There is a phrase the sports establishment in the USA tends to use to dismiss both football and the constant sense of anxious monitoring of its health in the country: “Soccer is the next big sport in the USA – and it always will be.”

But after a World Cup summer in which people turned out in droves all over the country to support the national team, as well as setting attendance records when big European teams followed the tournament with pre-season tours, this weekend’s return of the Premier League to NBC screens could represent a bellwether moment.

NBC acquired the broadcast and digital rights to the Premier League in October 2012, and hit the ground running last season with a comprehensive package of network, cable, and online offerings that offered subscribers to the network’s NBC sports channel every single game, live.

The US is already one of the most significant of all the 212 territories worldwide which air Premier League football. At a breakfast meeting prior to the announcement of the NBC deal, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore confirmed that the deal with the network was “easily one of the top five around the world”, and enthused about both the increase in network TV presence – each weekend now sees at least one PremierLeague game live on the main NBC channel – and the flexibility and thoroughness of the cable and online offerings as a paradigm for the future.

After a confident debut season that saw the dedicated sports channel NBCSN grow its daily audience by 80% (making it the fastest growing sports network in the US), that flexibility was demonstrated on the last day of the 2013-14 Premier League season, when NBC used its ownership of multiple cable channels to show every one of the simultaneous games live – casual viewers tuning in to their TV guide may have been puzzled to see line after line of “Premier League soccer” listings showing up on channels as diverse as E!, Bravo and Syfy.

What some of those viewers made of Sunderland v Swansea can only be guessed at, and NBC were forced to put a slightly brave face on the extensive coverage after the league ended in rather less dramatic fashion than previous seasons. But if anything, the lessons for both NBC and those who wait for sudden breakthroughs in the sport in the US have been that the success of the Premier League coverage, and indeed the World Cup interest, have been more about exploiting a critical mass of audience than sudden dramatic spikes. NBC has been able to build on audiences long established, though never so thoroughly served, by ESPN and Fox.

That sense of a particular American culture of watching the sport is reflected in the tone of the NBC coverage, which combines knowledgeable British and American pundits with a self-deprecating lightness of touch that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago. The coverage has been trailed last year and this by parody films starring Jason Sudeikis as an idiotic American football coach who finds himself managing Spurs – and then, this season, not coaching Spurs – and who gleefully indulges every cliche of the ignorant American fan who doesn’t know what relegation or “offsides” is.


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This season, the network has also signed up the Men in Blazers, Michael Davies and Roger Bennett – two expat Brits whose irreverent podcasts have become a cult staple of the US game’s popular culture, and who achieved wider prominence this summer with their “panic room” broadcasts as part of ESPN’s confident World Cup coverage.

Speaking earlier this week, Bennett joked about NBC’s great broadcast team being one of the most “talented in football” and added: “Every team has got a weak point, and Michael and I are just honoured to be NBC soccer’s weak point.”

Perhaps just as tellingly, on the subject of tone, lead commentator Arlo White, an Englishman who spent three years as an announcer for the Seattle Sounders, talks of the typical American fan as being “something of a self-starter”.

Being back here in England and back among the nine pages of sport on all the back pages gives you an appreciation for those fans who’ve had to seek it out – it reminds me a little of being an NFL fan in England back in the 80s or 90s. It’s a very particular type of appreciation. I don’t think English fans necessarily understand how invested US fans have historically had to be.

That sense of investment has created a sense of ownership that for NBC has represented both an opportunity and a challenge. As their American analyst Kyle Martino put it: “I think there used to be this hyper-sensitive vigilance about the treatment of the Premier League by US broadcasters, from both ex-pats and the hardcore US fans – and that’s relaxed somewhat in recent years when it’s become clear that there’s a critical mass of fans following the game.

“And when people saw we were doing solid coverage and not trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s allowed us some freedom as well.”

Martino adds: “The game here was never going to ‘make it’ from one World Cup, or signing David Beckham, or any single event – it was going to succeed by doing what it has been doing and reaching deeper with each generation. When I grew up, if you were lucky you saw a Premier League game on a Sunday. Now because of what NBC is doing, kids are wandering around with their iPads able to pull up every game.”

White is also happy that his network’s coverage is now in a second season with its own growing history to refer to. It means that during preseason remarks to the US media, he could repeat a Steven Gerrard quote that has become infamous in football/soccer culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

Asked about building on NBC’s first-season success, White deadpanned: “We go again.”