Looking back at the year 2010, there have been some wonderful soccer moments on television. The broadcast of the 2010 World Cup was incredible to see as was the exciting 2009-10 Premier League season. But there was also a lot of bad television. The type that makes your remote control finger itch as you’re tempted to fast forward or delete.

If soccer had its own Rotten Tomatoes, they would look something like this.

With that said, here are the top 5 worst soccer TV shows of 2010 as well as several honorable mentions:

  1. Soccer Talk Live (Fox Soccer Channel). The first two minutes of the show screamed train wreck. Kyle Martino walked through a door and on to the set as if it was an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Would you be Fox’s neighbor? It got worse from there. The cheap set, Martino learning his ropes live on-air, a sidekick comedian who was unfunny, guests who had no clue about soccer and cringeworthy segments featuring Temryss Lane reporting from the fast lane on topics that often had little to nothing to do with soccer. It’s amazing the show lasted just less than three months before being canceled.
  2. Ticket to South Africa (Fox Soccer Channel). Put Andy Gray and Richard Keys together, two of the most successful faces from Sky Sports’s Premier League coverage, and you would imagine that they would operate a decent show for Fox Soccer Channel in its quest to capture at least a portion of the World Cup 2010 viewing audience in the United States. Unfortunately it didn’t work. Fox’s show was blown away by the wall-to-wall coverage from ESPN. But competition aside, Ticket To South Africa suffered from a bizarre clique that was played before our eyes. It seemed that Gray and Keys seemed so full of themselves that they would often talk over or seemingly disregard the analysis from the other experts around the table, namely Fox Soccer Channel’s Christopher Sullivan and Warren Barton. The bias by Gray and Keys against Sullivan and Barton was revealing because the two full-time Fox employees often knew more about what they were talking about during the show than the two Sky celebrities.
  3. Football Superstar (Fox Soccer Channel). The reality TV show followed the lives of several Australian footballers as they embarked on their dream of getting a contract with Australian professional team Sydney FC. The premise sounds intriguing, but the show itself was a chore to watch. Maybe it was the fact that Fox Soccer Channel launched the show this past summer despite it being two years old. Or maybe it was that the prize seemed too gimmicky especially when you consider the excellent TV documentary GolTV showed a couple of years ago where they followed French youngsters going through the system at Clairefontaine, which was a lot more interesting rather than a show that was created for television.
  4. 2010 Champions League Final Pre-Game and Halftime Analysis (Fox). I’ll give you two words: Bruce Arena. The former US national team manager and current L.A. Galaxy gaffer is an expert at being a manager, but he was awful in front of the camera for the final between Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. Why Fox decided to use Arena instead of the soccer encyclopedia Bobby McMahon, who is much more comfortable in front of the camera and has a great personality, I do not know.
  5. Oh My Goal (GolTV). It’s hard to take a soccer goal highlights show and make it difficult to watch. Every soccer fan loves watching goal highlights. But this new weekly series from GolTV is a tough one to watch. Poor dubbed commentary mixed with comic book graphics make for an embarrassing program. OMG.

Honorable mentions: