Chelsea or MLS?

22-year old Ohio native Katie Callaway will be with fellow Chelsea fans in a Chicago bar today to watch the final with Bayern Munich.   She fell in love with Chelsea on a family trip to Grand Cayman in 2006 and she will be wearing her David Luiz away shirt for the game.

22-year old Ohio native Katie Callaway will be with fellow Chelsea fans in a Chicago bar today to watch the final with Bayern Munich.   She fell in love with Chelsea on a family trip to Grand Cayman in 2006 and she will be wearing her David Luiz away shirt for the game.

Ms Callaway told the Financial Times, ‘None of my family members are particularly into soccer and the only close friend I had who was into soccer was a Manchester United fan.  But being a Chelsea fan has truly changed my life.’    Perhaps only an American from the midwest could use such evangelical language to talk about football.

Fans such as Ms Callaway illustrate some of the challenges facing Major League Soccer (MLS).   They can turn on the television and watch games from the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and Mexico’s Primera.  

There’s more football on television in the US these days than there is in England. When I lived in Seattle over ten years ago I often had to leave my apartment at the crack of dawn, get the first trolley bus of the day and travel across the city to an Irish bar to watch a live game I wanted to see.

The television audience for football in the US is growing but still lags behind the main American sports.   However, the average MLS game atendance is more than at professional basketball and ice hockey games, and every match is now available on either national or local TV.   The MLS and NBC Sports signed a three-year deal last year to televise 45 league matches and four national team games for $30m.

John Guppy, an experienced hand, told the Pink ‘Un that it was not just the numbers watching that mattered but their demographic: ‘It’s about Hispanics and affluent upscale millenials [sic].   If you want to reach an influential 18-34 year old, soccer indeces higher than baseball, basketball or hockey.’

But that may be watching Chelsea.   That helps to raise the profile of the game but it still poses a challenge for the MLS.