Mere minutes after their coverage of today’s opening games concluded today, the verdicts were flying in on ESPN’s expensive work so far:

Soccer America loved the production values, but lamented the failure of Efan Ekoku to correctly call the offside decision given against Mexico for their disallowed goal: “The production quality of the opening game — from camera angles to well-timed close-ups — promises us a month’s worth of delightful viewing. One hopes the ESPN commentators will start getting the rules right.”

Ben Gossman at Broadcasting & Cable gave a full-on scoresheet on every aspect of the coverage. He rightly praises ESPN for dropping the traditional update ticker from the bottom of ESPN2′s picture and for the judicious use of onscreen graphics: “Kudos to ESPN for not bombarding viewers with tons of graphics, which so often add nothing to a broadcast. The few times a graphic popped up, it was useful, such as the fact that host nations were 14-0-5 in opening matches prior to Friday’s affair.”

The AP’s television writer David Bauder provides perhaps the oddest review, lauding the use of the British use of “football” by Martin Tyler, but offering a very confusing summary of the mess made around the offside call in the first half:

The broadcasters’ experience wasn’t used to help viewers in the first half, when a Mexican player’s goal was disallowed by a referee’s offsides call.

“What an awful decision,” Okoku said.

He didn’t explain why, however, assuming his audience clearly understood rules about where players need to stand. Because ESPN was taking a worldwide feed of the game’s video, it couldn’t make its own production decisions – so after one, quick, inconclusive replay the play was largely gone and many viewers were left baffled about what actually happened.

What Bauder leaves unsaid is that it remains unclear if Ekoku did understand the rule correctly, or if anyone in ESPN’s production team at all did even well after the incident, as the failure to clear up what had actually happened was unacceptable: the replay clearly showed it wasn’t “an awful decision”. Many made initial misjudgments about the call — I tweeted “huh?” right away before being corrected myself — but never explaining what happened on a national broadcast (as far as I saw) does a disservice to the game and the officiating crew, who got it right.

My opinion on it all? Aside from all that, Ally McCoist might be British, but he’s making me wish for the days of Marcelo Balboa as a co-commentator at the World Cup again with his inane pronouncements. Well, almost.

The same network that drew criticism for calling 20 matches from U.S. studios four years ago is putting together a staff of 300 people to produce the event in South Africa. ESPN has hired British announcers and plans 65 hours of live studio programming from Johannesburg.

“We have a production plan that we think is up to the level of ambition of this event with a great group of commentators that we’ve assembled, a broadcast operation that is far and away the biggest we’ve ever amassed outside of the U.S.,” Drake [executive producer for ESPN’s World Cup coverage] said.

ESPN aren’t doing this for the sake of shits and giggles. The World Cup has become a major draw on American television, as this New York Times article highlights:

“If you ranked World Cup viewing by countries going back to 1998, the U.S. ranked 23rd,” said Kevin Alavy, director of Initiative Sports Futures, a London-based analysis firm. “In 2002, the U.S. jumped to 13th, and in 2006, it jumped again to 8th place. And we expect America to keep on jumping.”

In 2006, the ESPN-ESPN2-ABC broadcasts of the World Cup reached 70.2 million viewers while Univision reached 29.5 million, according to Nielsen Media Research.

It’s pretty obvious those rankings-by-country are aggregate numbers rather than proportions of the viewing public, but there’s no doubt ESPN are tapping into a growing audience for soccer in a massive market: “We’re definitely selling the World Cup as if the U.S. has been converted to soccer,” Ed Erhardt, the president of ESPN customer marketing and sales told the New York Times. “It’s a more diverse country than it’s ever been.”

Many bloggers and journalists, though, are less sure about whether ESPN is covering the game in the right way, particularly in the broader sense of what’s good for the game in the United States.

