Second Thoughts

'Goooaaallll' to attract U.S. viewership

TV broadcaster Telemundo hopes sportscaster Andres Cantor’s unique style will entice Americans to watch the World Cup on its broadcasts this year, despite no American team competing.
TV broadcaster Telemundo hopes sportscaster Andres Cantor’s unique style will entice Americans to watch the World Cup on its broadcasts this year, despite no American team competing.

Andres Cantor screamed "Goal!" for 38 seconds.

Getting ready to broadcast its first World Cup, Telemundo hopes his huge-capacity lungs persuade American viewers soccer is better in Spanish.

"I never time myself," the five-time Emmy Award-winning broadcaster said. "If I can have three new people watch soccer because they have this crazy announcer that goes nuts when a goal is scored and that's what they think about, but they're watching the game, I'm happy for the game."

Alongside with the competition on the field will be the battle for American viewers of an audience likely to shrink because of earlier U.S. kickoff times than four years ago -- and because this will be the first World Cup since 1986 that won't have a United States team competing. ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC averaged 3.5 million viewers for 48 group-stage games four years ago, boosted by a 13.4 million average for the three first-round games involving the Americans.

Fox acquired U.S. English-language TV rights for three World Cups starting with this year's championship in Russia, and it hired mostly American commentators to differentiate itself from the mostly British voices employed in 2010 and 2014 by ESPN, which broadcast the past six tournaments.

Telemundo, part of Comcasts Corp.'s NBCUniversal Inc., took over U.S. Spanish-language rights from Univision, where Cantor called World Cups in 1990, '94 and '98 before switching networks.

Fox is planning more than 320 hours of broadcast television and over 1,000 hours including digital, according to David Neal, the network's World Cup executive producer. After the U.S. was eliminated in qualifying in October, Fox decided to base four of its six announce teams at its Los Angeles studios, where they will call matches off monitors. John Strong and Stuart Holden will call games from stadiums in Russia, as will JP Dellacamera and Tony Meola.

Eight of Fox's 12 match commentators are American, including Aly Wagner as the first female game analyst for a men's World Cup on U.S. television.

"For us it's a celebration of the growth of the game in the United States," Neal said. "You want American voices, I think, because that's what's familiar to Americans and their ears."

Telemundo, using the marketing power of many NBCUniversal networks, wants to attract viewers with a different sound: Cantor's cantabile con brio. His calls of Carli Lloyd's 54-yard goal in the 2015 Women's World Cup final and of Landon Donovan's stoppage-tie score that advanced the U.S. in 2010 are indelible.

NBC aired a 10-second ad of Cantor shouting "Goal!" during the Super Bowl that was seen by 102 million English-language viewers and 13 million Hispanics.

After switching to Telemundo in 2000, he called four World Cups for the Futbol de Primera radio network, of which he has an ownership stake.

"He's the most authentic," Telemundo Deportes President Ray Warren said. "One of the things we hear a lot and say a lot is that it's better in Spanish, es mas mejor en espanol, and so I think what's happened with everything that's gone on is there might be more people willing to try to discover that because there is no real magnetism to the English-language coverage."

She said it

From leftcoastsportsbabe.com: "Some complaints now that trainer Bob Baffert's other horse, Restoring Hope, by running second in the Belmont Stakes early prevented other horses from catching Justify. Uh, in a mile and a half race, plenty of time to go around."

Sports on 06/12/2018

Upcoming Events