Photo credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
FOX’s coverage of the 2018 MLS Cup Final between Atlanta United and Portland Timbers averaged 1.5 million viewers on the over-the-air network, an increase of 10% compared to the last time a MLS final was televised on the same network two years ago when Seattle defeated Toronto FC, thanks to a report by Showbuzz Daily.
It’s Major League Soccer’s second best viewership on record for a MLS Cup Final. The previous best was 2.2 million that watched the 1997 MLS Cup Final on ABC.
MLS’ viewing number greatly benefitted from the Atlanta effect, one of the most exciting teams to play in the league in over a decade. Managed by Tata Martino, Atlanta United’s playing style is an attacking, free-flowing game that features several exciting stars including Josef Martínez, Miguel Almirón, Héctor Villalba and Michael Parkhurst.
Buoyed by an equally incredible fanbase, Atlanta has become a must-watch team in MLS in a league where the Georgia team far outpaces any other team in the country. Without Atlanta in the final, surely the viewing figure for the 2018 MLS Cup Final would have been much less.
The viewing number for the 2018 MLS Cup Final does mask what has been largely been a disappointing year for the league’s TV ratings. For the 2018 regular season, viewing numbers were down on both ESPN and FS1. While the viewing numbers were up for the over-the-air FOX network, it was only because they aired the games immediately after World Cup matches when TV sets were left on. On the Spanish-language side, ratings were way up on Univision Deportes, which helped boost the overall numbers. In 2018, ESPN and ESPN2 had their lowest audience for MLS games since 2014.
The disappointing viewing numbers continued into the MLS Cup playoffs and semi-finals. The Conference semi-finals saw a 4% drop in viewership on English-language television when compared to last season, averaging just 240,125 on FS1 and ESPN. Viewership for the Western Conference Final was down almost 10% dropping from 326,000 average viewers in 2017 to 295,000 average viewers in 2018. The Eastern Conference Final was down 7% and 21,000 viewers from the 2017 edition.
Despite all of the doom and gloom for Major League Soccer, the league now potentially has a team that can be appealing for soccer fans to watch nationally. Whether Atlanta United can continue to win the hearts and minds of soccer fans across the United States, we will have to wait and see (especially after losing their star coach Tata Martino to Mexico, and rumors of their top players heading to Europe). But there is a strong foundation in Atlanta that could dominate over all of the other MLS clubs for years to come, thus creating a powerhouse in the league.
SEE MORE: Most-watched MLS Cup Finals of all-time on US TV
Regarding the actual television coverage of the 2018 MLS Cup Final itself, it wasn’t a home run for FOX Sports but it was improved compared to previous broadcasts that they’ve done. The much-hyped corner flag cam thankfully wasn’t used a lot during the broadcast. The halftime show was uninformative. During the pre-match, halftime and post-match, studio analysts Maurice Edu and Alexi Lalas were pedestrian, but we weren’t expecting much given that FOX Sports presenter Rob Stone isn’t one to ask tough questions that elicit thought-provoking answers. Overall, FOX’s coverage of the MLS Cup Final was adequate, which is a boost for them because it didn’t deter people away from the broadcast like they’ve done with other soccer properties they’ve televised in the past.
Both the 2016 and 2018 finals were televised in primetime on a Saturday night.
The viewing average on the Spanish-language broadcast of the game on UniMas was not available as of press time.
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Atlanta united did a magnificient job Sincé The very beguining everybody involved on give it best from The organización, conceiving practicing proyecting and execution.
Complet rubbish on your part CHris…. It’s article like this that have kept me away from your Euro Snob mentality to your publication.. Get use to it American MLS Soccer is not going away.
BTW important only FS1 was down you’re leaving out Sports Business Daily see below MLS was down on ESPN linear TV 241,000 but the overall was up on 13% ESPN from last years 261,000, viewership shifted to out of home streaming ESPN app (ESPN+) ESPNs actually number according to Sports Business Daily is 295,000.
https://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Daily/Issues/2018/11/08/Media/MLS-Viewership.aspx
“Data does show that ESPN/ESPN are seeing nearly a 13% uptick to regular viewership when out-of-home numbers are factored in.”
Numbers from Sports Business Daily
Networks ’18(000) ’17(000) %+/-
FOX/FS1 296,000 236,000 25%
Univision/UniMas/Univision Deportes 289,000 244.000 18%
ESPN/ESPN2 241,000 261,000 -8%
ESPN Deportes 42,000 24,000 75%
Sweet 1.6 mil (1,563,000) up from 1,411,000 last time it was on FOX. The US MLS Cup viewing number will be over 2 million once UniMas numbers come in my guess 2.2mil-2.3mil. Looks like 2 mil is the baseline for MLS Cups Finals in Broadcast Cable Prime-time in the US. because the last MLS Cup with 1 Canadian team involved got 2 mil in prime-time. I think as MLS expands these next 4-8 yrs or so and gets a larger TV Foot Print increasing US based teams from 20 to 29 you’ll see the TV Ratings increase more.
