Champions League TV Ratings Nearly Double to 1.8

Just curious what kind of numbers NHL games get, I honestly have no idea. I have to assume they are much higher, because like you said, the league generates tons more revenue.

Bringing it back to soccer/MLS, what have the ratings trends been over the past 5 years? Does anyone have those figures handy?

Also, what kind of jump did the UCL Final see in the USA ratings when it moved from Wednesday to Saturday?

Game 7 of the Bruins/Lightning just got a 2.2 rating, the highest ever for a non-Stanley Cup Final game on VERSUS, and the sixth most watched game ever on the network.

NBC’s coverage of playoff games has been averaging a 1.4 for random playoff games.

And the Sharks/Canucks series on VERSUS was averaging a .74 rating.

It was never meant to be a comparison of leagues, only the sports in general. Soccer’s audience is far more fractured. The biggest US audience is for the Mexican league. Following that, it’s probably England, then MLS, then ‘other Europe’, then ‘other Latin America,’ (That’s on a week-to-week basis, anyway, not counting event games like this CL final.)

And then there’s the international events. International hockey only gets ratings when the US is in the Olympic Gold Medal Game, preferably against Canada or Russia. In the US, the WC is not the only tourney that can register on the ratings scale, the Euros and Copa America also have.

And then of course exhibitions, where the US can draw and get some degree of TV viewership for friendlies, where that’s more or less impossible in hockey. The two CL finalists will play a friendly in Washington DC in a couple months, and it’s likely to draw 75000 fans and get another couple hundred thousand television viewers.

The only point of that claim is that if it’s true, then it re-frames American Soccer’s challenge into one of soccer market share more than pushing the sport.

But that’s not to say your point here is wrong, it isn’t. Spending the hundreds of millions of dollars to get rosters like the ones on display this weekend in exchange for a 1.8 rating would be a financial disaster. So the answer can’t be throwing money at the problem, or anything you’d think of as a ‘quick fix.’

Just having an American on either team, who sees maybe 15-25 minutes of action would help, but its going to take an American superstar succeeding at the highest level to really transcend the game.

As much as I think Jim Rome is a tool, he has a huge following. He, or Rick Reilly, or whoever else make a huge difference in what people think about the sport, and that’s tough to overcome. When mainstream figures begin to endorse the sport, it will grow.

but while 200 bars may have had 200 people show up to watch this game, thousands had dozens with baseball on the screen.

In every other sport the Finals pull in higher ratings than regular season matchups.

Started following them back when they had Tim Howard and just never stopped. I also watch Barca anytime they play a good opponent and almost any other game between two top notch teams.

And the place was packed. But how would you fairly track views from bars?

asking people where they’ve watched sports in the past 12 months. You could figure out a fairly accurate ratio of how many people watched soccer in bars vs. how many watched other sports in bars.

As for me, I enjoy catching a game at the bar every once in awhile. It’s the best way to get that communal experience of sharing the game with a big group of people, beyond being there. I was at the Atlantic Crossing when I saw Donovan’s goal against Algeria, and that place went nuts. It was awesome.