By Brad Hubbard | @bradhubbard
The 2014 World Cup is in full swing. Close games, lots of goals and a USA victory highlighted the first six days of games. What the media outside of the soccer contingent is still talking about is how soccer just hasn’t caught on in America. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
The USA vs Ghana game on Monday afternoon (or early evening for those of you on the East Coast) had more than 11 million viewers on ESPN and almost a half million a minute on the Watch ESPN app. The opening match of the World Cup between Brazil and Croatia did over nine million TV viewers between Univision and ESPN.
And that was a random Thursday afternoon.
CBS This Morning ran a story on Tuesday about kids in poor neighborhoods in Rio playing soccer. Gayle King said at the end of the piece, ‘I’m amazed how big this game is except in this country.’ (fast forward to the 2:45 mark to hear it for yourself)
Apparently she has never seen or been to an MLS match in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver or Kansas City much less a US Men’s National Team game.
Cause soccer is not big in America.
Maybe she wasn’t aware of the 5,000 or so people in Grant Park in Chicago watching the match on the big screen. One of many massive viewing parties across the country.
Yeah, nobody in the US watches soccer. It’s not a big deal here.
US Media, what the hell else do you need?
No other country has as many popular professional sports as the US does. From the NBA to MLB to the NHL and of course the NFL and College Football. Let us not forget March Madness and the Masters. England is not packed with this level of sport. Neither is Brazil, Japan, Germany, Russia, or China.
Let’s have a little reality check here for the US news media. Maybe they are not as smart as they think.
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