Bundesliga takes biggest step yet to challenging Premier League in America
Chances are you'll be watching a lot more Bundesliga this season. After Germany's top-tier league spent years in quasi-exile on the practically unobtainable Gol TV, with its almost non-existent distribution, one of Europe's elite circuits is moving to the much more accessible FOX Sports channels this year.
FOX Sports 1 will air 58 games live while FOX Sports 2 will carry 60 matches. FOX Deportes will broadcast 105 games in Spanish.
This move of the Bundesliga to FOX will have a number of consequences. For one, it will likely reignite a love affair between America and German soccer dating back to the weekly "Soccer Made in Germany" shows that aired on PBS from the mid-1970s through the late '80s, one of the first stateside offerings of European club soccer.
[Bundesliga: Scores and Schedule | Current Standings | Teams]
The discerning fan knows that the Bundesliga is in the discussion as the world's strongest league, along with the English Premier League and Spain's La Liga. Just a few years ago, the Champions League final was an all-German affair between juggernauts Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. While Bayern has dominated its domestic league recently, Germany is flush with big and well-supported clubs, making for fierce battles set to pulsating backdrops.
It's all very good television – when broadcasted properly, that is.
Better distribution and production values bring obvious benefits for a league. Even though beIN Sport is in just 17 million or so households, it's an ambitious and well-funded channel and its most recent broadcast of Spain's Clasico between Barcelona and Real Madrid drew some 2.12 million viewers across its English and Spanish-language channels. When Spanish soccer was on the barebones Gol TV, which had 11 million subscribers at its peak, it topped out at about 500,000 viewers.
Moving from being meekly produced, standard definition-fare on Gol TV to being featured on FOX Sports 1 and 2 (which are in 85 million and 45 million households, respectively), the Bundesliga will be in position to make significant inroads in the American market.
In a rapidly commercializing sport, where all potential avenues of revenue are precious, this is clearly a priority. You'll have noticed the sheer volume of European clubs now touring the USA during their preseasons, and Bayern Munich recently opened up an office in New York City to sell its product in North America. When the Bundesliga airs on FOX Sports 1, it will now have slightly better distribution than any other European league, since the Premier League mostly resides on NBC Sports Network and its 81.5 million households.
If this all sounds like inside baseball, it's nevertheless relevant to the regular fan because, in today's soccer world, the value of your television rights means everything. There is a considerable portion of soccer fans that don't think the Premier League is the best in the world. But it's inarguably the most popular, and consequently, its broadcast deals have shot through the roof and into the billions of dollars.
That has helped its clubs tremendously. Even middling top-tier teams are now so flush that they're buying the best talent from other leagues' much bigger clubs. It's no wonder that clubs like Watford, Bournemouth, Sunderland, Leicester City, West Bromwich Albion, West Ham United and Crystal Palace could all afford to run net transfer losses of at least $27 million this summer, per Transfermarkt. They simply have more cash to spend.
Collectively, the Premier League clubs have a negative transfer balance of $323 million over the ongoing transfer window. The Bundesliga's is just $32 million.
More American viewers for the Bundesliga will likely mean new fans. And when its new deal with FOX is up in 2020, the league will probably be able to negotiate a bigger contract. In NBC's new agreement with the Premier League to extend its rights through 2022, the network will pay some $166 million annually. Such figures are probably not in the Bundesliga's short-term future – the value of its current deal with FOX is unknown – but in soccer's television-funded arms race, the FOX deal will help German clubs keep up.
And in the meantime, it will become a lot easier for Americans to watch a splendid league.
(Full disclosure: The author is a former FoxSports.com employee.)
Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.
