Nobody watches soccer? The recent womens world cup soccer final drew a larger audience than any of the NBA finals games, over 25 million viewers in the US.
I think you are full of it.
That's always where soccer fans go when you point out that no one watches soccer on TV, they always want to point to the World Cup. What they don't understand is that people aren't watching that because they are fans of soccer, they are watching to root for the USA. It's the only soccer match I watched all year. Same thing happens during the olympics. People watch swimming to root for the USA but nobody watches the rest of the time. Or speed skating, ski jumping, track & field, etc, etc...
One problem with ESPN (and there are many) is their hard sell self-promotion. You never ever saw an ordinary soccer score make it into the Top 10, much less to #1, until ESPN signed the TV agreement to broadcast games. Then there's their attempt to include poker as a sport. Seriously? Add to that the gruesome twosome of SC desk jerks Neil Everett and Stan Verrett. The staff is riddled with non-pros and it shows. Jonathan Coachman (voice like a girl), Kenny Mayne (what, exactly, is his talent?), Chris Berman ( a bad caricature of himself), Linda Cohn (oh please!), Stephen A. Smith (do I really need to characterize this one?), the biggest BSer of all of them, Skip Bayless, and on and on...... I left out Keith Olbermann because he's already been given the boot (for the second time). In my opinion another reason people have turned away from ESPN is because of the way ESPN has turned on the hand that feeds it. OTL has degraded into nothing more than a sewer crawling muck-wraking modern day version of the very worst of yellow journalism.