Fox Soccer Channel Misses Live Coverage Of EPL Goal Fests

While playing with my kids on Sunday morning, I checked Twitter for a minute and was astonished to see that Jermain Defoe had just scored a hat trick for Tottenham Hotspur. My first impulse was to grab the remote and to switch on Fox Soccer Channel, but I was greeted with the live match between Stoke City and Portsmouth. Then, for a second, I thought that the match from White Hart Lane was on Setanta Sports. Wrong again. I quickly realized that the match of the season was being shown by Fox Soccer Channel later that evening on delay.

I resorted to following the rest of the match on Twitter and was astonished, as I’m sure you were too, at the final 9-1 scoreline.

And that’s not all we missed. We also missed Saturday’s 3-3 goalfest between Hull City and West Ham United, described as one of Hull City’s most spirited performances of the season.

Not a good weekend for Fox Soccer Channel since both the Hull and Spurs matches were only shown on delay instead of live in the United States. To be fair to Fox, the Stoke against Portsmouth game was always earmarked for the Sunday 11am ET timeslot by the Premier League and Sky, so they would have been able to show the match live from White Hart Lane which kicked off at 10am ET.

It just goes to show that you can’t win them all. However, it does point to a couple of things which is (1) the network’s dependency on showing matches involving the top four can be a hinderance at times, and (2) how important it’ll be for ESPN to hopefully sublicense an additional timeslot of 10am ET Saturdays for 2010-2013 from Fox Soccer Channel so that we’ll have four Premier League games televised live at the same time (on ESPN2, Fox Soccer Channel, Setanta Sports and Setanta Xtra). We can dream, can’t we?

Photo credit: Soccergoalx1.