Doug Sershen Durham N.C. I’m curious how MLS comes up with its ESPN, espn2, ABC and Univision television schedule. In short, the TV schedule is full of bad match-ups and missed opportunities. The Chicago-D.C. match is a prime example of a game that simply must be televised if the league expects TV ratings to rise. In any other league that I know of, there is an obvious effort to put that league’s best foot forward on nationally televised games. Hence, we see the national TV schedules for the next NFL season peppered with strong doses of the league’s premier teams, especially when they’re matched up against one another. A few highlights from this year’s MLS schedule: Team with the most appearances — Miami with 13. Next comes Columbus with 11, D.C. with 10, NY/NJ, L.A., T.B. and Chicago with 9. Fewest appearances — Colorado and Dallas with 5. N.E. has 6, with San Jose and Kansas City filling out the roster with 8. Chicago, the defending league champion doesn’t even appear on TV until July 31. People, even hardcore soccer fans, won’t watch bad soccer anymore than football or baseball fans will watch poor match-ups in the NFL or MLB. It’s all about marketing, from the quality of the telecasts and the announcers to the quality of the game being played on the field and to whether the stadium is embarrassingly empty on a nationally televised game. Unless the league becomes more aware of these “details” I don’t see how [Doug] Logan can expect MLS’ TV ratings to rise. Ridge Mahoney: Doug, I agree with your criticism of missing the D.C.-Chicago game (see the MLS roundup in the May 10 issue of SA). I believe ABC and ESPN were committed to broadcasting the Kentucky Derby and satellite programs around the race on the weekend of May 1, which is ironic, since the company that produces soccer for the Disney Network — Winner Communications — got the MLS contract through its horse-racing programming. But when you talk of bad match-ups, well, what you’re saying is that the league only has two or three teams you consider worth watching. With L.A. off to a slow start, D.C. struggling and K.C. in the toilet, the chance of marquee matchups is somewhat slim. Unlike the NFL, MLS teams play a balanced schedule — four games against teams in its own conference, two matches against teams from the other conference. That the NFL usually has two or three enticing games every week is due to several factors — one is that, with many more teams, it has that many more potential division winners and wild-card contenders. The second reason is that the schedule is not balanced: a first-place team in a division is paired with several first-place teams in other divisions, but a third-place team in a division will play a third- or fourth-place team in another division. In another case of the league tripping over its own feet, it scheduled Miami so often largely to showcase Valderrama, then Logan sends him to Tampa — just in time to play on TV against the Metros. Columbus should be an exciting team, so I don’t disagree with scheduling the Crew often — plus, Univision and the league like televising games from Columbus, since the local Hispanic audience is quite small and the home crowd is barely affected. Remember the first season, when a lot of L.A. and D.C. home games were shown on Univision, and the crowds dropped significantly? The Thursday night games on the Deuce continue to draw poor crowds and bad ratings, but the league has promised sponsors a certain amount of television programming each season, and therefore must provide more games than can be shown on ESPN and on weekend ESPN2 games. MLS is not yet to the point where, as has been shown with college basketball, people are attracted to events because they’re being shown on ESPN. The X-Games is a classic example. Doug Schuetz Wyckoff, N.J. With 15 national MLS games scheduled to be broadcast by Univision this season, will Univision use the SAP (Secondary Audio Programming) channel for English language commentary? Mike Woitalla: Great question, Doug. We know of no plans yet for Univision to use SAP. It has no incentive to build an Anglo audience. I must add, however, that even if I could figure out the SAP capability on my Sony Trinitron, I would prefer listening to Andres Cantor on Univision in Spanish. He generally does a good job of identifying players. That — telling me who has the ball — is my main demand of TV commentators, and the English-language guys who do MLS tend to neglect that crucial duty. The Soccer America editors were recently having a discussion about SAP. The issue that intrigued us had to do with how World Cup broadcast rights have, in the past, been sold on the basis of the language the games were broadcast in. Thus, in past World Cups, Americans could view games on English-language, Spanish-language and Italian-language stations, which was a godsend, since until 1994, English-language World Cup broadcasts were sparse. Plus, before 1994, the English broadcasts had commercial interruptions. The 2002 World Cup could see a change — with only one U.S. station winning rights. That’s when SAP could become very important. Assuming the Disney channels — ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 — won the U.S. rights, they could sell Spanish-langauge rights for targeted games to Univision or Telemundo, offer them pay-per-view in Spanish or simply offer SAP. Tony Feroce Rochester, N.Y. I was looking over various MLS statistical leaders for 1998 and noticed a category called “blocks”. Exactly what constitutes a “block” and is it worth tracking considering the leaders (Chris Houser and John Doyle) only had four all year? Scott French: Hi, Tony. A block occurs when a player, not the goalkeeper, makes a goal-saving stop within the 6-yard box. It’s a legit stat, I suppose, and if you’re a fan of defending, it might be worth tracking. So few occur during a season that I check for blocks when I read game summaries but tend not to keep track of the leaders. Jeff Sellers Xenia, Ohio In the proposed two-referee system that has been approved by FIFA on an experimental basis, will referee assistants still be used, meaning that there are now four sets of eyes? Or will linesman be eliminated? Making the two referees responsible for offside infractions (without linesman) seems counterproductive if the point is to clean up foul play. And what about midfield coverage? Many high school associations run a 2-man system and it is terrible, but this may just be a product of two inexperienced referees. Mike Woitalla: Jeff, your question is very good because reports of FIFA’s two-referee experiment don’t refer to the linesmen. But we can assume that the linesmen will be kept in place while another ref is put in the middle. When I played high school ball, we used two refs — and no linesmen — and it was a joke when it came to offside calls. How can a ref be in the proper position to make the offside call or see if a ball goes all the way over the sideline when he or she is watching everything else? (Linesmen have have enough problem seeing offside or onside.) I believe high schools may go with two refs, no ref assistants, to save money. That shouldn’t be a problem in international soccer. Joe Cleary Windsor, Conn. Now that NBC has lost the NFL contract, is there any hope that someone from their company might consider trying a European Football Match of the Week? Can you enlighten us on reasons not to try this instead of pouring billions into creating a “Fans Football League”? Ridge Mahoney: Joe, NBC is the network that only grudgingly showed snippets from the U.S. women’s Olympic gold-medal team, and has shown zero interest in the World Cup, MLS, or the U.S. Soccer national teams. Not much hope, there. NBC has shown an affinity for golf and beach volleyball, but not soccer. Aside from the problems of production and sponsorships, buying rights for such a series would likely require purchasing an entire season from each domestic league, and the costs would run into several millions of dollars — with little chance of an equitable return. NBC and other networks are willing to pay astronomical rights fees for NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball rights because they know they can command astronomical advertising rates from companies and sponsors to buy air time. No such demand exists, nor is it likely to in the near future, for European soccer. The audience, even in a country of more than a quarter of a billion people, is still extremely small. This is why teams like Manchester United want to start their own channels. Then, they can market their own games to their own fans every week all over the world. They know the demand exists.