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USFL Showing Signs of Life-Still No Proof We will See Games Next Spring

July 31, 2012 by

A while back we mentioned that the United States Football League had risen like a phoenix from the ashes and thanks to an investor was seeking to establish itself as a viable spring football league. At the time there was scant information about the USFL’s plans but the league has been slowly releasing information about its plans so it seems an update is in order.

An entity called EndZone Sports Management purchased all of the rights to the league from Michael Dwyer, who held the rights. EndZone was founded by Jamie Cuadra who is also the President and Chief Executive Officer of the USFL. The deal did not include any of the old teams, and new ones are in the process of being created.

A tour has started to evaluate potential cities and the USFL said that it wants places that teams will want to stay and establish themselves rather than engage in the migratory pattern that has plagued other startup football leagues. At the same time it is evaluating owners for the teams.

It plans to operate in much the same manner as Major League Soccer does, which in part means that the players and the coaches are under contract to the league and not to the individual teams. I also believe that MLS soccer has a semi-hard salary cap and that the bulk of the players salaries come from advertisers, particularly Adidis, which has a huge sponsorship deal with the league that it signed a few years back.

The league’s advisory board includes Jim Bailey who was executive vice president of the Cleveland Browns/Baltimore Ravens for 21 years who heads up the business operations side. Former pro footballers Marshall Faulk and Jeff Garcia along with athletes coach and trainer Terrell Jones join Bailey. On the Football operations side there is former Raiders great Fred Biletnikoff, who was also a coach for two teams in the original USFL

The overall goal of the league is to launch a 14 game season starting in the Spring of 2013 with eight teams playing and a championship event game in June. It is hoping to establish relationships with other leagues (read NFL) and will use the NFL rule book for its games.

It has also refreshed its web site to look much more professional and created a new logo so that it has a clean break from the past and a new image to brand itself to. The leagues logo will be “Real. Fun. Football.” I guess that is better than the No Fun League.

We will check in again in a few weeks to see how things have progressed. Hopefully it will have cities, team names and possibly a broadcasting and/or live streaming deal in place as well.

Filed Under: MLS, NFL, USFL Tagged With: ,

ESPN keeps the Pedal Down with Summer Soccer Broadcasts

July 19, 2012 by

Fresh off strong viewership numbers from the recently concluded Euro 2012 tournament ESPN will be broadcasting a series of international club matches over the next three weeks, with the first match coming last night with the Seattle Sounders vs. Chelsea FC (sorry I missed it).

The matches have a very interesting mix of teams with three teams each from the English Premier League, Major League Soccer, two from Italy’s Serie A, and one from Spain’s La Liga and the Scottish Premier League.

As is to be expected the broadcasts will be all over the networks properties and all but one will be on its ESPN2 channel, while also showing the matches on ESPN3 and ESPN Deportes channels as well in most cases.

The rest of the broadcasts are:
Tue, July 24 10:30 pm ET Los Angeles Galaxy vs. Tottenham Hotspur ESPN3
Wed, July 25 6:30 pm ET Liverpool FC vs. AS Roma ESPN2/3 ESPN Desportes
Sat, July 25 1:00 pm ET Liverpool FC vs. Tottenham Hotspur ESPN2/3 ESPN Desportes
Sat, July 25 6:30 pm ET Chelsea FC vs. AC Milan ESPN2/3 ESPN Desportes
Tue, July 31 7 pm ET NY Red Bulls vs. Tottenham Hotspur ESPN2/3 ESPN Desportes
Thur, August 2 10:30 pm ET Los Angeles Galaxy vs. Real Madrid ESPN2/3 ESPN Deportes
Wed, August 8 8 pm ET Real Madrid vs. AC Milan ESPN2/3 ESPN Deportes
Sat, August 11 1:55 pm ET Real Madrid vs. Celtic FC ESPN2/3 ESPN Deportes

This will be a nice fill in until the major European leagues start up in a month or so. The premier League starts Sat. August 18th while the La Liga starts the following day.

Filed Under: ESPN, ESPN3, FoxSoccer, MLS, Soccer Tagged With: ,

Fancru Takes up the Sports Fan Chat Challenge

June 12, 2012 by

Fans like to talk with fans, at least ones that share similar allegiances, and Fancru is seeking to exploit that with its sports app that will enable groups of like minded fans to chat as well as allowing you to reach out to your friends.

If this sounds a bit familiar it is. There are several other apps that are seeking to establish themselves as platform for fan interaction and FanCru realizes that it has to step up to the plate big time to enable it to be recognized above the noise in this space.

The app, currently only available for the iPhone (it will work on an iPad but is not optimized) is the brainchild of John Wagner, Fancru’s co-founder and president and Bill Diamond, co-founder and CEO. Wagner is a self proclaimed sports nut who constantly watches games and saw this as an opportunity for fans to share experiences with others both attending the sporting events and those following elsewhere.

The app has several different distinct functions, and in some ways it reminds you of a host of other apps such as Foursquare, since you can log in your location, ESPN, since it gives you scores, and rival apps such as Recapp which provide news articles about selected teams.

Similarities aside it has a game feed that connects you to other fans following an event. Then on top of that there is the Cheer & Vent function that allows you to vent etc as well as post images from where ever you are.

You establish an account and then select the sports teams and leagues that you want to follow-NFL, NCAA Football, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS and Brazilian Soccer. Add the teams you want and then you can connect to them via Facebook, Twitter, searching your address book, SMS and the old fashion way by including their names manually. You can check to see which teams have the most fans and earn points for prizes by doing various actions.

