I'm sure this subject has been brought up before, but why couldn't during the summer months when there's nothing but reruns on and crappy reality shows, ABC have something like a Monday Night Soccer (similar to MNF) in which MLS teams play on prime time television? Probably it just isn't worth them money to put it in a prime time slot, even during reruns but it would open it up to a whole lot of people. Just a thought.
im not really an MLS fan but i believe this idea would be real good, but not for a few years. Since it would only be one game a week the fact that there aren't that many teams doesn't really matter but the quality of the teams and players would need to be better. It would need more entertainment to earn ABC money.
The NFL is the only sport in this country that can draw the ratings necessary to hold down a prime time weekday timeslot on a broadcast network during the regular season.
i'm sorry, but I seriously doubt this would ever happen. espn2 won't even show soccer in that time slot, i don't see ABC ever doing it.
Monday Night Soccer would be awesome, however I think the reality of the situation is that even the stale old re-runs get better ratings than MLS games. Another thing, I don't think attendance at the actual games on Monday night would be to good, so MLS would not be all that enthused about holding a game on Monday nights. In fact I think MLS made a point to schedule more games on Weekends/Holidays for the 2003 season to help improve attendance. But who knows, maybe one day (20 years from now) it will be some Pepsi Diva singing "Are you ready for some soccer!?!?!" On Monday nights.
hell espn2 shows more minor league basketball than soccer. how many times have we all turned to the duece to find the lowgators playing? this world sucks.
It'll never happen. Reruns cost the networks *nothing*. It's free programming. And people still watch. If you can spend zero money and get 10 million viewers or go through the effort to televise a soccer game and get less than 1 million viewers - and you have shareholders to answer to - what would you do? That's why you 'll never see MLS on primetime network TV. At least, not in the next couple decades.
The NFL is the only LEAGUE in this country that can draw the ratings necessary to hold down a prime time weekday timeslot on a broadcast network during the regular season. FYI - In 1986 ABC'S Monday Night Football, in its seventeenth season, became the longest-running prime-time series in the history of the network. MLS + NFL = NSL = World Domination
The reason why it won't happen all revolves around a single issue: Not enough ad blocks to make it viable, regardless of ratings.
I think this could definitly work. Monday night football has a 21 week schedule if I am not mistaken. They do the preseason weeks, but I may be wrong. Anyways if MLS had something like 20 weeks of games it would do amazing. The great part about soccer is that a whole pregame, game and postgame can be finished up in two hours, which means no cutting into local news time. Thee are plenty of sports fans out there that would watch soccer if it were on in consistent way. If the XFL was able to get its games onto network television so easily, then maybe some how some way MLS could figure a way to get this done.
According to ESPN's schedules, there are 5 NBDL games scheduled for January on ESPN2, all tape-delayed on weekdays. In February, there are 4 games, all tape-delayed on Monday afternoons. You may have seen games on NBA TV, but ESPN2 does a weekly tape-delayed game, which is getting a .14 or so in the ratings which is in line with three MLS ratings from last season and not that far off from a number of other games. In February, there are four soccer games - two Champions League, one MNT, one WNT. All are live. When MLS starts, they will have their games live (with I think two exceptions) and on the weekend. Only on BigSoccer.com could that be construed as worse than the NBDL's deal which is probably part of the larger NBA deal. Monday Night Soccer is a horrible idea. Monday Night anything outside of football on network TV is a horrible idea. Regular prime time sports on network TV is a bad idea. Why do you think it's so infrequent?
Easily? Easily? They had NBC invest $100M or so with basically the right to pull the plug on the league if the ratings were bad. And we all know what happened. And those ratings which sh!t-canned XFL were better than any rating MLS had ever gotten. The novelty factor of "Monday Night Football" might bring up the ratings a tad, but you're talking about a sport which draws less than a million on netrwork TV on the weekends trying to survive in a timeslot where the NFL draws 12M and people wonder what is wrong with MNF!.
