More than 30 years have passed since Arlo White, then a teenager, traveled from England to Chicago to visit his aunt and uncle and was treated to his first head-to-head, or hand-to-hand, encounter with American football. Even though it was just a Bears’ preseason game, White had a thrill.
“Got a high-five from Walter Payton,” he told the Guardian recently. “Didn’t wash my hand for a week.”
White, now 44, returned to England and became a sportscaster, or a sports presenter as he is called there, returning to the United States in 2010 to become the voice of the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer.
“I can remember when I first landed there,” White said. “I asked, ‘How do you want me to do this?’ They said, ‘We want authentic. We don’t want you to change a thing.’”
White called soccer games for NBC at the 2012 London Olympics, then moved to Premier League coverage when NBC acquired the rights a year later. He calls matches every week from England that are telecast to the US, and NBC has nurtured a loyal audience.
Over three decades, White has grown to understand that Americans like sports coverage to be thrilling and genuine. The British are perhaps more knowledgeable than Americans about soccer (or non-American football), but White is not holding back when he calls a match.
“It’s something I don’t get too hung up on,” he said of “Americanizing” his play-by-play calls. “I’m probably more likely to use standard football terms. We have a sophisticated football audience. They don’t like to be spoon-fed.”
He then said, “By and large, we try to keep it as authentic as possible. The audience has been with the Premier League for many, many years. I don’t think we’ve done that by dumbing it down.”
NBC seems to have found a good formula. Although ratings of its streaming games on the internet this season have declined, not surprisingly, because of a newly instituted subscription fee, ratings on games broadcast on NBC’s networks have held steady.
As always, matches featuring the so-called “top six” in the league draw the best. The 10 December match between Manchester City and Manchester United drew 902,000 viewers, 71% more than Premier League matches telecast at the same time all of last season.
That number pales in comparison to the 17.2m that watched the NFL game between Baltimore and Pittsburgh later that night on NBC. But the Premier League seems to have found a niche here – if, for no other reason, that it has a spot in the US sports landscape.
“We just want to make everybody feel like we’re broadcasting to the US,” White said. “We’re not broadcasting to the world.”
Simply because most Premier League matches in England kick off in the morning in the US, sometimes as early as 4:30am on the West Coast, there is a different dynamic to NBC’s audiences than in England. For one, not as many American fans watch from a bar or pub.
But families watch together in the US. Robbie Earle, a US-based Premier League commentator played professionally in England, knows of a “Dad Club” on the west coast that gathers to watch Tottenham Hotspur matches on TV, with duvets and cups of tea.
“The timing helps,” Earle, 52, said in an interview with the Guardian from the NBC studios in Stamford, Connecticut. “You always can get your Premier League fix early.”
White said, “Families are actually sitting down in the same room together, instead of in four different rooms watching on four different devices.”
It helps, White and Earle said, that there would seem to be more Anglophiles in the US than ever. At a shade under two hours, a soccer game, unlike a plodding, three-hour-plus American football game, requires less of a time investment.
Americans enjoy tuning in to an English football game with English announcers and commentators, and White, Earle and other announcers take it from there, explaining the subtle differences between clubs and their neighborhoods or regions without sounding condescending.
“Part of the appeal of the Premier League is some of the colloquialisms,” Earle said, referring to “kit” for “uniform” and “pitch” for “field” and “clean sheet” for “shutout.”
“But we don’t play up on it. We just try to feel natural. Some of the English parlance just finds its way into the conversation.”
Authenticity is the key. White has also called a handful of NFL games played in London for BBC Radio. He uses the same tactic for American football, albeit in reverse, saying, “Nobody in this country would change ‘quarterback’ to ‘throwing back.’ “
Earle said Premier League clubs have fans, or “supporters,” that he thinks are similar to fans of American college football, with unique personalities. Residents of Newcastle upon Tyne, in northernmost England, are known as “Geordies”, with a distinct accent.
“Football is almost like a church or religion up there,” Earle said.
What the broadcasters hope to relate to their American viewers is that football is serious pretty much everywhere in England, and it is much more fun to develop an interest in a particular club because of its style or location – because that club probably has a hated rival.
“It’s very dangerous relying on Twitter these days for feedback,” White said, laughing. “The nasty comments: ‘You hate my football team. Why do you hate my football team?’ I don’t hate anybody’s football team!”
Earle said the longer Americans watch, the more they tend to “attach” themselves to a Premier club. NBC held a fan fest in late November in New York featuring the US-based broadcast team – including Earle and effervescent host Rebecca Lowe, another Brit.
The gathering was held at the same time as Premier League matches, and Earle got a big kick out of the fact that Liverpool fans at the fan fest joined in the singing of the club’s anthem, You’ll Never Walk Alone, with supporters at a game televised from Anfield.
“What we’ve tried to do from the start is talk in a normal way about football,” Earle said. He meant “normal,” as in British normal, but in a way, it has become normal in the US, too.