If you’re around my age you remember the time when skateboarding “made it”. Tony Hawk was everywhere from video games to cereal boxes. Everyone watched the X Games because it was the hot new thing. Then the X Games would end and everyone went back to watching baseball and waiting for football to start. Sound familiar?
After Sunday’s USA v Portugal match saw a record 24.7 million viewers on television in the United States, the talk has again turned to “is soccer finally making it?” The big problem in soccer “making it” is that most of the American public tunes in every four years to watch the World Cup and doesn’t watch any soccer in between. This is where Major League Soccer must step in and grab this audience.
Bleacher Report national lead writer Dan Levy had a great tweet yesterday illustrating just how big even a fraction of the World Cup market would be for MLS.
Perspective on those ratings. If 1 percent of those viewers like soccer enough to start watching MLS, ratings would essentially double.
— Dan Levy (@DanLevyThinks) June 23, 2014
Let that sink in for a minute. One percent. If MLS could just convert one percent of those viewers they’d be increasing their fan base that much. That is staggering to think about on many different levels. It shows you just how big that audience was and also how little of that pie MLS currently has tuning in to their games. But what can be done to get that one percent and much more?
Set times for a game
Any NFL fan knows they can turn on their TV to watch an NFL game on Thursday night, Sunday at 1 eastern, Sunday at 4 eastern, Sunday night, and Monday night. Most MLB teams have set times for their home games. For example, I know if I want to watch the Astros, and they are playing at home, they will play at 7:10 during the week, 3:10 on Saturday, and 1:10 on Sunday. These are appointments for most sports fans. We know exactly when these sports are on.
Major League Soccer? Not so much. The Dynamo for example, their next four games are a Tuesday at 8:00, a Sunday at 6:30, a Friday at 7:30, and a Saturday at 6:00. This is an issue. Yes, the new TV deal will hopefully fix some of this but a number of people who I have talked to about the World Cup say they haven’t watched the Dynamo because they don’t know when they are on. That is part scheduling and part marketing, which brings me to my next point.
Marketing
How many Major League Soccer commercials have you seen during this World Cup? The answer is not enough. ESPN is the English language rights holder for the 2014 World Cup. ESPN is also a rights holder for Major League Soccer. You should be sick of seeing MLS commercials. There should be so many MLS commercials airing right now that you have the song from the ad in your head all day. You should be seeing so many Tim Cahill, Thierry Henry, and Clint Dempsey goals that your head is spinning.
A number of MLS teams are doing this but every single club should be hosting viewing parties, at least for the US games, with their players visible and ticket giveaways. Every single club. For every single game. MLS players are fantastic. Their visibility and friendliness is one thing that draws fans to the league. Get them out at bars or in your stadium handing out t-shirts, tickets, koozies, talking to fans about the games and the team. It just makes too much sense!
MLS and it’s clubs have been great in working with media, including us. Great is an understatement. The league gets it. It knows it needs eyes and ears on its product. The “For Club and Country” campaign has been great and the coasters and scarves that have been produced are brilliant. They may not seem like a big deal but I’ve seen many pictures of the coasters being handed out at bars across the country. They are a perfect, cheap tool to get the brand out. It just feels like this World Cup where the American public is tuning in to root for the underdog, their own American boys, is missing the boat on some opportunities.
Quality of Play
This World Cup has shown the soccer haters that the game isn’t always a 0-0 draw. The high scoring games in Brazil have drawn in casual fans and Major League Soccer tends to have exciting games as well. American fans have long complained about soccer being boring and lacking scoring but this World Cup has shown that is not true. Now is the time to show these people that MLS can be the same way.
Some American sports fans that don’t follow MLS follow European soccer. We affectionately call these people Eurosnobsand I could write another long article on just these people alone. For now let’s focus on the majority of the American public who are watching the World Cup but normally don’t follow any soccer.
Much is made about bringing stars to MLS to attract fans but it really is about the quality of play and the product on the field. David Beckham may have brought in fans but how many other soccer players have that kind of global appeal? The average American sports fan is not going to know who any of the rumored designated player signings are. They probably couldn’t pick David Villa out of a lineup. What they would know about David Villa is that he can score and that by doing that he will quickly become someone that they want to watch and follow on a regular basis.
What I’m saying is, you don’t necessarily need the big names to make an impact on American viewers. What you need is good players and good games. Whether those good players come from Spain or from Lincoln, Nebraska should not matter and likely does not matter to the American viewers we are looking to convert to MLS.
These are just a few areas Major League Soccer could look at to convert the huge number of World Cup viewers in to fans of teams in their own backyards. There are many more areas I could write about and please feel free to contribute to this discussion either in the comments below or by reaching out to me or our Total-MLS account on Twitter.
One thing is for sure, soccer is beginning to gain a foothold in the American sports landscape. The next fight begins in getting Major League Soccer to be the soccer that American fans tune in for weekly, not just every four years for a World Cup.
(image courtesy of Jeon Heon-Kyun/EPA)
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