NEW YORK -- Colorado's victory over Dallas set a record-low for English-language U.S. television viewers for Major League Soccer's championship game. The 2-1 win Sunday night received a 0.4 rating and 748,000 viewers on ESPN, Nielsen Media Research said Tuesday. That's down from a 0.7 rating and 1.14 million viewers for Real Salt Lake's win over Los Angeles in 2009. Since the league started play in 1996, the previous low for viewers was 876,000 for San Jose's win over Chicago in 2003. This year's game also received a 0.1 rating and 232,000 viewers on Spanish-language Galavision.
pretty stupid to put it up against Sunday Night Football. Especially Eagles-Giants, two teams that draw huge in the ratings. Why not put it on a Tuesday or Wednesday night?
It also didn't help that it was Dallas & Colorado. Two teams with no star power to the average fan (even though David Ferreira may have been the best player in MLS this season) and two teams that hardly received any hype as the season went along.
If it's going to be on a Sunday, it can't be kicking off at almost 9:00 et. Kickoff should've been at 7:30 et, which is sort of that in-between time between the afternoon NFL games and SNF, though it'd over run some into SNF. Also, had to take into account there's two huge cable TV hits on at 9:00 et and 10:00 et in Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead. Put the game on a Wednesday next year, when there's not much competition. No big NFL or cfb Thursday night game, just competing against locally televised NBA games for the most part.
Yea I cut it off at half time to watch the walking dead and joined the feed again in the first few minutes of extra time. That was a horrible time slot. I would've had it on a Wednesday or Friday night.
The game was pretty good. The event itself needed some work. Why was it being held in Toronto? Why was it being held on a Sunday night? Why do they NOT slant the playoffs to heavily favor regular-season winners...an LA/New York final would have drawn record ratings. No real good answers to any of that as far as I can see.
There's really nothing that could've been done to favor the Galaxy. We disposed of Seattle in the 1st Round, but we just flat out got our asses beat at home in the conference championship by Dallas. New York just choked, up 1-0 with the 2nd leg at home. One thing I like that the Mexican league playoffs do is the tie-breaker on aggregate. There's no away goal rule, extra time, or PK shoot out, the team with the better regular season record advances.