Paul Gardner highlighted the ambiguity of all this in his SoccerAmerica column yesterday, criticising again ESPN’s decision to go with British announcers, wondering if their approach will prove popular, and whether it will do any good for Major League Soccer:

I happen to think that ESPN has made a frightful mess of trying to work out who its World Cup television coverage should be aimed at — but I’d have to admit that it’s not an easy task. ESPN has decided to go for the Eurosnobs. What makes this rather hilarious, is that ESPN has done this without knowing anything about the Eurosnobs or about the various factions of the U.S. soccer landscape.

All we know is that the man in charge, Jed Drake, is a soccer ignoramus who is in love with British accents. And what will make matters even more hilarious is if this turns out to be the right decision.

Fake Sigi piles on from a different angle, highlighting an article on ESPN Soccernet (that’s actually wire copy from AP) about the stampede at Makhulong stadium on Sunday, summarising the piece as follows: “Mayhem! Violence! Not Uncommon! With the subtext that this is something foreign to be distrusted and viewed with suspicion.”

Fake Sigi concludes, “Maybe I’m a little sensitive, but I honestly thought ESPN of all outlets would be past this sort of thing. If this is what their idea of audience-targeted content looks like, they really do have it all wrong. ”

Maybe Fake Sigi is right in saying he’s a “little sensitive” on this one, but it does highlight the challenge ESPN faces in presenting its content (across a myriad of platforms, including television, radio, mobile, its magazine, and online) to diverse audiences, some extremely knowledgeable about soccer, some still hostile to soccer, some simply curious about soccer. Hell, that stampede article Fake Sigi links to has 265 comments to it, a good few weeks worth of comments here. Blogs like this one with a largely American readership who know the sport inside-out are but splattered bugs on the windshield of ESPN’s soccer juggernaut (just a few years ago, putting those last three words together would have seemed laughable).

The broadest conclusion to be drawn about ESPN’s unprecedented World Cup coverage is simply the good news that it reflects the growth of the sport. But that growth is fragmented, hard to measure and hard to direct appeal to (ask an MLS marketing department in the United States outside of Seattle), and this presents a massive challenge to ESPN as the premier sports outlet in the United States. It’s no wonder their coverage is something of a”frightful mess”.

That’s up from last year, when it received a 1.0 share on ESPN, but the game should have benefited from a move to the FOX network and a shift to Saturday afternoon, American time.  The final rating will come in on Thursday, but it looks certain not to meet the expectations of the Fox hierarchy, as Fox Sports chairman David Hill said he hoped for a rating of 2.0 to 2.5.

Hill explained why:

“What we’ve discovered with Fox Soccer Channel this year and Fox Soccer Plus has been an incredible eye-opener about the way the audience just keeps building,” Hill said. “So it really became a kind of no-brainer for us to say this game deserves a place on the network.”

I don’t think Saturday’s rating will dampen that view, especially if the World Cup proves to be a ratings success on ABC/ESPN, but it’s worth noting the event didn’t achieve a massive audience by itself. How much that was down to the teams involved is open to question.

(By the way: this is the first of the new “Diary” entries, quick links & commentary on news of note – a feature of the new Pitch Invasion. Let me know if you find these posts worthwhile or not).

Big Story

ESPN has decided to go all British for its lead voices in all 64 World Cup games this summer on American television this summer, and Steve Davis is not happy about it. In an eloquent rant, Davis comments that:

I’m on this British accent thing again because you guys just announced your lineup for World Cup broadcasts. Talk about a kick in the nads to the American soccer establishment! Here’s the opening line from your announcement:

“ESPN’s World Cup telecasts will have a British accent.

“Adrian Healey, Derek Rae and Ian Darke have been hired by ESPN for its U.S. broadcasts at this year’s World Cup and will join Martin Tyler to give the network British play-by-play announcers for all 64 games beginning June 11.”

Man, that’s a fine “How Do You Do” for Yankee viewers …and announcers.

In an open letter to ESPN, Davis asks “couldn’t you guys at ESPN squeeze an American voice into the play-by-play lineup?  Is American soccer such a craphole wasteland that a guy like JP Dellacamera can’t get a bite of the play-by-play mic?”

