Univision’s debut season of its 8-year TV deal with MLS has paid dividends. In its first regular season of broadcasting MLS games mostly on Friday nights, the total number of viewers per game, on average, was 224,000, according to a spokesperson for Univision Deportes.
The MLS games that Univision televised during the 2015 season were shown live on UniMás and broadcast simultaneously on Univision Deportes.
Univision also revealed that the average viewing audience for MLS games for adults 18-49 was 129,000.
Throughout the season, Univision has been broadcasting MLS games on Friday nights in both Spanish-language and English-language (via SAP). Mid season, Univision decided to replace co-commentator Paul Caligiuri with Keith Costigan. Since then, the quality of the commentary team with Ramses Sandoval and Costigan has improved dramatically.
SEE MORE: fuboTV adds Univision Deportes for Liga MX and MLS coverage.
As of press time, FOX Sports and ESPN haven’t revealed TV viewing data for MLS games for the 2015 season.
UniMas’ coverage of MLS continues this week when the network will show all four MLS playoff games across Wednesday and Thursday night featuring DC United vs. New England Revolution, Seattle Sounders vs. LA Galaxy, Montreal Impact vs. Toronto FC and Portland Timbers vs. Sporting Kansas City.
SEE MORE: MLS average attendances increase 12.8% in 2015 compared to last season.
MLS telecasts on UniMás are drawing similar viewership compared to the combination of FOX Sports 1 and FOX Deportes. That’s to be expected given the similar reach (around 90 million households.)
Considering that Univision Communications, Inc. paid around $10 million/year (overpaid in my opinion, but Univision didn’t have a choice because Univision does NOT want “NBC Deportes Network” to be able to launch), anything less than 200,000 viewers on average would not have been good.
“FOX Sports and ESPN haven’t revealed TV viewing data for MLS games for the 2015 season.”
Did a bit of number crunching on my own — ESPN games averaged a tad less than 250k, while the Fox games averaged a bit more than 190k.
Are those numbers good or bad? Asking for a friend…
200K for a typical MLS match on a national TV network would be in line with most expectations.
– ESPN(1) is now down to 92 million households, ESPN2 is about on par with ESPN(1), ESPN Deportes should have around 8 million households because ESPN Deportes was late to market (did not launch 24/7 in the U.S. until February 2004, did not get on DIRECTV until 2006.)
– FOX Sports 1 (FS1) is in around 85 million households, FOX Deportes is in around 25 million households but only around 8-10 million of those households are “Hispanic”. There is significant overlap between FS1 and FOX Deportes because FOX Deportes is on the expanded basic cable TV tier in many TV markets including Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, parts of San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, parts of Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto, and Reno. FOX Deportes was launched in November 1993 (as La Cadena Deportiva Prime Ticket) and did not carry the “FOX” branding until October 1996.
– UniMas is in around 90 million households (mostly via free-to-air broadcast) Univision Deportes Network (UDN) is in about 40 million households (very late to market: launched in April 2012.) Over 90% of those households that have UDN also have UniMas.
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One should NOT expect a significant bump in MLS national TV ratings until the new generation of sports TV viewers, currently in the 12-17 age group (which are divided almost equally among baseball and soccer as their late spring-summer sports TV product of choice), become old enough to have children.
That means MLS is about 20-25 years away from the next statistically significant TV ratings bump. There may be a small bump 10-12 years from now, as the current 18-34 age group become old enough to have children.
Generations do not all come of age at once, and MLS has a lot of fans above 17 years old, as shown in the numbers above (having 58% of your total audience in the 18-34 age bracket is very unusual, it’s typically somewhere in the 30s or 40s). Which means the inflection point has already started happening, and the viewers will fill out the broader demographic a bit at a time.
There are also a lot of soccer fans out there who just aren’t watching a lot of MLS, which you can see when you look at Premier League and Liga MX ratings.
Will the content Unimas receive be the same for all 8 years of this deal? Only Friday MLS matches and some playoffs? Will it ever expand?
UniMas has exclusive Friday night MLS games. They also have some of the playoff games. There are no plans to expand MLS coverage on UniMas in the future as far as I know.