ESPN tries to make accent mark
Not long ago, Lucas Bongarra, a former college soccer player and now coach, was watching ESPN2 when a promo came on for ESPN Deportes.
He switched. And stayed.
“I now can watch ‘SportsCenter’ in Spanish,” said an almost jubilant Bongarra, 30, who grew up in Buenos Aires and now lives in West Hollywood. “It’s the same format as the ‘SportsCenter’ on ESPN, only it’s in Spanish.”
He doesn’t deny that he is hooked. And yet, on Sundays at noon, Bongarra is also watching Argentine soccer on Fox Sports en Espanol (FSE) , or has been sure to TiVo it.
This kind of enthusiasm is why Spanish-language coverage is the fastest-growing segment of sports broadcasting, with ratings to prove it.
And nowhere is that dynamic more in play than in Los Angeles, the nation’s No. 1 market for Latino viewers.
The growth can be seen in the coverage of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, which opened Wednesday and concludes June 24. Galavision, FSE, Univision and its sister network Telefutura all have a piece of the six-city soccer tournament, which includes a doubleheader today at the Home Depot Center.
During the 2005 Gold Cup, Univision (Channel 34) televised six games, including the final. Those telecasts averaged an impressive 7.7 national rating and 2.9 million viewers.
Numbers like those are why these networks, along with the upstart ESPN Deportes, are trying to win the loyalty of sports fans such as Bongarra -- and the revenue that comes with them.
And it is the marketing of Deportes by the ESPN juggernaut that has signaled the shift in importance of Spanish-language coverage. Already, Deportes is being promoted on ESPN’s “Sports-Center,” as viewers get used to hearing, “And now for your Deportes minute.”
And it’s not just soccer that brings the viewers. Boxing, baseball, basketball, Ultimate Fighting Championship and NASCAR are all gaining.
ESPN Deportes, only 3 years old, hasn’t had many of those viewers but is out to change that.
Although it has its own version of “SportsCenter” that originates from Mexico City and has studios at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., Deportes has lacked visibility in L.A. Its flagship radio station, KWKW, is here, but on the television side there is only a small bureau headed by reporter Jaime Motta and producer Brandon Clark.
That will be changing. Its profile is already being raised through the ESPN marketing machine, and a facility that ESPN is building next to Staples Center could be a boon as well when it opens in 2009.
“It will give us the opportunity to do a lot more out of here, a lot more local stories,” Motta said, noting that the network’s coverage has slowly expanded.
“It’s been a process. When we first launched, we did a little bit here and a little bit there. As time has gone by, we have covered more events. We covered the BCS championship game for the first time this year. We’ve always covered the Final Four, but at first, it wasn’t something that was put on our calendar. Now it is automatic.”
ESPN Deportes also recently wrapped up two distribution deals. It now is on DirecTV’s Spanish-language tier -- giving the network more than 3 million homes, an increase of about 1 million -- and beginning July 13 will be on a Time Warner Cable digital tier. Right now, Time Warner’s 1.4 million digital subscribers in the L.A. market are getting it for free in a promotional push.
Meanwhile, Fox Sports en Espanol, which has been around for 10 years, reaches 4.5 million of the 11.5 million Latino television households in the U.S., Telemundo reaches 91%, and over-the-air network Univision reaches 99%.
ESPN Deportes has two good reasons to think big.
First, there are an estimated 45 million Latinos in the U.S. today, based on the latest figures from the Census Bureau. That number has been projected to grow to 70 million by 2020. Latinos are not only the largest ethnic group, but also the fastest-growing, accounting for 1.4 million of the national population growth of 2.9 million between July 1, 2005 and July 1, 2006.
In Southern California, it’s even faster. Of the estimated 10.3 million people now in L.A. County, 4.6 million are Latino.
ESPN chief George Bodenheimer said the numbers make the Deportes push “a no-brainer.” All of ESPN’s platforms -- TV, radio, print and online -- are now cross-promoting Deportes. “You can see where we’re going,” he said. “We want to emulate essentially what we’ve done with our English-language networks.”
Second, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth, Latinos wield the most buying power of any minority group in the U.S. at $863 billion a year.
“And that is expected to pass $1 trillion by 2010,” Bodenheimer said.
A 2002 survey by USC’s Tomas Rivera Policy Institute that tracked viewing habits of Latinos found that watching sports was prevalent in 36% of Latino households compared with 30% of English-speaking households.
Suspecting that those numbers were lagging, Deportes conducted a poll last year in conjunction with the research company TNS Sports that showed 86% of Latinos consider themselves sports fans. That was driven home by the Nielsen ratings for last summer’s World Cup, which was watched in 73% of Latino households in the U.S.
