Originally posted by Furball
do what they do here, and air them during half time, before and after the game. Sky paid over £1bn or $1.8bn for the TV rights for the English Premiership.
Getting rid of the offside rule would just ruin the sport. Dont forget your country is pretty much the only one in the world where football is not popular, no need to change it just to suit your tastes.
I forgot to mention the "Vodafone" emblem on the Man U jersey. We don't have that here. People expect to see the team name on the shirt, or at least a logo. Plus, tv doesn't like to show the logo of a company that hasn't paid the tv station to advertise. Even in NASCAR which is filled with corporate billboards, in the post-race interview the tv cameraman will go to great lengths to get a nice tight close-up of the driver's face, not because its more dramatic, but because he can block-off the sponsor logos outside the frame.
Tv networks aren't willing to wait an hour to show a commercial. Even the NFL, the almight pro sport, will take a "tv timeout" if the action continues longer than 20 minutes. One thing that was tried with soccer over here was a "box in a box" broadcast: the action would be in the center box and company billboards would frame the sides, top, and bottom. Unfortunately, this made it difficult to see the player because it reduced the size of the viewing area, and if the camera zoomed in on the player it cut off the players who were off-camera ready to make a play.
So, the best hope for US "soccer" is at the youth and school levels, or recreation on weekends. We grow the players, then send them overseas.
Meanwhile, sports like American football, basketball, and baseball will continue to do well, mostly because the action fits well in a tv screen, there are frequent stoppages of play, and because there is a lot of scoring.
