When NBC paid a quarter-billion dollars for the U.S. broadcast rights to the English Premier League beginning in 2013 it was an expensive gamble. Just 4% of Americans ranked soccer as their favorite sport, according to a Gallup poll taken that year. And the network was drawing a 0.1 rating for its coverage of Major League Soccer games that season.
More people were watching paint dry.
But the wager has paid off big. When the network kicked off its 14th season of EPL coverage last month, the opening Saturday game between Brentford and Tottenham drew an average audience of 1.2 million on NBC and its Peacock streaming service, up 16% from the opening Saturday game last August.
“When we took on the project, we all just thought it was awesome and it was just a fun, ‘Hey, let’s just do the best we can,’” said Pierre Moossa, the coordinating producer for NBC Sports’ broadcast coverage of the Premier League from the start. “I don’t think we all appreciated how much it would change.”
Much of the change has favored NBC, which will air all 380 EPL games this season on NBC, the USA Network and its Peacock streaming service.
According to a recent Parks Associates and InterDigital survey, roughly 70% of U.S. sports viewers at least partly watch on streaming services like Peacock, which will carry more than half of all EPL games. And the audience for those games skews young, with more than half of all avid soccer viewers aged 18-to-34, a demographic highly sought by advertisers and one that suggests NBC’s numbers could stay strong for years.
Then there’s the growing popularity of the sport itself. Over the past 14 years the number of Americans ranking soccer as their favorite has more than doubled, to 10%, trailing only tackle football and basketball, according to a survey by The Economist. The success of this summer’s North American World Cup, which played to stadiums that were 99.7% full and drew a record U.S. viewing audience of more than 62 million for the final, confirmed the survey’s findings.
How much NBC is responsible for that growth is impossible to say but it clearly deserves some credit. So does Rebecca Lowe, who has ridden that wave while anchoring the network’s Premier League coverage from the first season.
“Over the course of these 14 years we have just brought so many more people into the tent. And they’ve stayed,” Lowe said.
“When I first joined, it was always a bit of a fight to be talked about in the same breath as some of the bigger sports. Now it’s being talked about. It’s changed a lot.”
NBC announced its first season of Premier League coverage with much fanfare, including a four-minute 42-second promo featuring a fictional coach named Ted Lasso, who had been lured away from college football to manage an EPL team. Lasso has since gone on to bigger and better things on Apple TV, where the series is in its fourth season. But the NBC promo’s tagline — “It’s football. Just not as we know it” — spoke to the network’s belief that U.S. viewers would have to be educated about the English game and its differences from the American one.
Lowe’s deep knowledge, infectious enthusiasm and patience made her the perfect teacher, though she had to be careful at first. Assuming viewers understood the history of English soccer — or even the offside rule — could make the broadcasts unintelligible for new fans who understood neither. Oversimplifying things, on the other hand, would leave hardcore fans feeling as if they were being talked down to.
That once-wide chasm of understanding has narrowed, she said.
“The audience has just gotten more and more knowledgeable as it’s gotten bigger. I just think [soccer] is more mainstream,” said Lowe, 45.
“Still I’m very mindful of the audience. There’s a different audience to the English audience. It’s just not as different as maybe 13 years ago.”
Before agreeing to her first contract with NBC — a three-year deal signed in the spring of 2013 — Lowe wanted to be an actor. But a series of short-lived soccer assignments for a variety of outlets in the UK, including the BBC and ESPN, won her an audition with the U.S. network. And while soccer remains her main duty, she has also covered the Kentucky Derby numerous times and has fronted NBC’s coverage of the last seven Olympics.
No active American TV journalist has hosted more Olympic coverage than Lowe, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2022. And in an unusual agreement, NBC also allowed her to anchor Fox Sports’ coverage of this summer’s World Cup, where she spent much of her time refereeing spats between former players Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Alexi Lalas.
“I definitely felt like their mum. Or maybe their younger sister,” she said. “They were like three big brothers who were just unruly and I was supposed to keep the peace.”
Most surprising though was the fact that the former players not only listened to her, they also respected her because like the sport she covers, Lowe has become so ubiquitous to U.S. viewers that even World Cup veterans no longer need an introduction.
Moossa, the son of British immigrants, grew up playing soccer in San Diego and said the audience and enthusiasm for the sport was always present in the U.S. It just had to be lured out into the open.
“When I got assigned to work on the Premier League, I was walking the hallways at 30 Rock and a young intern walked up to me and he covered his mouth and whispered ‘I like soccer,’” Moossa related. “And I said to him ‘I like it, too. Why are we whispering?’
“We are now hiring people on our production staff that were watching the Premier League for the last five or six years, that grew up watching it. We’re really sort of seeing sort of that generational shift. But we also have to start back at the beginning because there’s so many people who are sampling for the first time. We have to make sure that they get to enjoy what makes Premier League so special.”
At that they have succeeded. Which is why, 14 seasons later, NBC’s gamble has become a sure bet.
You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
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