NBC’s expensive bet on the Barclays Premiere League may be a winner, if its opening weekend is any measure. The broadcaster served up three live games of imported English soccer to American viewers Saturday, two on its NBC Sports and one on its primary network. The main-stage game featured five goals—four from Manchester United (MANU).
See Americans: Scoring! A team you’ve heard of! If a nation of sports fan can forget about the 1-0 scrum between Fulham and Sunderland, importing the world’s top-grossing soccer league to the homeland of the other football just might work.
The three matches drew a combined .5 rating, according to the network’s preliminary estimates, a number representing the percentage of U.S. homes with a TV watching some of that soccer action. As a benchmark for comparison, NBC’s America’s Got Talent regularly draws an audience more than 10 times that size. The juggernaut of Sunday Night Football consistently grabbed more than 15 percent of TV households last year. Still, the rating marked a decent debut and an improvement on last year’s Premiere League opening weekend broadcast in the U.S., which garnered a combined .3 rating for ESPN and Fox Soccer.
The Manchester United game managed to capture almost 800,000 households, according to figures provided by NBC, surpassing the network’s modest expectations for soccer played in the U.K. “In this business, we tend to be hopeful publicly, but privately pessimistic,” said Jon Miller, president of programming at NBC and NBC Sports. “With this we were very pessimistic internally, but it exceeded anything we could have dreamed of.”
The Premiere League is not new to the U.S. Fox has broadcast its matches for 20 years, and ESPN has bought rights to a few games as well. But the NBC deal was the first time a major network made a bet big on the league rather than cherry-picking major matches. NBC signed a three-year, $250 million broadcast deal in October that calls for live coverage of all 380 games—1,600 total hours of programming between now May 11, 2014, when the season wraps up with a 10-match finale. The deal is roughly triple what Fox has been paying for U.S. broadcast rights, according to the Associated Press.
“Our pitch to the league and our pitch to our corporate parent was we were going to be all-in,” Miller said. “We think this sport is very much on the rise. And we think we can catch it at the right time and make it really jump.”
Plenty of other U.S. corporations are making similar bets. General Motors dropped its Super Bowl advertising last year in favor of sponsorship deals with Manchester United and Liverpool. In 2011, Under Armour, a company that got its start in football of the NFL variety, closed a five-year deal to outfit the Tottenham Hotspur.
Posting a relative ratings success in the sports doldrums of mid-August, however, is a bit like scoring on an empty net. The big question is whether NBC’s soccer offering can still exceed expectations when it is crowded by college football, playoff baseball, and the other all-stars of native sports. NBC, a unit of Comcast (CMCSA), is counting on Premiere League super-fans, including a population of about five million European expats living in the U.S. for whom the star players are more likely to be household names.
The big question is whether NBC can win casual fans and viewers who could care less about soccer—people who relate to NBC’s recent marketing spoof in which Jason Sudeikis plays an NFL coach taking the helm of the Tottenham Hotspurs. NBC likes its odds. Because of the time-change, weekend soccer coverage will be competing with cartoons more than Norte Dame. The network plans to win viewers who tune in early or those tire of the blowhards on pregame shows. “I think this is going to be a very viral grow,” Miller said. “People are going to be talking about it.”
What’s more, NBC isn’t waiting for huge ratings before trying to win big ad dollars. While big global brands like Burger King and Anheuser-Busch Inbev (ABI:BB) are on board, negotiations with other advertisers have been slow as the network works to establish “premium” pricing. NBC hopes they call it the Premiere League for a reason.
