Billions of fans all over the world are eagerly anticipating the start of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. ESPN and ABC are financing coverage of the games, hoping that a sizable chunk of those fans will be Americans.
ESPN and ABC, along with Spanish language channel Univision, paid $425 million to FIFA for exclusive rights to broadcast the World Cup this year and the following two years it is held, according an article on Forbes.com.
All the matches, starting Friday and ending July 9, will be broadcast on ABC and ESPN live in high definition.
The 2002 World Cup drew 80 million American viewers out of a total of 1.5 billion worldwide viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. The last World Cup took place in South Korea, forcing American viewers to watch live games in the middle of the night because of the time difference. The games were usually broadcast in Spanish on Univision. By increasing television coverage in non-Spanish speaking networks, ABC and ESPN are betting that this World Cup will draw more viewers.
“This could easily be the most-watched World Cup,” John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content, told The Associated Press.
Soccer has mostly gone under the radar of sports fans in the U.S. who prefer football, basketball and baseball to the world’s most popular sport. The 2002 World Cup drew 85 million Hispanic viewers in the U.S. Major League Soccer is now in its 11th year in the U.S. but has never been as popular as other major league sports. In 2005 the average attendance for a MLS game was 15,108, according to statistics compiled by Kenn Tomasch,
announcer for the MLS team Chicago Fire. More than twice as many people, approximately 30,970, attended a Major League Baseball game on average in 2005, according to a press release from the MLB Web site.
Media hype has surrounded this year’s World Cup, urging viewers to tune into the games. ESPN and ABC launched an ad campaign with the tagline “one game changes everything.” The ads, featuring U2’s Bono, emphasize the social effects of the game in modern times.
One of the spots talks about how fighting ceased during a civil war on the Ivory Coast so fans could cheer on their team that advanced to the World Cup for the first time. World Cup sponsors such as Adidas, MasterCard and McDonald’s, as well as non-sponsors such as Nike, are also adding to the hype.
Gabriela Martinez, assistant professor at the University’s School of Journalism and Communication who specializes in electronic media, believes that the World Cup on ABC and ESPN will draw viewers.
“Soccer, as a sport, is growing in the U.S.,” she said.
Middle-class parents encourage their children play soccer, and the sport is popular among women, she said. Martinez also said that a large targetaudience of the World Cup are Hispanic people who are English speakers.
“Some of that population would be more comfortable seeing (the World Cup) in English,” she said.
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