NBC bets on British soccer
More coverage than available in the U.K.
STAMFORD, Conn. British sports announcer Arlo White remembers visiting relatives in Chicago more than two decades ago and flipping through a seemingly endless array of television channels.
“I was somewhere in the 300s, I think, on cable TV, and suddenly I saw a 17-year-old Ryan Giggs thrashing in a volley from Manchester United against West Ham United,” he said this week. “And I was overjoyed that I managed to find this little snippet of English football action.”
Starting Saturday, White will be the voice of NBC’s $250-million experiment that tests how many Americans now find joy in a glimpse of Premier League soccer — and how many more will latch on with the games no longer buried in the hinterlands of the channel lineup.
“It’s so ironic that 22 years later, there’s every chance that I’ll be commenting on Manchester United and a team containing a 39-yearold Ryan Giggs and providing that as part of this unprecedented amount of coverage to the American market,” White, the network’s lead play-byplay voice, said on a conference call. “Is it a tipping point? We’ll have to wait and see.
“I just know that there is a huge amount of following of the game in the United States. And even if you’re the fifth or sixth or seventh most popular sport in a country of 350 million people, you’re still very viable.”
As part of its three-year contract, NBC Sports Group will broadcast all 380 games from the Premier League this season in some form — more than what’s even available in the United Kingdom. The main U.S. outlet for the EPL will shift from Fox Soccer to NBC Sports Network, doubling the number of homes in which those games are available.
Under the EPL’s previous three-year deal with Fox, which was worth about $80 million, some matches were sublicensed to ESPN.
Games on ESPN and ESPN2 last season averaged 208,000 households. For NBC Sports Network — which was averaging 273,000 homes in prime time for this year through late July, according to Nielsen — it’s a chance to add live sports on weekend mornings and weekday afternoons.
Canadians will have direct access to matches airing on NBC, starting with Swansea City and Manchester United on Saturday (12:30 p.m. in Ottawa).
But the company’s investment is as much a bet on how viewership can grow in a fertile environment as on the sport’s prior popularity. That means a big advertising and marketing push — including the spot starring former Saturday Night Live star Jason Sudeikis, spoofing the American football-European football divide, that has more than four million YouTube views.
The idea is that airing more games and making them easier to find will mine a previously untapped audience whose interest is already piqued.
“There’s just so much conversation,” said Jon Miller, the president of programming for NBC Sports. “It almost is to the point where they say: ‘I’ve got to check this out. I’ve got to find out what the big deal is here.’ ”
NBC will emphasize the fierceness of the rivalries in English soccer, a focus that proved popular during the recent lockout-shortened NHL season.
“The top flight of English soccer seems to have romanticism about it,” said White, who previously called Major League Soccer games. “It’s where football was invented. It’s where the concepts of having league competitive soccer was introduced in the 1880s. And I think clubs like Manchester United, like Liverpool, like Arsenal and more recently, perhaps Manchester City and Chelsea, they resonate throughout the world.”