As Duane Rollins wrote in this space recently, the opening season MLS match between Vancouver and Montreal drew an impressive television audience in Canada of over half a million viewers.*
But in the U.S., FC Dallas versus New York Red Bulls attracted a relatively paltry 82,000 viewers to debut of MLS on NBC Sports, suffering the ignominy of having fewer viewers than several hunting and fishing shows.
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That 82,000 figure does represent an improvement on the 68,000 or so average that Fox Soccer was doing with its MLS broadcasts last year. But as this writer notes, it's hard to dress up those 82,000 viewers as anything but a disappointment, considering the hype behind this match and the fact NBC Sports is available in more homes than FOX Soccer.
To me the bigger story is MLS' ongoing failure to capitalize on the general explosion in popularity of soccer on U.S. television. ESPN and Fox posted some of their biggest audiences ever for the English Premier League last season, with about four and a half times as many people watching Premier League matches on Fox than were watching MLS. World Cups set U.S. viewing records every four years now, and Spanish-language channels are putting up big viewing numbers too.
It's not like the suits at MLS aren't aware of the issue. And as Don Garber points out, as long as attendances continue growing there's not much more the league can do except acknowledge that the process will take time.
But back to the Canadian TV numbers. While MLS struggles mightily and loses to European soccer in the U.S., those 563,000 viewers that tuned in to watch the Whitecaps and the Impact are more than the 438,000 who watched last year's Champions League final on Sportsnet. Yes, comparing combined French and English markets to English-only isn't an apples-to-apples thing (see note below), but the two numbers sitting beside each other point strongly to the growth of club football in Canada in a relatively short time.
*Even more impressive in my eyes is that almost half of that figure came from RDS and its French market, which is about one-fourth the size of the Canadian English-language TV market.