You’ll eat drink it and you’ll like it!
So I just watched Super Size Me last week. I know I’m behind the times; it’s sad when you watch a movie that came out years ago; no one wants to talk about it any more. Oh well. There’s quite a mentality I think among the restaurant business that says if they market something, no matter how crappy it is (McDonalds’ hamburgers for instance) people will eat it—and like it.
Now this is true to a degree, but where it’s truer is soccer fans. The things that soccer fans put up with in this country is amazing. As Marc Connolly noted last week, we take what we can get. And we’re happy for it. We pay exorbitant amounts of money to get obscure Spanish-language satellite channels, keep odd hours and request three hour lunch breaks to watch games. It’s kinda like being in a cult.
I didn’t even have cable until 2001. I eagerly awaited games on ABC and had my dad (who got cable at work) record games for me and played the waiting-without-finding-out-the-score game for my own tape-delays.
That’s why when people say that since ESPN’s deal for MLS is bad or because the announcers are bad, US soccer fans should boycott ESPN to “teach them a lesson” I just don’t get what they’re thinking. What lesson is this teaching ESPN? That we’re willing to cut off our nose to spite our face? Cutting out the audience for soccer on ESPN isn’t going to cause ESPN to do better work; it’s going to cause them to cut their soccer coverage. They already lose money on all of it except the World Cup, and only keep it because US Soccer is smart enough to bundle them together.
No, we’ll take what we can get, and be happy for it. Tape delay our friendly from 5:00 PM to 1:00 AM? We’ll stay up for it. Give us Dave O’Brien and Marcelo Balboa? We’ll watch them. We’ll grumble about it, but entirely unsuccessfully. It’s like an alcoholic complaining about the cost of liquor.
We’ll take what we can get, but damn will we whine about it.
That’s why we’d put up with a league of Red Bull NY, DC United Airlines and Real Player Salt Lake. I just hope we don’t have to.
Now this is true to a degree, but where it’s truer is soccer fans. The things that soccer fans put up with in this country is amazing. As Marc Connolly noted last week, we take what we can get. And we’re happy for it. We pay exorbitant amounts of money to get obscure Spanish-language satellite channels, keep odd hours and request three hour lunch breaks to watch games. It’s kinda like being in a cult.
I didn’t even have cable until 2001. I eagerly awaited games on ABC and had my dad (who got cable at work) record games for me and played the waiting-without-finding-out-the-score game for my own tape-delays.
That’s why when people say that since ESPN’s deal for MLS is bad or because the announcers are bad, US soccer fans should boycott ESPN to “teach them a lesson” I just don’t get what they’re thinking. What lesson is this teaching ESPN? That we’re willing to cut off our nose to spite our face? Cutting out the audience for soccer on ESPN isn’t going to cause ESPN to do better work; it’s going to cause them to cut their soccer coverage. They already lose money on all of it except the World Cup, and only keep it because US Soccer is smart enough to bundle them together.
No, we’ll take what we can get, and be happy for it. Tape delay our friendly from 5:00 PM to 1:00 AM? We’ll stay up for it. Give us Dave O’Brien and Marcelo Balboa? We’ll watch them. We’ll grumble about it, but entirely unsuccessfully. It’s like an alcoholic complaining about the cost of liquor.
We’ll take what we can get, but damn will we whine about it.
That’s why we’d put up with a league of Red Bull NY, DC United Airlines and Real Player Salt Lake. I just hope we don’t have to.
posted by Zathras at 10:06 AM
1 Comments:
It's a fine line to be sure. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't grumble about things; I think it's an important thing to do, even if you're shot down it's important to make your point and fight until then if you think you're right.
While I don't advocate bashing ESPN, I think that the best way to change things is from within. People like McCain and Bradley or even Nader have been free in recent elections to come from further afield because they're the one behind in the polls; they can afford to make more idealistic statements because they're not as answerable to "the base."
We need to make ourselves a big enough demographic to wield some power.
The local sports editors (and I've spoken to them) have said that coverage of soccer comes down to what people want to read. They say that if the Thunder start selling out to 15k people a game, they'll cover it (which I don't, actually believe since they didn't cover minor league baseball when it sold out but anyways...) There's a serious chicken and the egg problem here in that how can a sport claim good attendance when it gets no coverage so no one knows about it? It's quite a dilemma and the soccer industry in this country seriously needs to get its collective head out of its ass and figure out a new way to market things at a grassroots level because that's all we've got for now. And I don't mean 'soccer families'.
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