Fox Soccer Wins the Rights to the Champions League

Fox Soccer has outbid ESPN and won the Champions League broadcast rights for the United States.  I’m…not sure how I feel about this. The roaring waves of my basic fear of ESPN are crashing against the rock of my basic sense that they do a better job broadcasting soccer matches than FSC. On the one hand, Tommy Smyth. On the other hand, Max Bretos. This is how God made Norway, geologically speaking, I mean.

UPDATE: I’m hearing from readers whose sources are better than mine (i.e., better than Google) that people at FSC are flatly denying this story. Which is weird, because its point of origin was the blog of Fox Soccer’s senior writer, published on foxsports.com. It may just be that the announcement happened before FSC was ready for it, but the denials I’m hearing about sound a lot stronger than that. Hopefully we’ll know more soon; in the meantime, imagine a giant translucent Riddler-style question mark hovering over this entire post.

SECOND UPDATE: Every trace of this story has disappeared from Jamie Trecker’s blog on foxsports.com, and the original post has apparently been deleted.

THIRD UPDATE: However, Jeremy St. Louis’s Twitter feed—it’s come to that—continues to suggest that this is real.

FOURTH UPDATE: Now the tweet is gone! However, Jamie Trecker’s Twitter feed still repeats the claim. It’s weird. If Fox wants to kill this story, why don’t they delete all the online breadcrumbs at once rather than deleting them gradually one by one? And given everything the network has done to promote online accessibility to fans, why don’t they just, say, tell us what’s behind the confusion rather than trying to hide it? This whole thing is too trivial to be called a cover-up, but it’s curious.

FIFTH UPDATE: Unprofessional Foul is reporting that an anonymous source at Fox has confirmed that FSC has indeed won the Champions League rights. In which case, the question behind all this leaking and unleaking and re-leaking would appear to be, “What are you doing, FSC?”