If I remember correctly, MNF ratings have been down the last couple of years. So even the NFL is having trouble drawing viewers. The first step would be to get a one-off on a summer Monday night and have the ABC promotion department get into in like crazy, but even that ain't going to happen. Nice idea, maybe in time, but unfortunately nowhere near realistic.
Only on Monday Night, everybody else's NFL ratings were up this year. And "trouble drawing viewers" is a relative term. The St.Louis/San Francisco game to close the 2002 season was the least-watched MNF game ever and still drew 13 million viewers. Nor is it realistic that ABC's promotion department would get into something like crazy that has no chance of drawing a decent audience. There's this perception here (not just in this thread) that the problem is promotion, that as long as you promote soccer on television, people will watch it. It's not the promotion, it's the potential audience no matter what you do. You're not going to get a big audience for soccer on television no matter how much promotion you do for the game because, by and large, the sport is relatively unpopular in this country and even less so as a television sport. There's a difference between Fox endlessly promoting "Joe Millionaire" or some such thing and having people tune in and giving the same level of promotion to televised soccer and expecting anything remotely approaching an audience that a major network would get excited about. Americans have proven they will watch freak-show television (and this reality show trend is just the latest, following the gameshow trend and the medical drama trend and the copshow trend and the jiggly women detective trend and the western trend), and they've proven that outside the really big events that don't happen that often, they won't watch soccer on television in any great numbers. That speaks to the intrinsic popularity of soccer as a spectator sport in this country, not to a vast anti-soccer conspiracy or bias, or to the fault of Disney in its production or promotion.
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The only way ABC/ESPN/espn2 (aka, "Mouse Network") will heavily promote MLS games is when they pay MLS the right to broadcast the games. MLS needs to promote MLS games by buying 30-sec and/or 60-sec slots - in other words commercials that let potential viewers know when games will air - on the "Mouse Network". They need to do this heavily, but can't afford it. SUM/MLS actually owns the broadcast rights to MLS and World Cup games. They produce the games and sell the commercial ad time. They purchase time from the "Mouse Network" to air the games. The "Mouse Network" has an agreement with SUM/MLS - they sold time slots, to SUM/MLS, to air both MLS and World Cup games. Another way of putting it is that Soccer Saturday is a "Paid Programming" broadcast, but with traditional commercials. You're watching commercials within a commercial when you watch a MLS game. Try and follow me here...The "Mouse Network" doesn't have to promote the games; because, they don't need the viewership, that would increase ratings, which increases ad revenue, thus recouping what they paid in broadcast rights; since the "Mouse Network" didn't pay out one dime to get MLS or World Cup games on television. The idea of promoting the crap out of a "one-off" Monday Night Soccer broadcast isn't bad in itself. However, it is SUM/MLS that needs to do the promoting, not the "Mouse Network". It would cost SUM/MLS at least $4 million to buy the two hour time slot to air the game. ABC brings in around $120,000 for a 30-sec commercial; though their worst show brings in $60,000. This translates into $1 million per half hour with around eight or so minutes of commercials. To have the league show 13 games in the summer months would cost $50 million. They probably paid around $15 million to get the air-time to show the slate of games last season. This thread was started so that the league could quadruple what they spent in 2002? They could completely dump Soccer Saturday and replace it with Monday Night Soccer and save $15 million on the Saturday time-slots, but still spend 3x as much as they did in 2002 for half as many national broadcasts. There would still be the MLS Shootout so there still are games to watch on Saturday. O.K., this isn't a good idea. Remember MLS still lost around $15 million last year, and my best guess is they will lose $10 million this year. The league is still another 4-6 soccer specific stadia away from even contemplating Monday Night Soccer.
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I live in North Carolina. I never watch Monday Night Football. It starts at 9:00pm and ends at 12:00am if they don't go to OT. Baseball is the same way. A lot of young baseball fans miss the last 4 or 5 innings becuase it is bed time for them. MLS needs to play on the weekend when people are still awake.