Dellacamera is certainly hard done by here. Most odd of all, as EPL Talk has commented, is that United States games (including against England) will not have an American voice as lead commentator. The only American voice we will hear is the dull John Harkes.

What Davis doesn’t mention is the disappointing coverage provided by ESPN at the previous World Cup behind the microphone, led by baseball guy Dave O’Brien, as this New York Times article from July 2006 reminds us:

At the beginning of this tournament, we received so many comments from readers complaining about the ESPN and ABC announcers that we had to ask you to stop sending them in. It was true, however, that like many of you, I found it so hard to listen to their game commentary that I switched to Univision — even though I was describing matches live and needed a steady flow of information. It felt as if whatever information I was getting through half-understood Spanish was superior to what I was getting on the English-language telecasts.

After a few days, however, the ESPN and ABC announcers had gotten better. They had stopped shoehorning trivia facts, interesting sidelights and random statistics into the play-by-play and color commentary, and best of all, they had stopped making tortuous analogies to sports like baseball and basketball to “explain” soccer to their American audience.

This was true for all the announcing teams (although the English/Irish team of Adrian Healey and Tommy Smyth were getting it right pretty much from the start). Shep Messing, who had been particularly awful the first couple of days with constant explanatory references to baseball while doing color to Glenn Davis’s play by play, must have heard the complaints and thankfully kept it to soccer thereafter. Two other teams, JP Dellacamera and John Harkes, and Rob Stone and Robin Fraser, were straightforward and even insightful from a fairly early point. Sometime during the World Cup’s second week, I found myself gravitating back to ESPN.

Which brings us to the lead announcing team, Dave O’Brien and Marcelo Balboa. O’Brien in particular has come under a heavy barrage of criticism for his lack of feel for soccer, which is down to his being a baseball announcer who didn’t follow soccer until a few months ago. Some American soccer fans were upset with ESPN’s choice of O’Brien even before the tournament started, with one starting a petition to remove him in favor of a career soccer announcer, and certainly once the tournament got under way, the reaction has been consistently negative from fans in general, as anyone reading the comments sections to this blog’s live game reports can tell.

All true, though for my money Marcelo Balboa was worse; so inane and inaccurate was his commentary that I had to institute a house-rule to all visitors to my house for World Cup games not to point out his every annoying comment, so we might be able to talk about something else at some point. In any case, it’s pretty clear (and this was obvious in their Euro 2008 coverage as well) ESPN is committed to not repeating that mistake by going with more experience.

At the same time I think Davis is still right that it’s a shame ESPN could not find room for one talented American soccer commentator (rather than attempting another Dave O’Brien transplant from another sport), and Dellacamera would have done a decent enough job.

All things considered, though, it’s going to be much easier for every fan of the sport to listen to Martin Tyler in 2010 than it was to Dave O’Brien in 2006.

Then again, I have (the remnants of) a British accent, so perhaps this isn’t my place to speak.

Quick Hits

• Cardiff City’s Supporters’ Trust has released a statement about the club’s financial crisis, issuing some alarm about the way the club is run following court proceedings: “It is obvious that our beloved football club is in a wretched financial state and yet there appears to be none of the drastic cost-cutting measures we have seen at other clubs who have encountered similar problems. Instead, it seems the only remedies being offered by the Cardiff City board are the hopes of substantial foreign investment or promotion to the Premiership.”
• A sneak peak at the new MLS website. That’s MLSsoccer.com with two Sssss, then. We’ll have our own review of one MLS club’s new website up sometime this week. Bet you can’t guess which one.
• Kinda wish someone would do this for every city in the US: Football in Miami and Beyond has an excellent roundup of all the media coverage out there for the sport in Miami.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

It’s almost cliché to point out the growth of television coverage of soccer in North America. The announcement this week that Fox would screen the UEFA Champions League final on  Fox Sports, rather than as originally planned on subsidiary FX, made major waves. It’ll be broadcast in the afternoon on a Saturday, so strong ratings are expected, as the event continues its march as the world’s most popular annual sporting event on television.

