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[QUOTE="IthacaMatt, post: 1077595, member: 405"]
MLS regular season viewing is about 300,000 when the game is on NBC, a little under 200,000 when on an ESPN channel.  Then there is the Spanish audience. Univision Sports has about 500,000 viewers per game for MLS.  That's why we were seeing some Spanish language commercials during the World Cup on ESPN.

Regular season baseball games don't draw that well, with the Yankees having fallen from around 300,000 viewers per game to around 200,000 in the last few years.

When it comes to the playoffs, though, MLB smokes Major League Soccer.  The World Series drew around 11 or 12 million viewers.  The MLS playoffs drew around 500,000 English-speaking and maybe 1M Spanish speaking viewers.

I think part of that, aside from the fact that Major League Baseball spent decades as the most popular sport in America, is that there is only minor recognition of the make-up of teams in MLS.  People don't have a sense of who the players are, past the first couple stars, on any particular team.  In Portland and Seattle, they have a nice rivalry, rabid fan bases and custom-built soccer stadiums.  Other regions are developing identities for their teams, but in some key markets, MLS teams remain faceless and haven't captured the imagination.  There is work to do branding teams in MLS.  This is where the recent return to the US of some national team players who are still in their prime is going to raise overall viewership (and average salary, and quality of play, and sponsorships) for the league and its players.

If FIFA gives us the World Cup in '22 if Qatar falls through, or in '26 as one of their spokesmen recently suggested, then you are going to see the growth spurt that has been slowly building up over the past 20 years.
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