ESPN's Impact on Soccer in the United States

Throughout the world, football is the number one sport. It's played by many people around the world and it could be played by anyone.

In the United States, which is considered to be one of the top nations for sports in the world, the beautiful game has a very small following. Other sports leagues, such as the MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL, all have a larger fan base than soccer. Their influence has had a stronger impact for a longer amount of time.

In my opinion, one of the major reasons behind this is ESPN (which stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network), which has shown a minimal showing of soccer to the viewers. They have only shown the UEFA Champions League, MLS and the World Cup in recent years, and have had "personalities" (such as Jim Rome) that don't like soccer at all.

Recently, ESPN has started to make its move into the water's of European football. After losing their rights to the UEFA Champions League in May to Fox Soccer Channel in America, the sports giant bought broadcasting rights to La Liga in the United States, which is the English Premier League in England and the Scottish Premier League in both locations.

ESPN was able to do this after he Irish sports network, Setanta Sports, lost their broadcasting rights to the SPL and EPL after failing to pay both leagues in recent months, which has showed us that ESPN will make an effort to show more of the world's game to viewers across the world.

But, the truth with ESPN is that they are responsible for making sports as popular as they want to make them. They will play shows based off of what they think the viewer wants to watch the most. Unfortunately, that belief isn't always true.

They only started to really show more of an interest in MLS after David Beckham came over from Real Madrid in 2007. They barely showed any games on ABC, except for the MLS Finals.

They neglect to tell scores of major football games in Europe except on their bottom-line. They barely mention any of the major transfers that are ever made unless it is related with America in some way.

They have used commentators, such as Dave O'Brien (who has no experience calling soccer games), to call the World Cup, which wasn't a good idea.

Despite all of this, ESPN have made strides to be better, as they have realized that they will need to be better at broadcasting the beautiful game.

They have showed a bigger interest in next year's World Cup, as they have recently announced that they will have a daily highlight show of the games that were played. They will have American announcers down in South Africa to help with their daily recap show.

They also did a great job to market the Americans in the Confederations Cup in June, and with their help, they helped make American soccer more popular than ever in the United States.

Despite all of this, ESPN will need to be better with their coverage of soccer, but it appears that will be done in the near future.

Finally, "The Worldwide Leader in Sports" has a major impact with how soccer is broadcasted in the United States. It is up to them to make sure that they do everything right and do not hurt their image in broadcasting the beautiful game.