PREMIER LEAGUE SOCCER
British soccer tries to score American fansBY MONICA CRAWFORD ON OCTOBER 18, 2013
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, but for some reason, in America it can’t seem to get off of the bench and onto the playing field with all of the other sports. Over the past years the popularity of professional soccer has slowly grown in America with leagues such as Major League Soccer and even the introduction in 2009 of the Women’s Professional Soccer League which folded in 2012. Despite the efforts made to promote the world’s favorite sport in the US, soccer just doesn’t seem to receive the same hype here as it gets from our British friends across the pond.
Hopefully this is subject to change thanks to NBC Sports. At the beginning of this season, NBC paid $250 million to get the rights to broadcast the Barclays English Premier League soccer games on Saturday mornings for the next three years. Now, instead of having to look up highlights online or illegally watch crappy quality streamings of the games, anyone with cable can tune in and watch Manchester United take on their long time rival Liverpool. NBC has even made it easy for sports fanatics who don’t know much about British soccer to get involved with the sport. On the NBC Sports website, you can take a quiz that will, according to the website, help you “keep calm and pick a team.” After answering a few questions about your likes and dislikes, you get paired up with a Premier League team to support. While this might not be the most accurate test in the world (I was paired up with Manchester United because I like Orlando Bloom who is a Manchester United fan) it is still a good way to choose a team to root for throughout the season. The Premier League in England is like the NFL in America; fans go all out for their favorite teams. On game days in England, fans clad in their favorite teams’ jerseys pack into the stadiums. The stands are full of fans young and old holding up scarves of their favorite teams for the entire game. Their chants reverberate through the stands as they cheer on teams such as Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea. As a soccer player and fan who is stuck with NFL mania in the US, relying on NBC to hear the chanting fans and watch Wayne Rooney score another goal will have to do. We can’t all live in a country where football means kicking a ball around on the lush green grass instead of a bunch of big men covered in countless pads crashing into each other. In reality, watching football on a Sunday afternoon will most likely always be one of America’s favorite pastimes, but thanks to NBC, watching soccer games on Saturdays is slowly making its way up the ladder and becoming more popular in the US. American football can have it’s Sunday afternoons, Monday nights and really just about any other time besides Saturday mornings, because the real football deserves a chance too. HTML Comment Box is loading comments...
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