There they were again, signaling with their unchanging faces and voices and their unchanging studio backdrop that another Premier League season had begun. On Friday afternoon, and again on Saturday and Sunday morning, Rebecca Lowe welcomed American viewers to what is somehow already the 14th season of the world’s most popular sporting circuit to air on NBC. She was flanked, as ever, by her merry band of pundits, her gang of fellow British expats.
The Robbies and the other ones. Also, Tim Howard as the token American, albeit one who spent 13 seasons of his goalkeeping career in the Premier League, deemed sufficiently English by osmosis to join the crew. The games’ announcers would be British, too.
And they would all speak of “football” and “pitches” and “away matches.” Teams would be “they,” of course. The ads, too, would sound very English, supremely English, maximally English. For Barclays, among other longtime sponsors leaning hard into the image of the beleaguered American fan, embattled but persevering in his or her niche pursuit of following this plucky little league that airs on one of the nation’s most readily available channels.
Taking it all in, I couldn’t help but think back to watching the BBC’s coverage of the final day of the last season for the first time in years with some English expat friends and some VPN trickery. It struck me that somehow, despite originating from the country, it didn’t actually look or sound or feel quite as English-coded as the NBC offering of the events. Except for the diversity of mellifluous regional accents on offer on the BBC, NBC has out-Englished the English.
Other broadcasters have chosen different approaches. Fox leans into its Americanness as hard as NBC does the Englishness in its World Cup presentation. MLS sits somewhere in the middle, on neutral ground, when it airs Major League Soccer.
If Major League Baseball’s core product is really nostalgia, and the NFL’s is consumerism and nationalism, then the Premier League’s, going by NBC’s presentation, is anglophilia. The satellite zoom-ins on the league’s quaint stadiums nestled between the brick row houses. The reverence for the club anthems and traditions.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
