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I love radio. I worked in radio for many years. I listen to radio (mostly on my phone or on satellite in the car). You can call it audio. You can call it streaming. What I hope you won’t be calling it in the near future is irrelevant.
It feels like some in the soccer business don’t quite understand its value. In turn, they don’t make much of an investment. And in some cases, they’re getting a return commensurate to what they are essentially “not” investing in.
Many MLS teams have a radio broadcast. It is impossible to know what kinds of investments are being made by the clubs. But we know the league hasn’t been much help. When the league moved to Apple TV with its MLS Season Pass they signaled that they would offer the local team’s radio announcers, both home and away, as an alternative to the national announcers.
That turned out not to be. What was offered then, and continues to be, is the home team’s radio/audio feed. There is no option to listen to your team’s announcers when your team is on the road.
All other major leagues in America – NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL – invest in local broadcasts and in some form make those broadcasts available to their fans around the world.
“Every professional team has home-and-away radio,” said Glenn Davis, who for many years was the TV voice of the Dynamo. He now does an audio-only feed for the MLS Season Pass games played in Houston. “You want (radio) and it makes you look big-time. And without it I think it does kind of hurt relevancy and it does take a little poke at the professionalism.”
MLS’s TV package only offering the home team announcers is perplexing. You would think the most fervent supporters of your team would like to sync their local announcers to the video when their team is on the road. They are likely to be sitting in the stadium for the home games.
“I think the uptake would be even higher if the away games were broadcast,” said Brad Feldman, who broadcasts all the New England Revs games on 98-5 The Sports Hub in Boston. “A good portion of those loyal viewers are probably season members, season-ticket holders.
“A good percentage of people want that connection.”
That is it. The local fans make a connection. They develop a relationship with the local announcers. It’s familiar. They are the friendly voices, they are neighbors.
“Yes, I think that’s a big one,” Davis tells me. “I mean you and I are kind of from the older school. Local is very important. The team has to be held to the fire in a fair way. But in a fun way as well. I don’t think it has been good for the local fan. It’s kind of sad to me.”
Feldman said, “I don’t want to inflate the importance, but I live in a sports market where those connections have historically been very, very close and very much a part of the fabric of the sports culture, and the various teams’ culture and legacies.”
Options
Fans of every sport have plenty of choices, for the games, for the media content, for building a relationship with their favorite team(s).
D.C. United announcer Dave Johnson says the competition is not just for the dollar, it’s for your time. “If you’re going to invest the time in something,” he said, “you want to know that whoever you’re investing time in is investing time back. And that means making the experience as optimal and interactive as possible.”
And that, Johnson says, means giving the fans both home and away radio on MLS Season Pass.
Not surprisingly, Feldman and Davis are of the same mind. Feldman says his club is ready to make a greater investment if the league would make those road games available.
“The Revs front office has been very clear about this,” he said. “If the league went to a model where the away radio call was an option … then the New England radio announcers and producer would travel to all the away venues.”
The folks in the league office tell me they have no plans to change the structure.
“People want more options,” Johnson said. “This is the age, 2025. We expect more options.”
History
The radio broadcast is the history of the club – it is how the team is chronicled on a game-by-game basis. No one else is there every single game. Or, should be there every single game.
When you see a documentary film reliving great teams and great moments, it’s often the local radio announcer whose call is mixed into the television video.
In the documentary film about the 2004 Eastern Conference finals, Feldman’s voice was used, alongside his analyst Greg Lalas.
“I get goosebumps,” Feldman said. “I hope in 80 years somebody uses that archive to find out what it was like. When they make that equivalent of Sports Century that some of those clips of that game and our call get used. That’s why you do it.”
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The bigger picture
As we all know there is no bigger, more popular sport in America than the NFL. Every game is on network television, but every team invests in local radio. Some more so than others. I called on Bob Sargent to help me understand why. He is the senior director of broadcast partnerships for the 49ers and a man I worked with for 15 years in radio in San Francisco.
They partner with the all-sports station KNBR (where Bob and I worked together) for the games, and one of the station’s talk show hosts and longtime Bay Area broadcaster Greg Papa is their play-by-play voice.
“In our case, and in most cases around the league, those announcers are somebody you trust,” Sargent said. “There’s a credibility factor that’s unspoken, and any station that doesn’t understand that is missing the boat.
“That relationship is everything.”
Johnson, who has been the voice of D.C. United for 30 years and the NBA’s Washington Wizards for nearly that long, makes that same kind of connection to the NFL. For 25 years the Redskins had the radio team of play-by-play announcer Frank Herzog alongside former great players Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff. They were revered by the fans.
“They were the local broadcasters and people would turn down the sound on the TV and listen to the radio,” Johnson said. “Not because of TV, which has some of the highest-paid broadcasters in the world, but because they were their neighbors. And that’s the difference.”
To get a bit more perspective I called Don Martin. For many years he ran the Dodgers Radio Network, was program manager for the local station, KLAC, on which the Dodgers are heard, and the Fox Sports radio network. He says this whole radio thing is a generational challenge.
“Younger folks look at the name radio,” he said. “And they think of their grandparents or their parents. It’s what they listened to, not what they (young people) listen to.”
Young people listen to digital, and Martin says that’s where you need to find them. That brings us back around to MLS. The league claims to have a younger, more digitally savvy audience. Give them options. More options. Home and away options. Give them more audio options on MLS Season Pass, as you do the video components.
Martin says not only did he and the Dodgers adapt in delivery, they did so in branding. “About nine years ago we just started calling it the Dodgers Audio Network.”
He says they are not just radio but streaming, and more. The world changed in the last decade, especially since Covid. You have to make your product available to the audience where they want it. And when they want it.
Circling back
The NBA, NHL and MLB still do local television, and they invest in local radio. The NFL does national television only and invests in local radio. MLS does national television only and the investment in local radio is not as great.
You may have determined by now I think that investment could be a lot greater.
“Game-to-game, week-to-week you are the interlocutor, the translator,” Feldman said. “You’re sort of in real-time documenting, and when it’s radio interpreting, the action in lieu of people being able to see it themselves.”
By most metrics MLS could be considered in competition with the NHL for the No. 4 spot among the American major leagues.
“Everybody is always saying ‘we want to be talked about like the NBA and the NFL and MLB’,” Davis said. “Well, it takes an effort, and it takes investment. It’s not going to fall in your lap. I think people need to know that.”
Personal experience tells me this; the social scientists who study this say the same. Radio (or call it audio if you like) is the most personal medium. The most ardent supporters know their announcer, their voice, their friend on the radio.
“I am grateful and proud to be able to play a part in the culture of the Revolution in this great sports market,” Feldman said.
Sargent of the 49ers says radio and television are not competitors, they are complementary. “Television is the main engine,” he said. “To try to pretend that, even for a radio nut like I am, would be disingenuous. I see it more as a true sidekick partner.”
And the way the product is delivered there is little reason to believe they can’t be sidekick partners in Major League Soccer.
“The iPhones are like transistor radios,” Johnson said. “Go where the people are. Audio is the easiest thing to get on your phone. We would all love to sit and watch. But we can’t all sit and watch.”
I wonder if the sport’s most powerful people are listening.
(John Shrader is associate professor of Sports Media and Broadcasting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His 30 years of TV and radio sports broadcasting included coverage of the Golden State Warriors, San Francisco 49ers, Oakland A’s — and play-by-play for the San Jose Clash/Earthquakes in 1996-2011.)
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