The company’s first version of the app, for all practical purposes a beta release, provided it with plenty of user feedback that it used to incorporate in its current offering. But it is not just listening to what fans think of the product that is important to the company. Available now for the iPhone the company is working on an Android release and then will optimize its iPhone app to efficiently run on iPads.

Fancru is taking an interesting approach in that it is seeking to engage teams and leagues into using its technology as possibly a front end to an app that the teams might be developing by opening up its SDK and APIs up to the market freely available.

It is hard to predict how that will work out for the larger, more established leagues such as the NFL and MLB. Right now MLB has AtBat as its official app, which it own. However MLB has been very proactive in trying to engage fans via a series of apps and contests and having like minded fans chat during games would seem to fall into the direction it is taking. There is also an effort to allow teams to add a local flavor to AtBat so that while the league might not adopt the technology local teams might have that option.

In addition Fancru has been accruing analytics about what its users are doing and so it would enable teams to better meet fans wants and needs, Wager points out. He sees the app as a valuable tool to teams that want to bring fans out to the events in a day when many have huge high definition televisions and are content with watching at home.

By enabling a team to have contests that could be centered on a game, a player or a section of seats it can bring fans into more active participation and with that more active attendance.

A challenge to an app of this sort will be breaking through the noise. The Apple App store has almost a million apps currently. There are slightly older rival apps that either point to a single sport such as GolfGamebook or are also more broadly based such as GrabFan, PlayUp and Kwarter.

Being a relatively new category helps since there really is not established leader and they are all facing the same uphill battle. In addition stadiums and leagues are only ow upgrading their wireless capabilities to enable in-game fan interaction. I suspect that within a year or two a huge number of fans will be using a chat technology that connects them to others in and out of the stadium.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Facebook, Fancru, iOS, iPad, iPhone, Major League Baseball, MLS, NBA, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NFL, PlayUp, Startup Tagged With: ,

MLS embracing Social Media

March 12, 2012 by

Major League Soccer has kicked off its season last weekend with it its new broadcasting deal with partner NBC. You might have missed the broadcasts because it seems that people are missing NBC Sports a good deal these days leading to very bad ratings.

NBC’s woes might not go away soon due to the fact that the MLS has not yet broken through as a ratings driver. Its troubles in this area are varied, and it has at different times come under fire for everything from when it starts to its trading window. A good look at some of the issues can be found in these transcripts from Eric Wynalda.

Yet if you attend a match the energy is great. Fans are knowledgeable and attendance is growing. So what more can be done? Well using social media and other tools to keep the sport in front of fans is one step, and one that the league is taking.

It conducted a Twitter-based contest last weekend called #FirstKick for fans attending their teams opening match. The rules were pretty simply and any fan with access to Twitter that attended a match could participate. All you needed to do was tweet a photo of you or your friends from a match to win.

The tweet needed a @MLS twitter handle; it needed the #FirstKisk hashtag, proof that you were actually at the game in the photos such as stadium, player, promo or sign visible in your photo and last a link to your photo available on public domain, ex. Twitpic, Lockerz, Yfrog, Photobucket, Flickr, etc.

Submissions were accepted from Saturday, March 10 at 6 PM EST and ends on Monday, March 12 at 11:59 PM EST, so there is still time to send your photo in! There will be a winner draw at random for each day.

Fans that are traveling, or have games that are not broadcast can watch the action via MLS Live, which the league has revamped for the current season. The program, which does have blackout rules, allows fans to watch games via computer, iPad or iPhone, Roku and can be integrated with Apple TV for broadcast as well. Cost for a season is $59.99 and the free preview unfortunately ends on March 12.

The league has the obligatory Facebook page that also has the ability to keep fans in touch with what is going on in games and the league as a whole. I was surprised to find two friends that I did not know were fans not only subscribed to the page but also wrote about the sport in blogs and posts elsewhere. I guess when you have 325,000 likes that is inevitable (the league not me). I did not check Myspace.

I feel that the aggressive use of outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as revamping and increasing its online presence is vital to the success of MLS. The league has a number of soccer only stadiums that show off its product very well. But it is obvious that television alone will not get the message out.

Even as sports powerhouses Fox Sports and ESPN continue to turn up the presence of soccer in their sports programming, MLS often seems to be missing in the mix. Fox captured the World Cup broadcasts in 2018 and 2022 and has increased its broadcasting of soccer matches, just not US MLS. ESPN, after losing the World Cup to Fox has still increased its broadcasting and online efforts with things such as broadcasting the UEFA European Championships and upgrading its online presence.

MLS has been expanding and has seen strong attendance in the new towns like Portland where its games last season were sold out. However television viewership has been flat and this does not bode well for the sport. According to the Big Lead last weekend, MLS averaged 291,000 viewers on ESPN and ESPN2 last season and 70,000 viewers on FOX Soccer. That is just sad.

The league, which is kicking off its 17th season, does not have to worry about out of control salaries for players due to a hard cap, but this is a disadvantage because it will be hard to lure top talent from around the world or to keep talent that hears the siren call of a big payday. Glowing television viewership can change that, but it will take all of its tools, on-line, mobile and broadcast, to achieve this dream.

Filed Under: Apps, ESPN, Facebook, Fox Sports, FoxSoccer, Live sports via mobile, MLS, NBC Sports, Soccer, Social Media, The Big Lead Tagged With: , , , ,
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