MLS on NBC Was More of a Failure Than a Success

Face it: The MLS on NBC experiment didn’t work out for either side.

Major League Soccer was a league in limbo in the fall of 2011. MLS was on the verge of entering a relationship with NBC that would have the North American top-flight as a mainstay on the newly-named NBC Sports Network. While there were hopes that NBC would help bring new exposure and new viewers to a league largely ignored by the mainstream media unless David Beckham did something impressive during a match, there were far more questions than answers about how NBC would treat MLS beginning in 2012. The partnership between network and league lasted all of three MLS seasons, as the league put pen to paper on a deal that will see its media rights shared by FOX Sports and ESPN beginning in 2015.

Think back to the feelings had about MLS matches airing on FOX Soccer Channel three years ago, and you’ll see that little has changed outside of the league getting more money for its latest media right deal.

It must first be pointed out that NBC Sports did way more for MLS than FOX Soccer ever did. NBC aired MLS matches in crisp high definition. Legitimate pregame shows and postgame coverage made MLS games feel like they were must-see television for sports fans. Announcers and TV crews were sent to arenas whenever possible. Kyle Martino emerged as a top in-game analyst, breaking down the action like a pro and learning his craft while in front of national audiences.

Dec 7, 2014; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Los Angeles Galaxy forward Landon Donovan (10) celebrates by drinking out of the MLS Cup championship trophy in the locker room after defeating the New England Revolution in the 2014 MLS Cup final at Stubhub Center. Mandatory Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

That said, it feels as if MLS did little but complete a circular journey over the past three seasons.

NBC Sports never appeared to go all-in on MLS programming. Those eight editions of MLS 36 that aired on NBCSN in 2013 were fine and all, but the perception at the start of the 2014 campaign was that NBC had already moved on from MLS minus one final lame-duck season. We never got anything even resembling a MLS version of Match of the Day. Far more attention was given to the English Premier League once NBC began broadcasting EPL content heading into the start of the 2013-14 campaign. Commercials for MLS games rarely, if ever, aired on NBC during Sunday Night Football NFL contests that were the most-watched programs in the United States.

One may point to the fact that more people watched MLS on NBC Sports than ever viewed games that aired on FOX Soccer as proof that the league is growing in popularity in the US. Yes, more people watched, but more people had access to NBC Sports than ever went out of the way to acquire FOX Soccer in high definition. MLS matches on NBCSN, according to Matthew Futterman of Wall Street Journal, averaged 141,000 viewers in 2014, and FOX will not, as NBC did, have Premier League matches leading up to MLS coverage at any point of the 2015 season. That a MLS match airing on NBC involving Seattle Sounders taking on LA Galaxy with the Supporters’ Shield on the line barely beat out Swansea vs. Leicester (.59 to .50) is supposed to be a sign of anything positive tells you all you need to know about the average amount of Americans registered as MLS viewers.

Just like FOX before it, NBC never gave MLS a true Soccer Night in America, a weekly time slot dedicated only to a match. There is a good reason for why Monday Night Football kicks off precisely at 8:30 pm ET 16 times a year without wavering, and it is the same reason that a prime-time comedy that is a hit isn’t moved around the schedule during the fall, winter and spring months. Television viewers are creatures of habit, and they forget about shows, sports programming included, if they have to put in any effort to find when those shows are featured.

Putting a live MLS match at 2:30 pm ET following Premier League programming was a stroke of genius, a move underutilized by NBC over the past two years. NBC copied FOX’s procedure for scheduling MLS matches in that sometimes games would kick off at 10:30 pm ET on a Friday night, and sometimes a game would air at 7:00 pm ET on a Saturday. You had to be a diehard follower of the league or have your DVRs programmed to find matches for you to know when MLS would be featured on NBC Sports, which was the case when FOX Soccer held the TV rights for the league.

Reasons to believe that MLS was filler content and secondary in importance to the Premier League. Lackluster TV ratings that were, at times, downright embarrassing for the league. Uncertainty about how MLS will be presented by relatively new stations, ones that are figuring things out as they go along.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Just as FOX did years ago, NBC was more than happy in 2014 to allow MLS to move on, and the same uncertainty had about the league three holiday seasons ago exists today. FOX holds the rights to a plethora of live sports programming — Major League Baseball, college football, UFC, the FA Cup, NASCAR and other motorsports included. It is not unrealistic to fear that MLS will serve as fill-in programming and nothing more for FOX, and any MLS games that are relegated to FOX Sports 2, a channel available only in standard definition if at all in various portions of the US, will die TV deaths.

The myth that casual sports fans will not tune in to watch soccer games that do not feature the United States Men’s National Team was squashed during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and it is disproven whenever a marquee Premier League match pops a good rating after it has been hyped across the NBC family of networks. No company, ESPN included, has found a method to get a meaningful percentage of those viewers to consistently watch MLS regular season games. Only when that changes will MLS have landed a TV deal that truly benefits the league.

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