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Why Wasn’t the USWNT Qualifying Match Available on a Free Channel?

By Chris Blakely

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On Wednesday night the United States Women’s National Team took on Trinidad and Tobago in their first qualifying match for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. The problem is some of you may not have seen the match. I did a little searching around to see if I could find out what TV network was broadcasting the match. After a few minutes I realized the Fox Sports have the broadcasting rights.

After searching around on their website I found that it was being broadcast on foxsoccer2go.com. I proceeded to see if there was a way to stream the match from my computer so I sent a tweet to Fox Soccer and received the following:

So I went to where they suggested and filled out the information that they wanted me to fill out. Problem is when I hit continue, they wanted me to enter my credit card information so that when my free seven-day trail ended they could charge me $19.99 a month. I don’t want to seem cheap, but $19.99 a month is something that my family and I cannot afford right now as we need to spend the $19.99 a month on more meaningful items.

What I am trying to get at is, why in the world is the USWNT qualifying game on a service you have to pay $20 a month for? Yes, I know that all of the other “four major” sports leagues have similar packages at a much higher rate. Why do I have to pay to watch my national team play a World Cup qualifying game on United States soil?

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    • I know that when the USMNT plays matches away from U.S. soil, you may not even get to watch the match at all unless you have additional sporting packages through your cable/satellite provider. ESPN carries all of the USMNT and the Mexican National Team home games on their various stations. Why can’t they do the same for the women’s national team?

    I understand that Fox Soccer has the rights for CONCACAF qualifying, but they couldn’t find a way to have the match on a free channel or at least be able to stream it for free? I also understand that game four of the NLCS was being broadcast on Fox Sports 1 at the time of the match, so at least in this instance it was not a viable option.

    In the future I hope that these games will be able to be seen for free so our country’s youth has the opportunity to watch these ladies work their craft. Oh by the way in case you missed it, the USWNT won their match against Trinidad and Tobago 1-0 after a header from Amy Wambach in the 54th minute.

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