Cable TV drops the ball

Next month, the USMNT will be headed to Mexico City for a very important World Cup qualifier against Mexico. I'm going to make a bold statement here and say that it's the most important qualifier for us. Mexico have already tried to knock us down a notch by scheduling the match at 4 PM EST, during the hottest, most humid part of the day. The US has never won at the Azteca EVER and with the squad we have now and the form we were in for the last three Confederation's Cup games, winning in Mexico is DEFINITELY a possibility.

HOWEVER, most of us won't be able to see it on television. Why, you ask? Basically, ESPN won't be carrying the ridiculously important US-Mexico World Cup qualifier next month. They decided it was too expensive to buy the English language rights from Telemundo, a Spanish-language channel that is part of the NBC Universal network. And that's understandable, since they apparently really jacked up the price because they knew it'd be in demand. But that leaves no English-language broadcast. NBC Universal had the bright idea to use their ties with Telemundo to broadcast it in English...on mun2. I had actually never heard of this channel until yesterday when I read about this. Apparently it is a bilingual channel aimed at the Hispanic 18-34 demographic. And it's only available to 30.4 million homes in the US, which isn't a lot of people. So hardly anyone is going to be able to watch this match. However, most people in the US get the USA network, which is part of NBC Universal. Do you know what they are showing during the time that the game would air? Reruns of House and NCIS, which, although they are good shows, are not crucial to watch and could either be aired on a different day or a different time or something. But of course they aren't, because this is America, and the mainstream media hates soccer.

Wanna help out? First off, you can sign this petition. It's unofficial, but when I signed it there were almost 500 signatures and this thing started yesterday, so if you sign this and send it to people, tweet it to everyone, put a link on facebook, whatever you want to do, you'd be helping out.

Another way would be to go to Matchfit USA's article which gives more details about the situation and has more things you can do to help. One of these ways is emailing NBC Universal network officials- they have a template email that you can just copy, paste, edit, and send to the NBC people whose email addresses they also give.

If you were to do all of this, it would maybe take 5 minutes out of your day. I think you can sacrifice that in the name of American soccer.