Fox have done a tremendous job since winning the rights to the Champions League this year, with their multi-channel HD broadcasts on DirecTV an oustanding advance from ESPN’s previous, more limited coverage.

ESPN and ABC are not sitting on their hands, though. In June, ABC will show the United States play England, in what’s expected to be the most watched soccer broadcast of all-time in the United States. ESPN’s coverage of the World Cup is expected to be the most expensive production of a sporting event in their history. Hell, if you’re really a masochist, you can even listen to every game on ESPN radio this summer…lead commentator, one Tommy Smyth. ESPN will be showing 83 Premier League games next season, up from 48 this. One day soon, Fox Soccer Channel will appear in HD on our televisions (please, god!).

The media landscape is also changing for writers. Brooks Peck’s irreverent soccer blog Dirty Tackle was bought by Yahoo!, and Ives Galarcep this week announced he was moving his freelance work from ESPN Soccernet to join Fox. We side with Fake Sigi on the quality of Ives’ writing (and check out the brilliant fourth comment there), but hell, it’s good to see soccer writers being picked up at a tough time for the media as a whole.

The question as ever is whether all this is good for the domestic leagues. ESPN is adding more Premier League games to its broadcast schedule this year, and once again, bloggers like Jason Davis are asking if this is really good for Major League Soccer:

MLS will always remain a second class citizen in the United States as long as it’s taking a back seat to leagues from distant shores. While the lack of visibility and money constraints are the major reasons for that situation now, television will play a large part in the future. Though watching the English game (thanks to the time difference) doesn’t preclude people from watching MLS as well, the juxtaposition of the two does the American product no favors.

There’s certainly some truth to that. At the same time, it’s been pretty clear for some time that when MLS targets its marketing to people that already like soccer — and much of this “liking” comes from watching overseas broadcasts of it — it bears fruit.  See the early days of DC United and Chicago, see Toronto, see Seattle. The combination of the massive youth participation in the sport by men and women now in their 20s who have also taken a serious interest in overseas football and the World Cups shown on television in the past decade is a demographic that MLS rightly recognises as prime for pumping in the coming years.

An interesting minor move was made this week reflecting that approach by Seattle, who picked up Arlo White from the BBC to be the main commentator for their games this year. Expansion team the Philadelphia Union has partnered with local network 6ABC with all games to be broadcast in HD featuring commentary by the solid ESPN-vet JP Dellacamera. The production of MLS games on television needs to match that of overseas broadcasts, and MLS appears to understand that.

This doesn’t, of course, address the issue of the quality of the play on the field in MLS, which Davis is implying will put-off fans of the Premier League from watching MLS. This subjective and age-old argument is very hard to prove based on anecdotal evidence, even though it’s clear there is a kernel of truth to it.  The next year for MLS might prove it one way or the other, though: the explosion in coverage of overseas football will or will not lead to a bump in attendance and TV ratings as the league attempts to market itself to the growing audience for the sport.

Big Story
There is an excellent interview in the Guardian with England women’s football boss Hope Powell, who led England to their most successful year on the field in 2009, attaining further notoriety that saw her linked with the Grimsby Town management job. Powell’s straightforward talk is great to see, and she discusses the pressure that would be on any woman to take a job in the Football League.

I think for the first female that does this, and one day I’m sure it will happen whoever it might be, the press will be phenomenal. It would probably hinder that person doing that job. And if they failed it would be, ‘Well, there you go, that’s why a woman shouldn’t be in men’s football’, and if they did OK it would be a really difficult position for that person to be in. Really tough.

But as Powell says, “It’s just football for me.”

Perhaps it will help that the media profile of the women’s game in England looks set to be raised further, with news yesterday that the new Women’s Super League launching in 2011 will be part of ESPN UK’s new television package with the Football Association. Maybe after a while, it won’t seem so exotic for a woman running a football team consisting of female players to run a football team consisting of male players.

