Americans’ access to Premier League trumps Brits’
If you’re a fan of Premier League soccer, you have a better chance of seeing your game of choice here in America than you would … in England.
For the first time, every single one of the Premier League’s 380 games will be available live to the U.S. audience, via NBC and its fledgling sports network, while certain games cannot be seen on television in the United Kingdom.
This reality has left many English fans distinctly unimpressed and pushing for change, while for the long-suffering U.S. soccer community it represents the final step in a transformation from the dark old days of virtually zero coverage.
It wasn’t so long ago that American soccer fans had to conduct frustrating searches for box scores in the fine print of newspapers to find out what was going on in big leagues such as England, Spain and Italy, plus an occasional treat of delayed highlights from random European games.
“When I was in college in the 1980s I would go to the library once a week and catch up on the soccer reports in the London Times,” said Nick Green, soccer columnist and blogger for the L.A. Daily News. “There was virtually no television coverage of it whatsoever so that was what you had to do. It started to change when Fox Soccer World arrived in the late ’90s and since then it has just taken off.”
The blanket coverage in the United States comes as a result of a three-year, $250 million deal brokered between the PL and NBC, which will split games between the new NBC Sports Network and its online platform. Read more
