Serie A’s TV rights sold to ESPN: The good and the bad

With only a week to spare, we finally know who will broadcast Serie A games in the US this year.

ESPN announced yesterday that they had reached an exclusive deal for Serie A’s US television rights. The deal will span the next 3 years and the games will air mostly on ESPN+, including Cristiano Ronaldo’s Serie A debut. The report didn’t include how much it will cost ESPN every year.

The Good

This deal is a major step forward for Serie A’s exposure in the United States.  At the beginning of the summer the television rights for the league were being bundled with the FA Cup to try to attract bidders.

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That changed once Ronaldo came over to Italy. The Italian league suddenly attracted the interests of ESPN and Turner, which were both a major step up from BeIN Sports.

Moving to the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” will allow Serie A and all of its teams to reach a brand new audience. The level of exposure the league will get in this country will now surpass every league except for the Premier League.

This exposure will hopefully lead to a larger fan-base and eventually more revenue for the league. Increased viewership would be instrumental in the league securing a larger fee for their television rights in 3 years. It could even close the gap between Serie A and the other top European leagues.

The Bad

While there are clear benefits of the partnership with ESPN, there are also some pretty glaring drawbacks. It has been announced that more than 340 of this season’s games will be aired on ESPN+, a subscription based streaming service with a smaller audience than ESPN or ESPN2.

This leaves less than 40 games to be broadcast on cable and the first of those, the week 1 matchup between Roma and Torino, will be broadcast on ESPNNews.

With college football around the corner, it seems unlikely that Serie A games will end up on ESPN on Saturdays, leaving them head-to-head with the NFL on Sundays.

This will likely make it tough for the league to really gain a foothold with the American fans until February, when European football will be the only football available.

There could also be some resistance to the move from current fans of Serie A who remember the absolutely ridiculousness of ESPN FC’s coverage of Roma last year.

There was a clear bias against the team, who was deemed “not very good” after being knocked out of Champions League by Liverpool in a tie that was filled with mistakes from the referee that impacted both teams.

To call any Champions League semifinalist “not very good”, especially one that knocked off Barcelona on the way there is a ludicrous statement.

Serie A’s fan base will certainly have not forgotten the slight and will not be thrilled to have the same people who made these comments consistently covering the league. The coverage of the league has not been much better during the International Champions Cup.

The people working at ESPN will really need to take time to educate them on the teams that they are covering or have new talent brought in otherwise Serie A fans will continue to not trust the coverage of a room full of guys from the U.K. with a bias toward the league they played in.

The new television rights deal comes with its pros and cons, but the issues are fixable over the course of the deal.

The exposure of a partnership with ESPN will definitely help bring Serie A into the mainstream of American sports, but not at the pace it might have if the league was a priority for the network. However, a big rise in television revenue would certainly offset the disappointment of streaming most of the games.

Luckily, ESPN has 3 years to work out all of the kinks and they will hopefully see the importance of Serie A over the next few years.