Copa América Centenario bets pay off big for Univision, Fox Sports

Both Fox and Univision drew massive audiences for their telecasts in English and Spanish, respectively. Fox's rivaled and in many cases surpassed ESPN's viewership for the European Championship, while Univision's average viewership for the group stage was higher than its average viewership for the 2014 World Cup.

Just because everything looks rosy now, though, doesn't mean the industry always believed that would be the case. Indeed, as anyone who has followed the FIFA corruption scandal knows, for much of last year it seemed the tournament wouldn't happen at all.

Univision Sports president Juan Carlos Rodriguez was convinced - and he had more at stake than almost anyone. His network wrote a $60 million rights fee check as soon as the tournament was first announced in 2014.

Twelve months later, Rodriguez was staring at a bust. But twelve months after that, he was staring at a smash hit.

Rodriguez doesn't like talking publicly about the key role he played in making the Copa América Centenario happen. But ask around the industry and you will find plenty of people who praise his specific role in the meetings last autumn that secured the event's existence.

I spoke with Rodriguez this week, and asked if he was willing to reflect on the work he did. He wasn't quite ready.

"I think we have to meet each other and have a lot of tequilas, and I'll tell you the whole story," Rodriguez said. "It's a book, for sure."

He did, however, drop a few hints.

"I'm paid to generate value for the company, and soccer is a very profitable landscape for everyone involved," he said. "Two years ago, we made the bet, and I think we delivered."

Rodriguez added that it was "an easy bet," and it's easy to see why. If you're surprised about Univision's viewership beating its World Cup average, remember that the Hispanic audience doesn't care too much about most teams from Europe, Africa and Asia. Games between those nations bring a World Cup average down. Take them out, and you get what Univision got last month.

There weren't just big audiences for games involving Mexico, the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Every game of the tournament drew at least 1.2 million viewers on Univision networks, including those with smaller nations like Panama, Haiti and Bolivia.

"People want to watch official soccer matches - I think that's the game-changer that we are very proud of," Rodriguez said. "We were able to deliver an event that was an official event where countries were battling for an official trophy, not just these friendlies that everyone is doing in the U.S. that are going nowhere. Our audience has matured enough so that they can decide what is for real and what is not for real."

A good chunk of that audience was bilingual, just like the tournament as a whole. Many fans watched one half of a game in English and the other in Spanish.

Rodriguez is fine with that.

"It matches with the way the country is growing," he said. "This is not about a first-generation of Hispanics coming to the U.S., or Anglos following [English-speaking] people. I think today there is a combination of second generations and third generations that is growing."

Fox paid just $15 million for English-language Copa rights - a quarter of what Univision spent, and a relatively small sum by sports TV standards. More importantly, the deal wasn't made official until this past January, well after all of the legal disputes around the tournament had been settled.

It was well-known around the soccer community for some time before then that Fox was going to do the deal. But the symbolism of the timing wasn't lost on anyone. Nor was the fact that if everything went right, Fox was sitting on a potential gold mine.

"I had very high expectations for this tournament," executive soccer producer David Neal told me. "Players like Messi, Chicharito [Javier Hernandez]; the Brazil, Argentina, Chile teams that have played often in the United States in friendlies or exhibitions but very rarely in the U.S. for matches that really had stakes attached to them."

There were definitely stakes. And as you saw during Fox's broadcasts, the network's on-air talent wasn't afraid to raise them. It wasn't just the soccer studio crew either. Big-name talkers such as Colin Cowherd turned the spotlight - and the pressure - up to the highest levels.

"It's absolutely important, and it grew organically," Neal said. "That kind of commentary, not only does it attract attention but it raises awareness. It's a wonderful things to us to see our corporate brothers and sister talking about the sport as well."

Cowherd's presence in particular caught a lot of the "soccer bubble" community off guard. Most soccer-centric types in this country tune out most mainstream sports talking heads on the assumption that they all hate the sport. That's not true in Cowherd's case. He wasn't forced by higher-ups in Fox's to talk about soccer.

"Soccer has been on his radar for quite some time," Neal said. "He did a piece for us in the pregame show before the U.S. semifinal [against Argentina] about the growth of soccer, and the fact that it's truly appearing on the mainstream more and more. He thinks soccer is on the brink of becoming one of the top four. He thinks it's going to supplant hockey."

Nothing grows soccer in this country more than good performances by U.S. national teams, and Fox got that in the Americans' run to the semifinals.

After the U.S.-Colombia game came within a whisker of setting Fox Sports 1's men's soccer viewership record, every subsequent U.S. game set a new high mark - culminating with an audience of 3.290 million for the U.S.-Argentina semifinal.

"The United States, after the first match, caught fire, and then things aligned in a way that exceeded expectations," Neal said. "I thought it would be a significant event, and then it became a really significant event."

I asked Neal if the tournament would have been such a hit on his network if the U.S. hadn't done well. This was his answer:

It was important, but it wasn't crucial. Was it good news for us to see the U.S. make the semifinals? Absolutely, but it wasn't something that we thought was crucial. We thought that having the marquee players and marquee teams from central and South America would be sufficiently attractive, and then the U.S. [run] was really a bonus.

