As I pointed out in a post yesterday, the fact Major League Soccer requires marketers to take a national sales course to sell tickets to MLS games indicates in part that football is very hard sell in America. MLS broadcasters share the same problem—how to market an American take on a sport that is still widely-perceived as ‘foreign’?

In the old North American Soccer League days (1968-94), television networks believed the only way to sell the game to suspicious Americans was to try to recast it as an all-American past-time in the mould of the NFL, complete with a final season-ending ‘SoccerBowl.’ In recent years however, with the rise in TV exposure and popularity of various European leagues, broadcasters became aware that many potential MLS viewers are already steeped in the Euro-mystique of tifos, flares, passion—in short, soccer as narrative.

Whether unwittingly or no, this approach plays into a classic British perception of football. For cultural reasons that go beyond the purview of this post, match reports in England have up until recently been written in language normally reserved for dime-store novellas—attacks are “relentless,” defenses are “stingy,” “battles are won” in the midfield. It’s only in recent years that several writers have attempted something approaching tactical analysis, which even then in most cases is limited to broad, formational strokes.

American big four network NBC, who are the new domestic MLS rights holders, are largely following this British line. Their recent promo for example focuses on stirring images of fans, rather than any on-field play. An earlier spot uses an absurd metaphor involving “dangling meat” to describe a routine corner.

In other words, MLS is cast as a European top flight simulacrum; a live, if faded facsimile of a real live European domestic first division, with all its hackneyed narrative devices (NBC’s slogan for MLS is “Every game tells a story”). This strategy may or may not pay dividends in the short-term, but the ideal would be to find a way to present football in a way that is uniquely American but does not parrot the stars-and-stripes bombast of North American leagues like Major League Baseball or the National Football League.

How?

The excellent Sarah Rudd’s On Footy blog featured a recent post that highlighted some expert New York Times analysis on why exactly Jeremy Lin has emerged as a star point guard in the NBA. It was an example of what she terms, after Edward Tufte’s book, qualitative data. “Qualitative data can often be the “how” or “why” to go along with the “what” provided by quantitative data,” Rudd writes. Michael Cox does this kind of thing often on Zonal Marking, as does the excellent amateur YouTube videographer AllasFCB2. Qualitative data is particularly important in soccer because, unlike in sports like baseball, quantitative data alone, like pass completion rates or kilometres run, rarely tells the tale.

Despite the importance (and pleasure) yielded by qualitative data in soccer, few pundits make mention of the mechanics of a single play in soccer broadcasts (our own Kristian Jack, Formation Geek extraordinaire, excepted). Rudd makes the case by providing a link to this thirteen minute video (see above). It’s of poor audio-quality and the humour is, well, forced, but it proves its point well, one that I hadn’t heard before.

We all know soccer commentating is a mess of grab-bag cliches. Attackers who miss headers “should have done better.” Defenders who lose their markers are “atrocious.” Barcelona play “like a dream” (this may be why I find Ray Hudson hard to take). Rarely do viewers get a qualitative breakdown of the play itself, which in part explains the popularity of a recent generation of soccer writers like Jonathan Wilson who often go beyond ready-at-hand journalistic cliches or easy (and often meaningless) tactical explanations in their columns. They also don’t fall into the trap of gazing at numbers and presuming therein lies the truth.

The video however argues that this kind of analysis is already ingrained in American sports culture (save perhaps hockey, pace Don Cherry). It’s just so prevalent we don’t even think about it. Think of the exhaustive play-by-play analysis in any given NFL game; whether they like it or not, the viewer is provided with a detailed explanation of how a particular action or bit of skill opened up a defense.

The maker of the vid makes the case that US sports desks could offer American viewers unfamiliar with soccer a reason to enjoy the sport that is uniquely American, whilst at the same time offering the world a model for a new kind of soccer broadcasting. It’s a fascinating third way option between American flag-waving and European imitation with a lot of potential to help grow the sport.