Worldwide News

• We mentioned the FIFA Club World Cup yesterday and its seemingly odd placement in the United Arab Emirates; SI.com has an excellent piece (taken from this month’s World Soccer magazine) on the context of the UAE’s sporting ambitions. Oh, and here’s Chuck Blazer (CONCACAF’s General Secretary and member of FIFA’s Executive Committee) on his blog in Abu Dhabi before kick-off. His blog is an absolute gold-mine, if only for shots of one of the world’s greatest beards hobknobbing amongst football’s elite.
• Ricardo Rossi is scathing in Four Four Two about the future of Italian football in European competition, despite the fact three of the four Italian teams made it to the knockout stage of the Champions League: “Italy has finally found its place in Europe: providing possible finalists for the Europa League. Last season’s debacle in the Champions League – the first time in seven years the country hasn’t had a representative in the quarter-finals – was only the beginning of a crisis in Italian football that is set to get a lot worse. There are no green shoots of recovery on the horizon – and what’s the betting there will only be three Italian representatives in a few year’s time?”
• Sweden and Norway’s Euro 2016 bid is no more, due to a lack of government funding. The deadline for candidates to submit their bids to UEFA is in February.
• A review by the British government “is set to recommend the creation of a single unit dedicated to investigating corruption in sports betting”, according to the Guardian.
• A sad day in England, as Kings Lynn Football Club are no more.
• Patrick Barclay of the Times has a long and interesting Q&A on the value of agents to the game — actually, oddly, the readers questions are more informative and thought-provoking, but it’s still interesting stuff.
• And finally, European Football Weekends decided to take a virtual trip across the Atlantic and ask me a few questions about the Chicago Fire and Section 8.  Enjoyable Q&A, and check out the rest of the site, a fellow winner of the When Saturday Comes Web Awards this week.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

The love-hate relationship American soccer fans have with ESPN is legendary. The sports television behemoth (and I’m not sure even that word captures how much ESPN bestrides the world of American sports in the 21st century) is at once derided (too dumbed down in its coverage; too focused on the Beckham-cam) and desired (ratings are picked over with a Bigsoccer-sized toothcomb; HD coverage is drooled over) by fans for its coverage of the sport.

What can’t be doubted is ESPN’s commitment to the World Cup next year and beyond, and executive vice president of content at ESPN John Skipper was recently added to the US Soccer Federation’s 2018/22 World Cup Bid Committee. He is also an actual fan of the sport, regularly travelling to England to watch Tottenham Hotspur. ESPN has of course begun showing Premier League games in both the United States and England this season, with strong ratings achieved over here.

But how will they approach the World Cup in 2010, and how does MLS fit in next summer?

Skipper was also in charge, though much newer in his job, in 2006, spending the tournament in Germany. ESPN’s coverage of the tournament was high-quality, though marred by baseball guy Dave O’Brien’s newbie commentary (though he did improve noticeably on the job) and Marcelo Balboa’s amazingly atrocious performance as a sidekick (I had to institute a rule in my house for everyone watching to stop criticising Balboa’s irritating inanity, so as to be able to talk about anything else over the 90 minutes of any given game).

We can expect much better in 2010, with Martin Tyler already signed up as the lead voice. And then there’s the Sports Guy’s new found interest in soccer, a bajillion ESPN folks seemingly already on location in South Africa, and SportsCenter ready to explain the offside rule 80 times over, or whatever. ESPN knows how to overload coverage.

Yet will this mean that MLS will get lost in the shuffle in 2010?  The league will break for two weeks of the World Cup (though not the entire tournament) but will still be on ESPN the rest of the summer, most of it without ratings drawing cards like Beckham and Blanco. Many MLS teams are already sensibly planning to tie-in their marketing efforts with World Cup watch parties (helped by the break teams will be taking), so at a local level, we should see a vast improvement on previous attempts by MLS to keep playing soccer and pretend nothing else was going on in the rest of the world.

