12 July 26
This or Aquel
As the World Cup draws to a close, and as the hullabaloo around FIFA corruption doesn’t, I thought I’d go into a bit more detail about the broadcasting options available (legally) here in the United States. Fox bought the rights to broadcast the World Cup in English and hired a number of commentators for each match along with three former players (Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Alexi Lalas) for half-time and full time commentary. Several of the match commentators are Brits but many are American and they seem to have a fixation with statistics which are mostly meaningless: does it matter how many times England has made it to the quarter-finals vs. the semi-finals since 1966, in terms of predicting their performance in any given match at the World Cup in 2026? Of course not. Different players, different conditions, different coach, different. Apples and oranges. Football is just not a game of statistics, it’s more of akin to chess. But the commentators are paid to say stuff during the match and it’s so inane in English that I’ve avoided watching the Fox coverage as much as possible.
Which is where Telemundo comes in. These guys are PASSIONATE about football. They’re also knowledgeable, the kind of deep knowledge acquired by having kicked a ball about on dirt playgrounds as kids in Cali or Tucumán or San Luis Potosí and somehow having been noticed and gone on to play the sport professionally and sometimes even internationally. When they call the game, you sense they’re in there with the players. They do drop some statistics occasionally but never gratuitously. As my German friend put it, it’s more like radio commentary than TV. But lots of people who don’t even speak Spanish prefer the energy of the Telemundo coverage. Several Switzerland supporters, who’d watched the England-Norway match on Fox at a bar earlier in the day, came over to the Upper Crust café to watch Switzerland-Argentina in Spanish.
I did try to use a VPN to watch the Spanish matches on Spanish TV and was able to do so a couple of times but coverage was erratic. Telemundo has worked for me. I can’t believe Americans put up with the inanity of the Fox soccer commentary, but it’s what there is. It’s a metaphor for the state of the sport here. (Baseball commentary in the U.S. is exceptionally high on both radio and television; it’s not like it’s impossible for it to happen in soccer.)
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