2014 World Cup Coverage: An Analysis

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2014 World Cup Coverage: An Analysis
Jul 1, 2014

Twenty years after the World Cup came to the United States, soccer seems to have established, for now, a media beachhead in mainstream American sports culture. When the United States qualified for the World Cup in 1990 for the first time in 40 years, the TV ratings were so bad NBC decided not to bid on rights to broadcast the 1994 edition of the tournament. This year, more than 18 million people watched the U.S.’s second group stage match against Portugal alone.

Newspapers that could barely be bothered to provide box scores for the World Cup in 1990 now devote front-page headlines, live blogs and special website sections to it in 2014. But even now, there is a sizeable difference between those outlets that just run box scores and standard game recaps courtesy of the news wires and those who’ve done a truly exemplary job of covering the World Cup. The work of the following newspapers and websites stands out.

Sports Illustrated

SI has long had some of the best coverage in mainstream soccer media, thanks to writers such as Grant Wahl and Brian Straus. That’s continued this year with their “Planet Futbol” section, which has featured in-depth analysis of every game and items like “Viagem Brazil,” a daily feature in which writer Greg Bishop and photographer Simon Bruty explore each of this year’s World Cup host cities and give readers a better sense of Brazilian culture beyond soccer.

Los Angeles Times

Kevin Baxter has written several interesting articles for the L.A. Times about this year’s World Cup, especially his feature on the impact of Michael Bradley on the U.S. men’s national team. The L.A. Times has also done a good job of staff coverage.

The New York Times

The Times has been providing extensive World Cup coverage far longer than most mainstream U.S. media outlets, so it’s no surprise they’ve been among this year’s standouts. As Washington Post assistant sports editor Matt Bonesteel pointed out, part of The Times’ advantage is that they’re simply able to send more people to cover the tournament than most other papers. This allows them to cover a much broader range of World Cup-related topics: the growing popularity of goalkeepers in Brazil, the long-term effects of the new stadiums Brazil has built for the World Cup and even soccer-loving tennis players competing at Wimbledon.

Nieman Lab had an interview with Sports Editor of the New York Times Jason Stallman about the strategy behind their coverage of the World Cup.

USA Today

Both in its own pages and through its website SportsonEarth.com, which already featured excellent soccer coverage from the likes of Chuck Culpepper and Aaron Gordon, USA Today has published several good stories on the World Cup. One of its best was a series of graphics posted after the USMNT’s dramatic draw against Portugal. It contained a map of tweets during the game with spikes indicating the periods of greatest Twitter activity as well as a time-lapsed map of geotagged tweets to show the areas where most of those tweets came from.

ESPN

Obviously, the bulk of the attention ESPN has received for its World Cup coverage has gone to its actual TV broadcasts; however, its Grantland-based online/satellite radio show “Men in Blazers” has also recently received its fair share of praise. ESPN also has expertly covered the World Cup via its websites  FiveThirtyEight, where Nate Silver has regularly calculated the U.S.’s odds of advancing through the tournament, Grantland and even its newly revamped main soccer website, ESPN FC. Perhaps its best nontelevised contribution to this year’s World Cup, however, has been the dispatches of writer Wright Thompson, who’s reported from Brazil and other South American countries about the cultural impact of the game, including an excellent look at Pope Francis’ ties to soccer and the Argentine national team.

Deadspin/Howler

Deadspin was actually already fairly good at covering soccer, thanks to writers like Greg Howard and Billy Haisley, before teaming up with the soccer magazine Howler to create a special blog for this year’s World Cup called “Screamer.” But they’ve done a particularly good job of covering this year’s tournament, especially with a series that examines each of the World Cup stadiums and all of the flaws and corruption surrounding their construction and a daily feature in which every goal in every game is shown via a clip from the broadcasters of the country it was scored for.

The Washington Post

According to Bonesteel, The Post only has two sports reporters as well as one foreign correspondent in Brazil to deal with some of the larger issues surrounding the World Cup. Yet the work of Steven Goff, Rick Maese and Dom Phillips, along with the articles and posts written by Bonesteel, Dan Steinberg, Mike Wise and Marissa Payne easily stands alongside the much larger New York Times contingent as some of the best media coverage to come out of this year’s World Cup. 

The list of subjects is extensive: An article by Goff on the two former Maryland players currently starting for the U.S., Omar Gonzalez and Graham Zusi, passionate defenses by Wise and Steinberg of the growing American embracement of soccer against attacks by John Feinstein and Ann Coulter, local viewing parties in and around Washington, FIFA’s issues with handling concussions and the Luis Suarez biting scandal.

The integration of feature-length articles with short blog posts covering the games themselves and both the lighter and more serious aspects of the tournament has been seamless. Bonesteel said that’s been an advantage for the paper because Brazil is just “too sprawling” a country for three reporters to be able to cover every aspect of the games.

“I think sending people to Brazil and then having people pick up the slack with stories using the wires and aggregating what other people are reporting, that’s a pretty good way to do it,” Bonesteel said. He also said that while ThePost sent two reporters to cover the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, what’s different this time around is the strength of their in-house blogging.

“We’re really looking to generate a lot of web traffic out of this,” Bonesteel said, “because a lot of people are searching for news on this so the more people we have, the easier it is to do that.”

The Columbia Journalism Review has an infographic on the growth of soccer interest and coverage during the 2014 World Cup.

Alex Holt is a graduate student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

 

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