You could hear the fireworks throughout all 50 states the other night. And I’m not talking about Independence Day celebrations or the neighborhood kids shooting off Roman candles. This was about celebrating an amazing victory for a team of young women competing at the highest level on the world stage.
On Sunday night, a record TV audience of nearly 22 million people tuned in to see a pumped- up team of American women earn the FIFA World Cup trophy in a rousing victory against Japan. (And that television ratings performance came within one million viewers of the level reached in the 2014 World Series’ Game 7, according to NPR.)
The broadcast radio audience for this event?
Zero, nada, nothing.
That’s because hundreds of sports radio stations across the country were forced to air meaningless baseball games, shopworn talk shows, and other totally forgettable programming, rather than this historic global sporting event hosted in Vancouver, BC.
On an otherwise lazy Sunday evening wrapping up a long three-day weekend, Americans were enthralled by the possibility of a world soccer championship. And on the most patriotic of weekends, it was exhilarating to root for the U.S. on the biggest of stages.
NPR’s Don Gonyea tweeted a picture of a group of rabid fans in D.C. watching the match on a big screen TV at a neighborhood high school. And that was just a taste of the many groups that came together to enjoy a shared moment of pride and patriotism. In Chicago’s Lincoln Park, 7,000 fans came together to watch this championship event.
There’s no doubt this game was very likely a big deal in your community, too, as reports of these types of gatherings proliferated at stadiums, parks, and other gathering spots at cities and towns throughout America – and of course, the world.
And yet somehow, broadcast radio missed this event entirely, sending millions of listeners off on a futile effort trying to find the play-by-play on a local AM/FM station.
I became aware of the broadcast radio void Sunday afternoon on Twitter, when Tim Eby of St. Louis Public Radio sent off this question to his followers:
No broadcast radio coverage of this historic event?
Somehow with all these national sports radio networks that include ESPN, NBC, CBS, and Fox, there was no broadcast radio play-by-play. For a format that continues to rack up new affiliates, all those AM/FM sports outlets and their millions and millions of fans were denied access to this match on broadcast stations. Somehow, a deal was never brokered to carry these games, in spite of their rampant popularity throughout America. I get you can think of a lot of AM sports stations, in particular, that would have benefited greatly from carrying a game of this magnitude.
But aside from the Internet on TuneIn, the only other “radio” outlet was Sirius/XM, which simulcast the Fox TV play-by-play of the championship match 
to its subscriber base.
It wasn’t that many years ago when radio networks and local stations could afford to miss an event, and not pay a price. After all, if it wasn’t on broadcast radio, there were no other options.
Today, the choices are many, and consumers know how to find the content they desire. Our Techsurveys continue to show that high Net Promoter Scores – that measurement of loyalty – are hard to come by for local sports radio stations. That’s because fans know they can flip between many different sports sources – online and over the airwaves –to satisfy their voracious sports jones in real time, whenever they like.
It is hard to generate true loyalty in an environment where scores, fantasy updates, podcasts, videos, talk shows, and play-by-play coverage are seemingly everywhere for connected fans.
That was the case on Sunday night, and sadly, broadcast radio took a tough loss, further moving it away from relevancy and currency in this changing media world. And this lost chance to celebrate an amazing victory has less to do with ratings, and more to do with being a part of the zeitgeist of a truly victorious American moment where pride and emotion in all shapes, sizes, and color abounded.
Former ESPN Radio exec and WBAL-AM/Baltimore programmer, Scott Masteller, called it “a big missed opportunity” for radio.
He’s right, of course.
And we should be kicking ourselves.
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