As far as cherry picking and point out decreases and why increases occur it doesn’t really matter I feel like every year you say that, Maybe its time to realize thats just the way it is there will always be something to boost ratings and grow the TV audience WC, WWC, Euros, Gold Cup games. Bottom line is MLS notches another year of TV growth see below
2012-164,000
2013-185,000
2014-200,000
2015-229,000
2016-248,000
2017-258,000
2018-276,000
Thank you Edwin for bringing some fact to this “blog”
Looks like the UniMas 193,000 this year which was lower than the 304k it got on Unimas/UDN in 2017(credit@byIanThomas) The game went head to head with the Liga MX semi-final that averaged 1.5mil on Univision and Univision Deportes.
You know what World Soccer Talk is very concerned about MLS viewership because MLS only gets 6 percent of soccer ratings while having 6 percent of soccer games on TV. That really spells doom for MLS, doncha know?
That article was funny it’s one of those things when you look at it and go………. HUH ? What! but that’s proportional! In math being proportional doesn’t make a negative. So the ratings percentage matches the amount of time its on TV? Every one panic DOOM AND GLOOM DARKNESS IS SPREADING!! LMAO. So if you showed MLS 2x as much on TV the ratings percentage would be in correlation to it. They had several conclusions to go with BUT they FOUND a negative one towards MLS. The thing with stats is you can make them say whatever you want.
The funniest thing is that WST won’t acknowledge besides Kartik who I see as a straight shooter that EPL popularity on TV has declined and is no longer attracting new fans. Why? because that’s against Chris push EPL agenda. If they want to continued to be taking seriously and keep the people who’ve put up with the overt bias they need to start calling balls and strikes and stop with the Phony I call it like I see it mantra no one is buying it beside the die hard Eurosnobs. Don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining mate.
Kartik being a straight shooter doesn’t always mean I agree with him. We agree on alot but he’ll call out the overt EuroSnobbery and hypocrisy on twitter.
MLS Numbers from Sports Business Daily
Networks ’18(000) ’17(000) %+/-
FOX/FS1 296,000 236,000 25%
Univision/UniMas/UDN 289,000 244.000 18%
ESPN/ESPN2 241,000 261,000 -8%
ESPN Deportes 42,000 24,000 75%
Cable ratings were down this season. Point.
Irrelevant point. There is now multiple ways to watch programming on ESPN, because technology is changing. There’s been a drastic decline in TV ratings of programming watched on CRT television too. And it doesn’t ff’n matter because almost no one owns that outdated technology.
We have new technology, and the result is that Nielsen’s now tracks audience on multip,e technology programs. There are entire households without TV ‘s any more, There is no meaningful intellectual justification for excluding out-of-home viewers when judging audience size for programming.
Advertisers don’t care which technology you use to watch programming, they just want to know how many are watching.
Do you mean Cable in general or MLS Cable Ratings were down? MLS has had 6 straight years of Cable growth. You’d hardly know it from websites like this. They push their bias here and on social media platforms to form perception. The past year though I’ve noticed a “TRUTH” push back with facts about what the numbers really are. I think Taylor Twellman helped with his “Numbers don’t lie people do Rant”
Always nice to WST will never lose their hatred of MLS. This has to be the only site who continually uses ridiculous terms like “doom and gloom” when talking about MLS.
The Euro snobbery is over the top for me.
Classic Chris always has to make any positive MLS news negative
It’s funny how they compare the tv rating this year to last time fox air mls cup,but last year they didn’t compare the ESPN to last time ESPN air mls cup.
Lol exactly it’s getting to the point you can’t help but comment and laugh at the bias.
Up 59% from 2018 ESPN 1.1
Article written to generate comments from MLS fans, lets face it-how many articles get more than a couple of responses on this site?, certainly not the ‘where to find’ columns.
We don’t need a “powerhouse in the league”.
For MLS regular season games, how are ESPN+ and the FOX regional networks factored in?
They aren’t ESPN didn’t add the digital out of home(streaming AVG 54k) to their TV rating data like NBC does for EPL. ESPN just sourced to Sports Business Daily Journal that if you included streaming on ESPN platforms the ESPN average was up 13% from last years 261k ESPN average.
No word on FOX regional networks. I will admit that I was surprised at first by the ESPN streaming average for MLS being 54k, as MLB has averaged in the range on Facebook while NFL games streamed pulled about 200k in previous years. That 54k is more than the 11k EPL averaged on NBC Gold Pass last year. Then again ESPN+ offers more than just soccer so they probably have a larger audience to pull from.