ESPN’s own approach to MLS was explained by Skipper to reporters at a media availability session last week to promote ESPN’s World Cup coverage, with Kyle McCarthy at Goal.com providing an excellent summary:

The key for Skipper and ESPN remains finding a way to transfer the viewership in big-ticket items like the World Cup and the English Premier League to the domestic scene in greater numbers. In order to advance that goal, Skipper said ESPN plans to use its emphasis on the World Cup to increase interest in its MLS property as it enters the fourth year of an eight-year, $64 million deal. ESPN2 will feature a MLS game as part of its 24 hours of coverage before Mexico and South Africa kick off the World Cup on June 11, while other tie-ins are also expected to help raise awareness.

This is welcome, but the key for any momentum to immediately transfer to MLS will surely be a couple of post-World Cup major signings, as Skipper essentially went on to say: “If they sign somebody prominent, it’s a great story for us and we can build around it. It’s just that they (need to) get better players in, too. (Players such as) Fredy Montero in Seattle, if they can find players like that. The soccer just has to get better. You’d like to have some big names to have some stories around, get a few more people to the stadiums and poke up in the ratings here and there, but as long as it just keeps getting better, we’ll be fine.”

The usual way we soccer supporters in the U.S. measure interest in the sport is via television ratings and attendance figures, as both are readily available in the public domain and easy to digest. Unfortunately, this is a pretty weak sampling of fan interest as a whole in the American population.

Within the American sports industry, the longest-running and most widely respected research service on fan interest in American sports is the TSN/ESPN Sports Poll: their major clients list includes pretty much every league and major sponsor. As for soccer, MLS’ marketing arm SUM use their results in their marketing package — though they probably won’t be mentioning the results released this week that list MLS as the lowest in fan interest amongst American sports.

The poll was created in 1994 by a professor at Temple University, Dr. Luker, who believed a scientific random sample of the whole U.S. population was needed to establish an accurate poll of nationwide fan interest across all sports. Their methodology is as follows:

• Interviews occur 360 days of the year
• Questionnaire approximately 27-30 minutes in length
• Representative of US population, 12+ in age
• Online sample of 2,300 interviews per month, approximately 27,000 annually using TNS’ 6th Dimension Panel
• RDD/CATI sample of 1000 per month, for probability sampling and accurate projections of fan-base sizes are used to weight the online results

The bad news for MLS, as mentioned above, is that it ranks last of the 21 sports and leagues listed in terms of fan interest over the past twelve months. International soccer is also listed three places further up (so total interest in the sport of soccer is most likely higher than either ranking, though the same goes for other team sports divided between the college and professional levels).

Interest level in soccer was gauged at 27.8% in the survey, less than half of the leading league the NFL at 63.8%. A good spin for MLS is that this is well above its historic low of 10.1% suggesting considerable growth over the years, though also below its historic high of 35% (data has been tracked by the poll since the league began; unfortunately, we couldn’t find specific figures for other years to put dates to these high/low numbers).

The league did score better in avid fan interest, coming 14th of the 21 listed. It should also be noted that, as you can see, MLS was only 6.1% behind the NHL in general fan interest. Indeed, in professional team sports it’s only the expected big three of the NFL, MLB and NBA who are streets ahead of all other professional leagues.

As an MLS partisan, I’ll take the positive spins, but it’s still tough not to feel a twinge of pain for the league when we see interest in it sitting below even IndyCar and the NHRA nationwide.

Big Story

It came with no hype and no build-up because the deal was done at the last second, but the English Premier League arrived on ESPN2 this morning — in high definition. Of course, it’s absolutely beautiful, even to my bleary eyes at 6.45am Chicago time.

The question I have for my American friends is: will this move prove to be a tipping point for soccer in America?  Now, I know we hear way too much tipping points for the sport here, and we probably spend too much time asking the damn question instead of just following the sport, so feel free to skip to the links on other stuff below.

But there is something different about tuning into the Premier League on the (secondary) mainstream sports channel on a Saturday morning. Sure, it’s been on ESPN before, but never before in HD and never before with this buzz (EPL Talk’s website crashed under the strain of their exclusive announcement last night). The interest level is simply unprecedented.