One of the things that we've learned from our friends at ESPN is that the sophistication level of the American soccer watcher is at such a high level already that even as recently as the World Cup in 2014 when the U.S. went out in the round of 16, the audience continued to grow. We felt confident going in that it would be true [here].

It was indeed true. A prime time doubleheader of Chile-Bolivia and Argentina-Panama on Fox's over-the-air network drew over a million viewers. So did the quarterfinal doubleheader on FX that included Chile's 7-0 demolition of Mexico and Argentina's 4-1 rout of Venezuela. Chile's semifinal win over Colombia drew nearly a million viewers despite an hours-long thunderstorm delay, and the Argentina-Chile final drew 2.9 million viewers.

Of course, Fox being Fox, there were plenty of critics among those millions of viewers. I asked Neal to address some of the loudest talking points that surfaced on social media. He was glad to.

Let's start with the most controversial addition to the network's coverage, Fernando Fiore. Long a star of Univision's sports coverage, Fiore made the jump from Spanish to English television last year. His role with Fox is part-host, part-analyst, part-raconteur.

Fiore really wasn't that controversial a hire, especially for anyone who ever watched him at Univision. Plenty of viewers liked his contributions a lot. But some people who didn't know of him before the Copa were surprised by his outspoken personality.

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a fan of Fernando's work. I've also crossed paths enough with him over the years to know him somewhat well. But this space isn't about my view. Here's Neal's take:

He is a force of nature, and anyone who knew him from his work in Spanish on Univision was certainly not surprised to see the energy that he brought to us. One of the things that I love about Fernando as part of our on-air talent is that he's very unabashed about saying I'm not an ex-player, I'm not an ex-coach, I'm a fan.

I think that's an important aspect of any telecast - you want to have the fan's point of view as well. I thought Fernando's wide range of emotions, his analysis from a fan's point of view, his knowledge of history of the game - particularly of old south and central American soccer - he has proven to be encyclopedic.

Another subject I saw a lot of complaints about was in-game broadcast production. Things like replays, cuts to fans in the crowd and camera angles.

All of those things were controlled by a central production crew run by Host Broadcasting Services, the firm that FIFA hires to produce its tournament broadcasts. Fox didn't run the show, and indeed, many of HBS' employees aren't American. For example, the broadcast of the final was directed by Scotland native Grant Phillips.

"It's a fact of life in international soccer," Neal said. "One director may vary from another in terms of how often they cut to cameras. That's true of American directors and any others."

On the whole, Neal was satisfied with HBS' work. Every game had a minimum of 26 cameras, he said, and the semifinals and final had between 30 and 40. But if he needed to have a word with the crew, he could do so.

"We had a daily dialogue with the host broadcaster," Neal said. "If we had concerns about close-ups and cutaways and those sorts of things, we were encouraged to give feedback. Especially during the semifinals and finals, I thought the level of coverage was extremely high."

Another subject Fox got criticized over was having a lot of games called off monitors instead of sending its broadcast crews to stadiums. The tournament was in the United States after all, so why not?

Well, there were a few reasons. The biggest was that unlike for the World Cup, the Copa didn't build press sections into seating bowls of stadiums. They all (at least as far as I know) used the existing press boxes and broadcast booths.

On the print side of things, there was enough room for everyone. But on the television side, there wasn't always. A lot of South American TV networks sent crews to the U.S., and by the letter of the law, they had just as much of a right to booth space as Fox.

At Lincoln Financial Field, for example, not only were all the TV and radio booths occupied, but coaches' boxes and production rooms were also turned into broadcast spaces.

"Because there were so many rights-holders and there was only so much real estate in these stadiums - we always like toe be at as many venues as we can, it's just logistics as far as how many spaces are available and how many broadcasters we have," Neal said. "In group play we had 12 days of consecutive games and four teams. It was a lot of traveling and [sometimes it made more sense] to have them stay in L.A. for a day or two."

Fox's decision was also a bit of a hedge on its bet on the tournament as a whole. Yes, Neal's expectations were high, but a bet is still a bet. The network kept its talent roster to four broadcast crews, and kept its studio crew at home in Los Angeles through the tournament's early stages.

But as the tournament caught on with fans, Fox got the green light to spend more. So you saw the studio crews go to Seattle and Houston for the United States' knockout round games.

Lastly, let's address a point that is always one of the big ones when it comes to Fox's soccer coverage: its use of American play-by-play voices instead of Brits.

Fox has a long, proud track record of developing American voices to call the world's game, and that effort continued this summer.

FC Dallas play-by-play voice Mark Followill got a big national stage at the Copa, after quietly getting Bundesliga and CONCACAF assignments in recent months. Justin Kutcher returned after debuting at last year's Women's World Cup. Mark Rogondino returned to the fold to call a few MLS games after the league's Copa break ended.

Critics are still out there, complaining that Americans can't know the game as well as others. But the tide is changing, thanks in no small part to the emergence of John Strong. At this point, the 31-year-old Oregon native shares the top of Fox's depth chart with the dean of American soccer broadcasting, J.P. Dellacamera.

