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World Cup to be held in the winter
jecornel
Member Posts: 9,727
jecornel
Member Posts: 9,727
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That being said, it will be interesting.
Gregg Popovich as coach.
You are looking at an 8 hour time differential between Qatar and New York. Most world cup games will start probably at around 1, 5, or 8 local time. The 1 pm kickoff is 3 am in New York. The 5 pm kickoff is 9 am in New York. 8 is at noon in New York. Obviously subtract 3 hours for the West Coast.
The only real game that is at risk for a conflict against either college or pro football will be the late game start in Qatar. The rest there isn't much of a conflict with.
The problem won't be that football is being played alongside futbol, the problem will be that the novelty of futbol will have a lot less impact when Americans can worry about more important stuff like their fantasy football team.
While none of these events will directly compete against the World Cup, you will be in a situation where there will most likely be a saturation of sports in place that will probably tug at the most casual of fans who probably will be less likely to go party it up at the local bar to watch a day of games in the Winter whereas in the Summer there are a ton of outdoor viewing parties and part of watching the game is taking on the entire ambiance of the spectacle.
But let's also be serious, in virtually every other country, this won't be much of an issue and the World Cup IS the biggest event in the world when it happens. Our interest in the US may be a bit distracted for many reasons ... but in the grand scheme of the world, not a huge issue.
In the Summer there is only baseball and golf going on. The World Cup in Nov/Dec is not ideal for the "continued" growth of US Soccer. I say "continued" lightly because other than diehards and scarf wearers, nobody in the US cares about soccer after the World Cup.
Too bad the US is shit and will never win it.
($75,000 for knowing this much about the beautiful gayme)
The domestic leagues will be the easy reschedule.
The more difficult reschedule will be the domestic cup competitions and the champions league.
My guess, and this is purely a guess, is that you'll see leagues take probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-6 weeks off after the World Cup as they won't make those that are getting to the Finals immediately jump back into the domestic league seasons.
They'll probably move the start of the domestic leagues up 4-6 weeks or so and try to condense some of the games into 2 per week. You'll find more of the top end teams that year probably throw some of the domestic cup games because they won't want to backload their schedules.
From a US standpoint, this is actually not a terrible thing - although it will come at the end of the US domestic season so you could argue that the US players will not be fresh. But it wouldn't surprise me to see the MLS season moved up and condensed as well.