Europe

• Bryan Gunn was fired from Norwich after just one league game of the season (few commentators mentioned Norwich did win a midweek Carling Cup 4-0), that infamous 7-1 defeat last Saturday. As Two Hundred Percent mentions, the timing itself was very curious — the defeat had presumably been ‘unacceptable’ ever since Saturday, so why did it take the Norwich board until Friday to make their decision, leaving little preparation for the game today?
• Kevin Eason has a piece in The Times on season ticket sales in England, reporting that “It might be in £3 billion of debt and spending like a drunken banker hoping for a big bonus but football still pulls in the big money.” The Independent also weighs in to point out most Premier League clubs are living well beyond their income, thanks to wealthy backers — not exactly a surprise, but a reminder that the League remains a largely unprofitable venture.
• And there’s an equally bleak forecast for the Scottish Premier League.
• Stuart James has a good piece on Premier League new boys Burnley, where 73,000 inhabitants will see them return to the big time after 33 years. James emphasises the challenge ahead by pointing out that “At less than £20m, the club’s annual wage bill is the smallest in the division and would struggle to cover Manchester United’s salaries for two months.”

North America

• Worst headline of the year? “Beckham biggest name in MLS” announces the Seattle Times.
• All U.S. Soccer players who traveled with swine flu victim Landon Donovan to Mexico received a medical advisory.
• For those in the U.S. enjoying the HD on ESPN2 today, you’ll also be pleased to learn that EPL Talk is reporting Fox Soccer Channel will be going HD in 2010, including for MLS games. As for me, apologies for the brief post, but I’m going to enjoy the rest of the first match of the Premier League season. . .And don’t miss our piece on the Women’s Premier League, also kicking off this weekend in England, the same day the WPS playoffs get underway in the U.S. There’s more to life than the Premier League, even in HD.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

The beauty of the events of the past week is that they’ve created more questions than answers. They involve three of the most high profile clubs in the league, two of the most successful coaches to have managed in the league, and the future of one of the most popular players on the planet. And the season’s not even officially done. The playoffs will continue and will create on-field talking points, while the questions surrounding the aforementioned clubs and coaches will give MLS fans enough talking points to last until next spring.

One thing I’ve noticed in other sports like football and baseball is the ability of its analysts to find topics of debate when the season is still four months away. MLS needs that off-season presence in order to create sustained interest in the league, and take it out the realm of “niche sport.” I have no doubt that some of the better known soccer columnists out there will cover these stories, but the challenge is getting these type of stories onto Sports Center and similar high-profile broadcasts.

Yes, the transfer saga surrounding David Beckham last year was big news, but the talking points creating by DC’s ouster and uncertain future, as well as the resignations of Arena and Yallop, can only help MLS by making it relevant between games, and seasons.

Being part of the national sports conversation is critical for American soccer, as Dixon emphasises. Despite the fact the NFL only plays for a few months a year, the coverage is full-on year round: events like the draft, injury updates, trades and so on keep coming.

The question is, though, is indeed on how widely these events in American soccer are being disseminated. Thanks to the internet, MLS-junkies have a plentiful panoply of fora in which to discuss any topic to death (and boy, they sure do at Bigsoccer). Blogs plug holes that traditional media leave.

But big media hasn’t died yet. Newspapers remain crucial: and whilst it’s great the New York Times has a good soccer blog now, their coverage on dead trees leaves a lot to be desired. ESPN continues its schizophrenic approach, investing in MLS coverage but not doing the cross-coverage it does with the major sports. Sports Illustrated magazine, which used to be the agenda setter itself, has (as Slate points out) deteriorated into ESPN The Magazine territory, rarely covering sports outside the big three.

It’s interesting that as national culture fragments with the rise of niche media on cable television and the internet, the major sports media obsesses ever more over one sport, the NFL, with the NBA and MLB bridesmaids. The rest of the sports world is still considered obscure, or bordering on the anti-American: perhaps this is changing slowly, but it’s still a tough road to the office water cool discussion for MLS.

What do fans of American soccer think? Has this season generated more discussion outside hardcore soccer fans about MLS, beyond the Beckham buzz?