Increase the footprint, and you increase the viewership. It is a pretty easy concept, those two cities all of a sudden won't be turning off television sets because their teams got teams, quite the opposite will occur. Oh and the Folk from Cleveland best be spreading the word about bigsoccer. People who find their way onto the boards tend to grow in their commitment level.
Even at 16 teams you won't approach a 4.2. The thing only did a 2.6 in one of the cities whose team was in the final. There is zero promotion of the game. I wouldn't have had a clue it was taking place if I was not religious about following the league. Again, there are no easy fixes for soccer in this country. It will be a long, slow, hard climb. The plan that is in place, IMO, is a very good one. But it will take a lot of time before the game (by the game I really mean MLS) is recognized as something established by the media.
I've looked far and wide and never seen information on the NASL's actual ratings, just that they were "disappointing." The league had very few games on TV (I think 9 was the most ever in one year on ABC, but it's 2 in the morning and I'm going from memory). And a 1 or a 2 meant even fewer total households then than it does now, but ratings in general for TV were much higher then because there was less competition. I don't subscribe to the "double the teams, double the ratings" theory.
what we really need is a bunch of BigSoccer posters to get themselves some Nielsen Boxes, then we'd be doing good. Too bad it doesn't work that way.
Even soccer fans avoided the ABC-televised NASL matches. What a horror show. First, as great as Jim McKay was/is as an announcer, he was stuck in a no-win situation...his instructions were to explain every little thing to the "casual fan." So we constantly had the offside rule explained to us, as well as the 35-yard line's effect on said rule, "the whole ball must be over the whole line," etc. ad infinitum. This made the games unbearable. Plus, there were those damn commercials. Also, if I recall, they had some pretty lame matchups, sort of like the current Monday Night Football problem. And, if you complain about MLS games with football lines on turf today, imagine how beautiful many NASL matches looked on baseball diamonds, with the dirt areas around the bases as part of the action. As well as astroturf. And cameramen who were not quite sure how to track a soccer match. All in all, a recipe for disaster. (But we did get Shep Messing doing Skoal commercials, and Rodney Marsh's "look ma, no feet" spot for Lite Beer). I know the ratings were low in the Philadelphia area because the games were televised in the early afternoon, right around the time that PBS would show Soccer Made In Germany. You can guess which program won that battle.
Not far and wide enough Although there's not much out there, I was able to get these numbers from the May 1981 issue of Soccer Digest: The 1980 Soccer Bowl, televised on a Sunday afternoon by ABC, got a 2.3 rating, with an audience share of 7. The match (New York Cosmos v. Ft. Lauderdale Strikers) got a 3.3 rating in New York (audience share: 11), 1.8 (6) in Los Angeles, and 1.0 (3) in Chicago. Before everyone gets too excited by those numbers, remember that this is pre-cable. Fewer choices tends to bump up the numbers. To give you a frame of reference, NBC's national pro football numbers were 17.5 (49) and CBS' pro football numbers were 12 (34.1).
Just to add to what Steve said, though it has only passing relevance to the original topic: ABC televised these games in 1979, right smack in the middle of the NASL's heyday: Saturday, May 12 - New York at Tampa Bay 3pm Sunday, June 10 - Vancouver at Minnesota 2:30pm Sunday, June 24 - New England at New York 2:30pm Saturday, July 7 - Chicago at Detroit 3pm Sunday, July 29 - Los Angeles at Washington 2:30pm Plus, presumably, playoff games and Soccer Bowl '79 (which I remember watching - and when Rodney Marsh was pulled with 11 minutes left in what would be his last game, the sideline reporter asked him if he would be able to go back in the game, to which Rodney---to his credit---gently replied that once you're out of the game, you're out). But ABC wanted out of the two-year deal after one year. They ended up doing the Soccer Bowl only in 1981, while the league managed to get some games on the fledgling USA Network and ESPN. In 1977, NASL games were televised on TVS, Eddie Einhorn's ad-hoc network of stations (which had also carried the ill-fated World Football League in 1974). It was a mixture of ABC, CBS, NBC and independent stations. The 1977 schedule was: Sunday, May 29 - New York at Tampa Bay 1:30pm Sunday, June 19 - Los Angeles at Minnesota 2pm Sunday, July 10 - Cosmos at Seattle 3pm Sunday, July 24 - Chicago at San Jose 3pm Sunday, August 14 - playoff game 2pm Sunday, August 21 - playoff game 3pm Sunday, August 28 - Soccer Bowl '77 4pm Steve has the ratings info, and just to amplify that: in 1980, there were only an estimated 77.9 television households in the US (today there are 108.6 million). A 2.3 rating would have meant an estimated 1.8 million households watching Soccer Bowl '80. An estimated 845,000 households watched MLS Cup 2002, which got a .8 rating. A 2.3 rating on ABC today would be worth about 2.5 million households. And in 1980, there were only 15 million cable households in the US. Now it's close to 80 million, I believe.
One of the 1979 playoff games was from the American Soccer Conference final, Tampa Bay v. Philadelphia. I have the TV schedules for 1979 and 1980, if anyone is interested. As Kenn said, ABC wanted to bail after 1979, but was held to its contract. While I'm waiting for the turkey to cook, I'll see if I can dig up some really fun numbers: in 1967, CBS paid a million or so for a "ten year deal" to televise the new National Professional Soccer League. This was a game of the week format. It did so in 1967, and also televised the NASL in 1968, after the merger. Jack Whittaker did the play-by-play. Those ratings were horrible. I'll see if I can get some numbers. Side note: CBS used to radio down to the ref to tell him to call a foul or not let an injured player up too quickly so the network could squeeze in a commercial. After a few weeks, word got out, and CBS stopped.