ESPN Dumbing Down Soccer For World Cup

Filed in archive US Soccer on March 4, 2006

source: rlrassociates.net

While the USA team were impressing with a 1-0 win over Poland, espn were struggling up in the commentary box. Their decision to put Dave O'Brien (picture) on their World Cup team now looks questionable. O'Brien is a seasoned baseball and college basketball announcer, but after 'finding' soccer he asked ESPN to give him World Cup duty. His enthusiasm for soccer is admirable, but his knowledge is not.

There were numerous factual errors in his commentary. The phrase "well defensed" is borrowed from a recent worrying trend in NFL commentary and has no place in soccer, while his claim that Polish striker Tomasz Frankowski plays for "English clubside the Wolverhampton Wolves" made me cringe.

But the real problem is O'Brien's idea (expressed in this video clip) that "The essence of what I do is I tell stories, and I try to bring the personalities to life." This translates into a "fact sheet" he has, with little bits of trivia about each player, and was the reason why we were told three times that Kasey Keller lives in a 1,000 year old German castle with a real mote and everything. We were also told his wife's name (I forget) and how many kids he has (I forget that too.) This might be OK if it was just once, and if O'Brien could stray form his "fact sheet" without making me cringe. But he can't. It's soccer commentary for people who don't care about soccer, and if that's what the World Cup will be like on ESPN then I want to watch it somewhere else.