The push from Deportes doesn’t bother David Sternberg, executive vice president and general manager of L.A.-based Fox Sports en Espanol.
“You’ve got to be here if you want to have your pulse on the No. 1 Hispanic market,” he said.
Fox Sports en Espanol emphasizes Mexican League soccer, but its inventory includes baseball, boxing, Ultimate Fighting Championship and kickboxing.
In May the network signed a three-year, multiplatform deal giving Nissan exclusive title sponsorship rights to the Copa Sudamericana, to be renamed the Copa Nissan Sudamericana, across the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean.
Tom Maney, senior vice president of sales, said his network’s extensive live coverage of first-division Mexican League soccer puts it another step ahead of Deportes, whose league coverage is limited to 34 tape-delayed Saturday night telecasts.
However, Deportes does have college football from Mexico, the summer and winter baseball leagues from Mexico, as well as “Futbol Picante,” a Mexican soccer studio show. The network expects a 25% increase in Mexican studio programming in 2008.
The success of Spanish-language sports broadcasting is in the numbers.
* The telecast of Mexico’s 4-0 victory over Iran in a soccer exhibition on NBC-owned Telemundo (Channel 52) on June 2 got a 2.8 rating in L.A. That beat the 2.7 for Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals between the Ducks and Ottawa that night on NBC.
* The April 25 CONCACAF Champions Cup final between Mexican clubs Pachuca and Chivas de Guadalajara was televised live by Fox Sports en Espanol and seen in an average of 140,000 households in Los Angeles. On at the same time: a Ducks playoff game on KDOC (Channel 56), seen in 31,000 households, and a Dodgers-Giants game on FSN Prime Ticket, seen in 126,000.
* The Mexican network Azteca America (Channel 54) broadcast the final Mexican League soccer game on May 27 and for the week of May 21-27, that was No. 1 among males 18-34. Nielsen said 2.2 million viewed the game in the U.S. -- 1% more than the NBA Western Conference finals match between Utah and San Antonio on ABC, 10% more than the NASCAR Nextel Cup on Fox, 40% more than the Indianapolis 500 on ABC and 70% more than baseball’s “Game of the Week” on Fox.
Soccer is what brought Francisco Xavier Gomez, 36, of Whittier, to Fox Sports en Espanol. When asked about the competition for viewers, Gomez, who came to the U.S. from Jalisco, Mexico, when he was 3, said the choice is easy right now: “Fox has a lot more soccer.”
But ESPN said its many platforms will help win viewers for Deportes. Besides the TV and radio networks, there is ESPN Deportes La Revista, the Spanish-language cousin to ESPN the Magazine, ESPNdeportes.com and ESPN Deportes Wireless.
“Our primary target is the household where Spanish is the dominant language,” ESPN Deportes General Manager Lino Garcia said. “Our secondary target is the bilingual marketplace. There are businesses to be in that are considered a growth business. This is one of them.”
Its lineup helps with more than 1,850 hours a year of live and original programming: Dominican baseball, Pacific League baseball from Mexico, UEFA Champions League soccer, the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball.
In May it picked up another plum, acquiring the Spanish-language rights to the Pan American Games this summer.
Gabriela Harper, 31, of Santa Monica, recently found ESPN Deportes by accident on her satellite system. A native of Maracay, Venezuela, she came to the U.S. when she was 11.
“What is really cool is being so far away and being able to watch my hometown teams’ games,” Harper said of Deportes’ coverage of baseball and soccer, her favorite sports. “It gives me a connection to my family there.”
Jose Ortiz, 43, lived in the San Gabriel Valley for years before moving to Tulare, Calif. He, too, is a recent convert to ESPN Deportes because of soccer. “But I also like American football, baseball, NBA basketball when it gets to the Finals, and boxing when it’s a big fight,” he said.
But Univision remains the granddaddy of them all. Its telecast of a U.S.-Mexico soccer game in February drew a national audience of 6.1 million, while a Club America-Chivas Guadalajara match in March attracted 4.3 million viewers, equaling how many people watched Game 1 of the playoff series between the Lakers and Phoenix Suns on ABC.
If such numbers -- not to mention the 17 million U.S. viewers who watched the World Cup final -- are any measure, then language is no barrier.
USC’s Harry Pachon, who heads the Rivera institute, thinks he knows why, at least when it comes to soccer.
“You can’t match the enthusiasm you get from the Hispanic announcers. And goal,” he said, “translates quite nicely.”
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