Avoiding the Drop

Yesterday Fox rolled out their first offerings of the Champions League on TV and as with all new things, there was a bit of uncertainty beforehand. Personally I went to check the listings on FSC where I figured the majority of games were to be shown, I knew they were also on FSE but my Spanish isn’t very good and I don’t think I get it anyways.

I wasn’t very happy when I saw that FC Sheriff v. Olympiakos was taking the live spot on FSC and Celtic v. Arsenal was the second game on replay. Only today did I realize that there were also to be games on FSN (or what is usually known as FS_ with the blank being some regional abbreviation), today I also realized that this meant it’d be in HD. What I was expecting before today and what I got were two different things.

Pregame

I never really watch pre-game shows, but I tuned in for a few minutes to see what it was like. Nothing outstanding, but there isn’t much that a pre-game can do to make  itself outstanding, but there is plenty it can do to suck.

The hosts were Max Bretos, Bobby McMahon, and Warren Barton, now normally I cringe when I see Max Bretos on TV and I’m just waiting to see him scream about a ball floating 10 feet above the crossbar, but it was just the opposite and he seemed very reserved. Like I said I didn’t see all of it, so maybe he got his Landon Donovan related screaming out before hand. McMahon and Barton did well, as they usually do, with McMahon leading the show.

Coverage

One thing that always bothered me with ESPN’s coverage was their constant love of doing ESPN things, SportsCenter game breaks, promoting the NASCAR race that nobody who was watching the game would probably watch, forcing Derek Rae and Tommy Smyth to do awkward promos for said NASCAR race, and constantly having their ticker and various ESPN things littering the screen.

One thing I was concerned about before the match was the chance of FSN breaking into the game with a press conference from a prominent throwballer that we shall not name in these hallowed pages. Nothing of the sort happened, in fact you wouldn’t even have known the game was on an American mainstream sports network if you walked into a pub and it was on. No tickers, no in game ads, no “Don’t forget to check out Fox’s NFL Preseason coverage” it was a nice change from the past.

ESPN’s coverage was always available on the HD feed, but the picture wasn’t top notch HD all the time, and often would be in the 4:3 box with the bars on the side. This was annoying because I have a 4:3 TV and I’d lose about 1/3rd of the picture, so I always watched in standard def, but this was real, true HD and it was awesome. FSC is supposed to be switching to HD by about February, so we should be able to see the whole knockout phase in HD.

There was one small issue, the first minute of the game had no announcers and then someone from Fox did about 20 minutes of play by play before the English audio finally worked and the proper audio feed was brought in. I didn’t consider this that big of a deal, there are always issues with starting something new, and I’d expect that this was probably considered Fox’s “dry run” as they weren’t going to get a ton of viewers and it’d give them a chance to figure things out. Now if things like this happen again consistently I’d be a little annoyed, but as it is now, its fine.

Lack of Online Coverage

The one downside to the switch from ESPN is the loss of ESPN360. Since the vast majority of America is working when the Champions League games are on, 360 was perfect if they had access at their workplace because they’d be able to have a window with it on while they “worked”, plus 360 would have more than one game on at a time so you were able to watch the games that weren’t broadcast on ESPN live.

There is actually online coverage of games, but it costs $10 per game and I’d imagine a lot of people probably aren’t going to want to pay $10 for a match that they may have to switch back and forth between when they can probably wait and watch the game later on their DVR.

DirectTV’s Bonus Coverage

While this is limited in it’s scope of people it affects, it was rather impressive and worth a mention. The usual sports mix channel was turned into a Champions League channel yesterday. Now if you’re unfamiliar with the sports mix channel, it’s basically a bunch of mini screens showing different channels. It had eight different mini screens with the matchup and scoreline for each, as well as a game clock. They also had two free matches available, FC Timosoara v Stuttgart and Copenhagen vs APOEL, with the Stuttgart match being in HD.

Incidentally, these two were the only two matches that even showed up on the sports mix, as the Arsenal match just had an FSN logo there and the Olympiakos match said “you need a subscription to FSC” (which I obviously have), and then in the second half one of the matches on sports mix showed the Arsenal match under the heading for one of the free games, so they had issues but if this is going to go on this season, hopefully it’s fixed.

This wasn’t really very necessary yesterday as I really only cared about the result of the Arsenal game and today I’ll probably only pay attention to the Lyon and Atletico Madrid matches, but if this is a preview of whats to come then I must say I’m excited, since when you get down to the group stage and there are 3-4 matches on that you want to see you’ll more than likely be able to switch between them.

This could be some sort of teaser into some sort of PPV for the rest of the season as everything I’ve read stated that they’d only be offering the bonus matches for this round, but it certainly would be nice if we got free matches, even if they were the lesser games.

What We Can Look Forward to This Season

Personally I’m rather excited about how the Champions League is going to play out with Fox. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is just how many replays FSC has done thus far. As we all know, FSC doesn’t have much original programming during the week, whereas ESPN has about 100 different shows a day and is constantly trying to figure out new ways for Woody Paige to yell at you.

Normally one would probably consider this a bad thing, but this gives FSC the ability to replay games all night with nothing more than Sky Sports news and Fox Soccer Report to interrupt it.

We’re also getting more live coverage, as Fox is utilizing 3 of their stations to deploy games to:

• FSC will air a live game both days (31 total live matches), and 79 various delayed matches through the season
• FSN will air live matches every Tuesday (16 total live matches)
• Fox Sports en Espanol will air live games both days (31 total live matches), and 63 tape delayed matches. I haven’t found anything on weather or not they’ll be the same ones that are on other stations, or another live match.

Overall I was very impressed by what I saw yesterday, and we should be able to expect some quality coverage of the premier competition in European football that we weren’t fully getting from ESPN.