The broadcaster’s efforts at Russia 2018 were the TV equivalent of Marouane Fellaini, a player who tries to do everything and succeeds at almost nothing
Ratings in the US for this year’s World Cup are down significantly on 2014 and if reports are correct, Fox Sports will lose money on its coverage of the tournament. Fox executives will no doubt point to the mitigating factors: the unfavorable time zone; the absence of the US men’s national team; perhaps even the unexpected failure of big teams such as Spain, Germany and Argentina. On the other hand, this has been the most exciting World Cup in decades. If Fox has missed an opportunity to reel in casual American fans and get them excited about soccer, and it almost certainly has, that’s down to one thing: Fox’s own coverage of the tournament. It has been appalling.
OK, that’s maybe not entirely fair. The coverage has not been quite as horrendous as it promised to be before the tournament. But it’s still been poor. The network has had plenty of time to get things right too: Fox secured the rights to the 2018 and 2022 tournaments in late 2011, and the following year hired David Neal, a veteran producer who worked on nine Olympic Games for NBC, to oversee its coverage. This is perhaps when the rot began to set in: Fox insiders told the Guardian that Neal mostly staffed his World Cup team with the network’s existing roster of baseball, Nascar and NFL producers, whereas Fox’s soccer group – which handles year-round coverage of the sport, including the Champions League and MLS – was left in a largely peripheral support role.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NLIn5b
