Toronto as a surprise team Max Bretos? Really?

Surprised by the headline? You probably shouldn’t be after the news of J.P. Dellacamera moving over to FSC. ESPN announced today that Adrian Healey will lead the MLS broadcasts for ESPN this season. Healey will serve as the play-by-play announcer while John Harkes will continue his role as color commentator.

Healey will make his debut in the 2011 Major League Soccer season-opener next Tuesday, March 15 as the  Los Angeles Galaxy travel north to take on the Seattle Sounders FC.

Back in the studio for ESPN will once again be former FSC announcer Max Bretos and former US National team members Alexi Lalas and Taylor Twellman. Bretos will also call select games for ESPN this season as well.

Again, I’m not shocked by the news. Healey is a solid voice for the game, maybe not the best choice for a MLS game however. I get that ESPN wants an Englishman to call their soccer games here but I just hope Healey takes the proper time to truly take it all in for the league. At least he did start out doing New England Revolution games a while back, so some knowledge is certainly there about the league. We’ll see, maybe I’m over critical on the choice of Healey or maybe I’m not critical enough.

Either way the season kicks off next week, can you believe that?

Fox Soccer Channel finally has a lead broadcaster that I can side with. J.P. Dellacamera is said to have made the jump from his gig at ESPN to FSC for the upcoming MLS season. Philly.com’s Jonathan Tannenwald first broke the news last night. Dellacamera will remain the lead broadcaster for the Philadelphia Union’s home matches this season as well.

The report also says ESPN will make a decision on their soccer broadcast team in the coming weeks. My guess is ESPN is moving completely over to Ian Darke for their soccer broadcasts, given the time he’s already gotten on US National team games in recent months. Of course this means that Darke has to move across the pond permanently here. ESPN could go another direction to someone like Max Bretos, a move I really hope they stay clear from as I believe he is much better suited for a studio position rather than a play-by-play job.

What this means for FSC is that they finally get a quality broadcaster in my opinion to call their MLS games.

I honestly can’t decide if this is a glass half-full kind of thing or a half-empty. It seems as though lots of folks are noticing ESPN’s decline in MLS coverage on their website.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that their big guns of left in recent weeks. Ives Galarcep moved his opinions to Fox Soccer and now it appears Jen Chang has moved on, likely to SI.com or somewhere like that.

So why doesn’t ESPN give a damn about MLS on their website anymore? Honestly who knows, they still have Steve Davis and Jeff Carlisle, two of the best in my opinion.

After that its pretty weak.

Their World Cup coverage is some good stuff, including their World Cup 101 thing they have going on right now. Their Insider soccer blogs are pretty good though they aren’t updated as regularly as they should be (at least they did link this blog one time). But when it comes to covering MLS its gone from decent to pretty pathetic all in a matter of a few short weeks. Its almost like they’ve just doen away with the coverage despite having a couple quality writer on board.

I’m hoping all this change means the world wide leader is set to do something positive about it. They lost some good writers but hopefully it pushes them to do something different in the form of adding a couple MLS-related blogs to their site. Some fresh blood honestly wouldn’t hurt them at all here.

Maybe I’m too overly optimistic about ESPN getting their act together here but what can I say that is just who I am. I hope things change for the better but more than likely they’ll probably keep their coverage the way it is right now. Dismal, slow and only relying on quality posts once or so a week from Carlisle and Davis.

At least we know the league is taking things into their own hands here soon with a new website. From what I’ve been told it will be a thing of beauty. We should have that new site very soon I’m told.

So do you think ESPN will do here? Think their coverage online of MLS will improve in the coming weeks or continue to go down hill?

ESPN’s Outside the Lines did an excellent look at the project yesterday morning with interviews from some key folks in the project. Interesting numbers come from this video including the fact that out of the 43 players that played for the US during this World Cup qualifying, 58% of them came from the IMG academy or Generation adidas/Project-40.

The owners are hoping the later start time will enhance the stadium atmosphere which should translate into a better TV viewing experience.

Switching to Sunday night and on ESPN means the MLS Cup will go against NFL’s prime-time Sunday game.

“[We] decided to make this the move to allow us the opportunity to play the game later in the day,” MLS President Mark Abbott wrote in an e-mail. “MLS Cup had traditionally taken place during the early afternoon on Sunday, and we collectively decided to move it to the evening.”

“We have the flexibility within the partnership to try different things,” said Scott Guglielmino, vice president of programming and acquisitions at ESPN. “We’re going to continue to do that.”

The league hasn’t given word on whether or not the 2010 game will be on ABC or ESPN.

I know the move goes against prime-time football and other prime-time TV shows but the move could be good for MLS to do here. Either way the league was going to go against the NFL for the game so instead of going against five or six games at once the league will only be head-to-head against a single game. Which could be good and it could be bad. We’ll see.

Apparently the game in English will be shown on a channel most either have never heard of or even have on their TVs. Since Telemundo has the rights to this broadcast the English version will be on some channel called “mun2.”

Now I know a lot of us are angry at ESPN for not shelling out the cash for the game. Apparently NBC/Telemundo wanted a whole lotta lettuce for this game and ESPN didn’t go for it. In a while you can’t blame them but in a way it kind of stinks since the way NBC is going about handling it. We know if ESPN would have taken the game it would have been broadcasted to millions and got the proper publicity that it needs. Now with the game on mun2 most people are going to be either stuck watching it in Spanish or in the dark all together.

I also wonder if CONCACAF or the USSF is even upset in the least bit about this too. We know ESPN would have plugged the living hell out of this game across the board after the way they treated the US national team after their Confederation’s Cup run last month.

Some us of soccer bloggers are trying to take action. Jason Davis over at Match Fit USA is urging everyone to send emails and sign a petition to NBC to at least get the game moved to USA Network (they have a long history of actually showing sports).

It may be a long shot to get anything done here but there is still time for the suits to wake up and smell the coffee on this one.

The “World-Wide Leader” ESPN has announced more details regarding its coverage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa next June.

Highlights of the announcement:

• ESPN will present all of its 2010 World Cup coverage from on-site in South Africa, totaling more than 65 hours of original content.
• The studio hosts will be Bob Ley, Chris Fowler and Mike Tirico,
• SportsCenter will feature World Cup segments,
• There’ll be a nightly World Cup Live show (30 minutes) shown on ESPN or ESPN2
• ESPN will have pre-match, halftime and post-match shows, shown on ABC, ESPN or ESPN2.

Some will be excited to see Bob Ley back on the soccer coverage for the World Cup. He is one of those ESPN guys with a good knowledge of the game. I’m really curious to see how Fowler and Tirico will be though on the studio show. I enjoy both as broadcasters and have met each of them in person, I just don’t know how well they will connect with the average soccer fan out there watching.

Still ESPN is doing their part here and with the recent run by the US in the Confederation’s Cup, you can almost expect even more coverage on their part if the US is still doing well going into next year’s Cup.