It's one thing to have Americans call a tournament of the Americas. What will happen, though, when Fox airs the 2018 World Cup in Russia? That's the most demanding audience in soccer, and it might just demand that Fox use its British brethren from Sky Sports instead - especially global superstar Martin Tyler.

Fox also has a strong partnership with Sky Sports' operations in Germany and Italy. Sky Deutschland helps to produce some of Fox's Bundesliga features, and Sky Italia's Massimo Marianella contributed to Fox's coverage of the FIFA presidential election in February.

Neal is well aware of the pressure that will be on him, and told me Fox is already starting to make plans.

"Everything we do, whether the women's World Cup or the Copa America now or the Confederations Cup next year and the qualifiers in between involving the U.S. national team and Mexican national team, there is a common characteristic that it is about building our team for 2018," he said. "We have not filled all our spots [for 2018]. We had effectively four broadcast teams for the Copa America [and] need at least two more for the World Cup. We are not excluding anybody."

Ultimately, Neal said, "it's impossible to predict [right now] what all of our voices are going to be.

There is some time to settle that matter. A more immediate objective is to bring the momentum from the Copa América Centenario into coverage of Major League Soccer.

It was impossible to miss the many ties between MLS and the Copa, not least because Soccer United Marketing ran much of the tournament's commercial operations. But there is a greater philosophical question of whether the Copa can get the MLS community to pay more attention to South America, and to bring more South players into the league instead of aging Europeans.

Yes, this is the same subject I wrote about a few days ago. I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that when I asked Neal and Rodriguez for their opinions, they said many of the same things that I did.

But really, I barely had to ask them. They said it on their own.

"The style of play that we saw in Copa América Centenario - and almost equally important, the level of passion from the fans, the thousands that filled stadiums and the millions who watched on television - the sport is the same [as in Europe], but the passion and excitement of soccer in the Americas, I think it's something that has got enormous growth potential," Neal said. "And I think this tournament, over three-plus weeks, showcased it very, very well."

It's no surprise that Neal is very much in favor of having more combined tournaments of the Americas in the future. It's even less of a surprise that Rodriguez is too.

"Absolutely, the answer is yes," Rodriguez said. "In a six-month period, everyone proved that things can happen. If we have four years to plan, it would only get better."

Making it happen will take a lot of heavy lifting by CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and FIFA officials. The U.S. government's investigation into corruption in soccer across the Americas could also have an impact, especially relating to who gets to be at the negotiating table.

Rodriguez told me he believes that FIFA and CONCACAF are indeed committed to the reform packages they have approved. He has particularly strong faith in soccer governing officials in the United States.

"I think that U.S. Soccer and MLS have never been engaged in any of that - I can assure that this part of the world has nothing to do with the holistic world story," he said. "I cannot say more because I don't know more, but I do know that the sport itself is trying to clean the governing part. There is a new president, there is a new general secretary [of FIFA], there is a new president of CONCACAF [Canada's Victor Montagliani] that for sure has been - he went through all the required screenings."

Let's end this piece with some optimism. If you've read my past interviews with Rodriguez, you know he's very bullish on what Univision can bring to Major League Soccer.

Rodriguez had a lot to say on the subject this time too. Here are his words, unfiltered (as they often are), on where he thinks American soccer can go if it speaks a little more Spanish in the years to come:

I think everything is ready for soccer to explode in the U.S., and we're all trying to find the fuel and the ignition that really makes this the beginning of an incredible growth... If we really take a look and dive in the numbers, we might presume that one of the biggest paths for soccer's growth is the U.S. is Hispanics. It is all the Hispanics [and] Latinos. We really represent the possible growth of MLS.

So if the U.S. is eventually going to host the World Cup in 2026, I presume that there are a lot of things that we can all do together, and for this I can tell you that we work very close to MLS and SUM in the future of more investments and more things that make more sense to watch the growth of the sport. The thing I am most proud of is the growth of the sport in the U.S. We are really being part of it, and we're very happy about that.

[…]

We have literally invested thousands, I would say almost millions of dollars, in the broadcast experience. So from a technology perspective, from a commentator's perspective, from a data perspective, our experience of watching South American soccer - in our case, Mexican soccer - has grown a lot in the last four years…

It is important that we, the guys in the industry, understand that by having an enhanced experience, it's a lot easier to compare it to the world-class events that we get to see on television. So we have put [our production] at least at the same level of the ultra-high-class events. Therefore it's fun to watch. You are informed and entertained at the same time.

That's one piece: it becomes more appealing. The second piece is: MLS has done an incredible job in, let's call it, rejuvenating the image of the league in the U.S.

It's not only old players coming to America to retire here. Today, it is a full league that is between the best 10 leagues in the world, I would say, in terms of investments, in terms of stadiums, in terms of organizations, in terms of players now, in terms of development.

So this is starting to become an appealing market for players to come to the U.S. Plus security issues, plus the good living there is in the U.S. Everything is starting to be in place for a better proposal.