MLS and Media Coverage

A friend of mine who directs the Center for Court Innovation in New York City (and who writes a varied and excellent blog) lamented in an email to me this week that his two favorite sports leagues—the English Premier League and the NBA—are dormant. I suggested now might be the time for him to turn his attention to the New York Red Bulls. He wrote back that the Red Bulls are playing some frustrating soccer lately, letting opponents back into games and settling for draws. He also noted that the New York papers don’t regularly cover the team.

His last observation reminded me of how important media coverage is to almost all sports fans, whether they’re highly educated professionals who read the New York Times or tradespeople who read the New York Post. No one wants to follow a sports team in a cultural vacuum. Simply watching the games isn’t enough for most us. We want to read about the team in the local paper, watch analyses of the team on TV shows, listen to commentary about the team on sports radio. This kind of coverage leads to more personal social exchanges: barstool and water-cooler talk, exchanges of opinions between friends over email, blog posts, etc.

I grew up around Washington, D.C., and after I moved to Boston I used to watch Redskins games by satellite at a Brighton pub. This was in the days before the Internet, and one particular fellow Skins fan would usually show up with a fat Washington Post under his arm, purchased at a premium from the old Out of Town News in Harvard Square. He would kindly let other Skins fans read the sports section. The sports section of the Post seen outside the D.C. area had a numinous aspect to me back then, even if it was a week old (as it usually was). My God, I used to think when I went to the pub, I can read about the Redskins! And talk about them with other informed individuals! To repeat: reading and exchanging ideas are crucial aspects of the fan experience and almost as much fun as watching the games themselves. (Actually, watching those Charmin-soft Norv Turner-coached teams was often torture compared to reading and talking about them.)

If we accept this as true, then the continuing lack of MLS-related coverage in traditional media outlets is a serious impediment for most potential fans. To take a recent example of skimpy MLS coverage, I found out today that last year’s Revolution MVP—the injured Marko Perovic—is no longer a member of the team. (And unfortunately neither is fellow Serbian Ilija Stolica.) On June 30, Revolution management chose not to renew Perovic’s contract, which seems a rather ruthless thing to do to an injured former star. I discovered this from the MLS website, which referenced a post from The Bent Musket blog about Perovic’s release. I then went to the Boston Globe’s/boston.com’s Revolution section homepage, where there is currently no link to any article about Perovic. This is borderline amazing; surely New England’s decision not to renew its MVP’s contract must be the biggest Revolution-related story of the last seven days, if not the entire sorry season? (I eventually found a July 1 Globe article about Perovic’s release by Googling it.)

Imagine if the contract of last year’s Patriots or Red Sox MVP was not renewed? Seemingly everyone in the Boston area would be talking about it, and there would certainly be wide, long-lasting coverage in newspapers, on sports radio, and on TV. Yet when the Revolution actually do lose their skillful, still-young, and productive MVP—a real blow to New England sports, in my opinion—no one seems to care. Kudos to the Globe for reporting on it at all, but one would have thought that Perovic and Stolica both essentially getting cut from the team would warrant more than one 400-word article (with no picture) that’s quickly dropped from the website’s soccer section. (By the way, this paltry media coverage can work to a fan’s advantage in one important way: there is virtually no need to impose a personal media blackout if you plan to watch an MLS game on your DVR or your computer after the game has been played.)

Blaming the media—itself an old phrase, at least as old as the Viet Nam war—is almost always a mug’s game. Newspapers, radio, and TV cover sports teams insofar as they think doing so will generate an audience and therefore ad revenue. The Globe doesn’t have extensive Revolution coverage not because it’s a backward or inept organization, but because its editors are running a business and they think there’s no demand for extensive MLS coverage. It’s hard to argue with them, given the poor attendance at Revolution home games and what I take to be a general lack of interest in MLS among my own Boston-area friends and acquaintances. 

Still, given rising league-wide MLS attendance, widespread and increasing American interest in the World Cup and other international soccer competitions and foreign leagues, and potential readers/viewers/listeners like my New York friend and me, traditional news outlets may be underestimating demand and missing an opportunity by not devoting more of their resources to covering MLS.