This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
When NBC paid a quarter-billion dollars for the U.S. broadcast rights to the English Premier League beginning in 2013 it was an expensive gamble. Just 4% of Americans ranked soccer as their favorite sport, according to a Gallup poll taken that year. And the network was drawing a 0.1 rating for its coverage of Major League Soccer games that season.
But the wager has paid off big. When the network kicked off its 14th season of EPL coverage last month, the opening Saturday game between Brentford and Tottenham drew an average audience of 1.2 million on NBC and its Peacock streaming service, up 16% from the opening Saturday game last August.
“When we took on the project, we all just thought it was awesome and it was just a fun, ‘Hey, let’s just do the best we can,’” said Pierre Moossa, the coordinating producer for NBC Sports’ broadcast coverage of the Premier League from the start. “I don’t think we all appreciated how much it would change.”
Much of the change has favored NBC, which will air all 380 EPL games this season on NBC, the USA Network and its Peacock streaming service.
According to a recent Parks Associates and InterDigital survey, roughly 70% of U.S. sports viewers at least partly watch on streaming services like Peacock, which will carry more than half of all EPL games. And the audience for those games skews young, with more than half of all avid soccer viewers aged 18-to-34, a demographic highly sought by advertisers and one that suggests NBC’s numbers could stay strong for years.
Then there’s the growing popularity of the sport itself. Over the past 14 years the number of Americans ranking soccer as their favorite has more than doubled, to 10%, trailing only tackle football and basketball, according to a survey by The Economist. The success of this summer’s North American World Cup, which played to stadiums that were 99.7% full and drew a record U.S. viewing audience of more than 62 million for the final, confirmed the survey’s findings.
How much NBC is responsible for that growth is impossible to say but it clearly deserves some credit. So does Rebecca Lowe, who has ridden that wave while anchoring the network’s Premier League coverage from the first season.
Fox and Telemundo saw strong audience levels topped only by the Super Bowl.
“Over the course of these 14 years we have just brought so many more people into the tent. And they’ve stayed,” Lowe said.
“When I first joined, it was always a bit of a fight to be talked about in the same breath as some of the bigger sports. Now it’s being talked about. It’s changed a lot.”
NBC announced its first season of Premier League coverage with much fanfare, including a four-minute 42-second promo featuring a fictional coach named Ted Lasso, who had been lured away from college football to manage an EPL team. Lasso has since gone on to bigger and better things on Apple TV, where the series is in its fourth season. But the NBC promo’s tagline — “It’s football. Just not as we know it” — spoke to the network’s belief that U.S. viewers would have to be educated about the English game and its differences from the American one.
Lowe’s deep knowledge, infectious enthusiasm and patience made her the perfect teacher, though she had to be careful at first. Assuming viewers understood the history of English soccer — or even the offside rule — could make the broadcasts unintelligible for new fans who understood neither. Oversimplifying things, on the other hand, would leave hardcore fans feeling as if they were being talked down to.
That once-wide chasm of understanding has narrowed, she said.
