Women's World Cup TV Ratings Explode - Mean Nothing For Club Game

I think generally speaking you’re right, but it’s pretty rare to get a match with that much drama. I’ve talked to a lot of people who watched and said to me “are exciting games like this common?” How many converts will that make? Who knows. I just remember that I went through a similar thing about 17 years ago,

It’s not just the nationalism that makes me watch, if I’ll be honest. It’s the stage as well. Put those two together and I’m watching.

Women’s soccer is thrilling at this level, but watching WPS play makes me want to gouge my eyes out.

But I think you meant the MLB All-Star game had a 6.9 rating. If not, my oversight.

The Sounders Women are playing in the W-League semi finals at the end of this month.

…for two reasons:

1) First, as you noted, a lot of the interest came from a purely nationalistic slant. People love to shout “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” for any event in which Our Boys (or Girls) have a chance of beating the world…and especially so in sports where other countries are typically considered superior. Remember the fanatical interest in the 1972 Fischer-Spassky chess championship? Did that have any real impact on American interest in chess once we’d taken the title from the Commies? Likewise, if you get any U.S. team having a chance to win in a sport where we’re not supposed to do well — hockey, curling, probably even tiddly-winks — national interest will soar, only to flame out once Our Country has either lifted the trophy or gone down ignominiously to defeat.

2) Second, much of the coverage of both this and last year’s World Cups had a decidedly backhand tone when it came to soccer here. As in 1995 and 1999, the successes of the WNT were treated as more of a demonstration of “Grrl Power” than of the pleasures of The Beautiful Game. When you get a steady diet of stories with headlines like “For U.S. Soccer, It’s A Woman’s World,” the main point of the story is going to be that “our women are successful while our men are not,” which will do nothing to get people out to watch MLS and other men’s leagues, which still make up the large majority of professional soccer in this country — in fact, it may do just the opposite. Similarly, during last year’s tournament in South Africa, much of the coverage had a subtext (as stated outright by an announcer on KJR) of “look, ignore the MLS — it sucks! — but our World Cup team is really worth watching.” Once again, something that promotes watching a certain event, but that does so in a dismissive manner toward U.S. soccer as a whole. That may do wonders to gin up viewership for a specific televised match or tournament, but little or nothing to build interest in homegrown soccer here.

a record for a WPS match, apparently. Good for them. Ride that WWC wave!