by Kevin McCauley

I’m a regular listener to Bill Simmons’ B.S. Report. Regardless of the subject matter, which ranges from traditional American sports to reality television, it’s always worth a listen. Yesterday, Bill’s guest was Colin Cowherd of ESPN Radio and ESPN2’s SportsNation.

I’ll be honest, he’s a guy that I know very little about, but there are two things that I hear about him consistently. One, that he has a large and devoted audience, and two, that he’s a colossal blowhard. Well, imagine my surprise when Bill Simmons, who has largely ignored soccer since the 2006 World Cup outside of the occasional commentary from Rob Stone on his show, started talking about how much he loves soccer and how big he thinks it will become. This, even more surprisingly, was set off by the revelation that Cowherd is having a party at the custom sports bar in his basement for the USA-Mexico World Cup qualifier. This led to a tangent for a couple of minutes where Simmons and Cowherd talked about why international and European soccer is going to become massive in the United States in the next few years, and why MLS just won’t work in its current state.

Honestly, I agree with their opinions on both issues. La Liga, the English Premier League, and international football are likely to see slow but steady increases in viewership in the United States over the next few years, and I think MLS essentially needs a systemic overhaul. However, what’s important isn’t the fact that a couple of guys who follow the traditional American sports have valid opinions on the game.

What’s important is that guys like Simmons and Cowherd care.

Every time the United States men’s national team puts out a poor performance or MLS screws something up colossally, the old guard is there with columns, along with television and radio rants, absolutely berating the game. These columns and verbal rants are essentially “Mad Libs”; pre-written with some fill-in-the-blank spots for changing teams, dates, and competitions. Soccer is boring, America will never embrace it, the United States men’s national team will never be good, and soccer is a game for little kids. It’s just for those silly Europeans. This is America, goshdarnit! We like baseball and guns, not soccer! We’ve heard it all a million times.

Thankfully, as this site’s proprietor has mentioned both on his podcast and mine, these guys are dying out. A lot of these columns are written either by old guys who wouldn’t embrace the game if Lionel Messi was an American and we were a World Cup favorite, or by guys who have a minimal readership that are trying to make a name for themselves by bashing something. Bill Simmons and Colin Cowherd are both far from either of those things.

Simmons is 40 and Cowherd is 45, and over the last 5 years, Cowherd has become one of America’s biggest sports radio personalities and Simmons has become, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the most popular sports writer on the internet. These are a couple of guys who have massive followings with people between the ages of 13 and 30. It’s very likely that over a million people in that age range read Bill Simmons and/or listen to Colin Cowherd, and you don’t continue to listen to or read someone who you don’t like. If Simmons and Cowherd are talking about soccer, and they have these massive followings of younger people, then there’s probably a gigantic segment of the under-30 population that is, at the very worst, on the fence about whether or not soccer is something they could enjoy.

Now, if you know anything about how television works, you know two things for sure. One: That how much ad revenue a show can generate is what keeps a show on the air. Two: That how much companies are willing to pay for ad slots is the number of viewers you pull in between the ages of 18 and 49. Why 18-49? Because most companies speculate that once you’ve hit the age of 50, your tastes are determined. It’s unlikely that, after that period of time, advertising will be able to convince you to change what brand of beer, toothpaste, or car you purchase. Therefore, if soccer games have reasonably low Nielson ratings, but almost none of the viewership is over the age of 50, who cares?

This is why the likes of Cowherd and Simmons caring about this sport and telling their readers, listeners, and viewers how much they like the sport matters. The people who follow them are young. I don’t have numbers in front of me, and I doubt ESPN would give them to me, but it’s fairly obvious that people over the age of 50 make up microscopic portions of Simmons and Cowherd’s audiences. For every person they turn on to the sport, that’s a person that FSC or ESPN can use to make a sales pitch to an advertiser. If an old columnist at a newspaper convinces someone to turn the game off, the person they’re reaching is likely over the age of 50 and, therefore, that person turning it off is unlikely to affect the ad revenue for soccer broadcasts.

If advertisers are willing to pay good money for time during soccer broadcasts, then FSC and ESPN can bid more money for more packages, increasing our access to top-notch football in this country, which we all want as fans of the game. This, to me, is the biggest reason why it matters when Bill Simmons and Colin Cowherd speak out on behalf of the game, and why it means virtually nothing when the old guard trashes it.

Kevin McCauley is the host of the All Things Footy podcast, and weekly contributor to MFUSA. You listen to his podcast here, and follow him on Twitter here>.