ESPN hits WC Overdrive

I remember when I first moved here, apart from MLS and following the national team, ESPN didn't seem to care much about soccer. Over the years, I've witnessed a slow growth in coverage, leading from when they would bother themselves to announce the Champions League Final result in the "BottomLine", to actually purchasing rights to show some Premiership and Champions League games this year, live(!).

During Euro 2008, I walked into an Italian pizzeria (I was doing my summer internship elsewhere in Chicago) and the nice old proprietor actually had no idea what channel the soccer would be on, I had to go back to work, with his cable company information, and figure it out for him.

Well, this year, ESPN owns all the rights to the World Cup for domestic viewing here in the US (correct me if I'm wrong), and they are not letting you forget it. They started showing their first adverts during the Vancouver Olympics in January (they bought ad time on NBC to do so, if you hadn't thought of that) and are now blasting us whenever they can.

It's getting a bit overboard, albeit entertaining, as they are using their own advertising time to show 30 second reviews of the 32 teams that will be playing in the tournament. You can see the forty (at time of press) different adverts on their youtube page.

I liked the "power of 10" ad, which discusses the best players to have worn that number, but I'd honestly like it if they did a "power of n" advert because there has been so many great players.

On a related note, I had always detested the commentating done in previous tournaments, and would turn the captions off. Tonight, ESPN had someone on to briefly discuss the Dutch's defense and teamwork, and they subscripted the discussion with his "Resume", to tell me that his work in soccer had basically consisted of being on their international commentary team for the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Euro 2008 and Japan/S. Korea 2006 and....that's IT. His so-called "Resume" did not include any managerial experience or playing experience...in fact, he looked all the world like someone who had barely touched a ball, and ESPN was going out of their way to tell me that(!) All I could think of was, "Oh, so it was you that I'd been tuning out?".

Euro 2008 was better, including Andy Gray, and I was pleased to see Andy, but he got into an argument on the air with a fellow American analyst who was obviously pissing Andy off, and I didn't see him review games again after that (he did continue to commentate). I was disappointed, and I am hoping that ESPN has invested heavily, in fact as much as they did on the adverts, on their commentating team, because it makes such a difference (an infinite difference, some might suggest) when you have people who actually know what they're talking about.

I just had a look, here's the line up. I don't follow commentators, so I don't know these names *crosses fingers*.

Finally, ESPN took a little time to review the FA Cup Final tonight, and by review, I don't mean they showed Kalou's miss, or the number of times Chelsea hit the woodwork, I mean they showed the goal, and that Michael Ballack got injured, like, they had perhaps ten seconds for the game. But I brought it up because the captions spelled Ballack as "Bollack" *snigger*. The American captioning seems to cover the wide variety of names found in sports pretty well, but, I'm sure there'll be some good misses this June, I'll post them if I see them.