This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

At 40, Fox Soccer Report anchor and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) broadcaster Mitch Peacock has seen a few things, held a few jobs. My father on the other hand has had one job, been with one company his entire professional life. At 30, I’ve already surpassed him. The reality of my dad’s career inadvertently raised me to think that was the norm, that if for some reason you bounced from job to job there was something wrong. Then I entered the journalism world and came to realize that he is the rare case.

With this newfound knowledge, I forced myself to speak to as many people as possible to rectify my worn-in belief, to prove without a shadow of a doubt that leaving one job and taking another is not only not a bad thing, but could in fact be better, maybe even required if you expect to progress in your career.

Early in the life of TIAS I decided to reach out to some soccer journalists in order to learn their stories and discover their paths. Soccer journalism is its own beast with its own issues and following those issues is imperative I believe to getting at my self imposed editorial directive: What is American soccer? As goes the sport in this country, so goes the media, or is it the other way around?

The fact that the #1 soccer highlight show—number one because it’s the only one—in the country is produced in Canada by a Canadian company and sold to other markets, the U.S. being just one, is a great example of the at times, umm, odd?, soccer marketplace. With dwindling budgets, un-(soccer)educated editors, publishers, and producers, not to mention the hyper-fracturing of the consumer base, soccer is forced even further out in order to find a place in this wide world of sports and entertainment. Apparently that means Winnipeg, Manitoba.

As with soccer, each of our own professional aspirations and career paths face a daunting future. We all must find a place in this continually more competitive world. Peacock’s story, which he shares with me after the jump, is a prime example.

It aint SportsCenter, but one could argue that the casual personality of the Fox Soccer Report offers an intimacy that all the Budweiser Hot Seats can’t match. Before we talk to Mitch, check out this great clip–the only Mitch Peacock clip on Youtube–which states that case:

Let’s start from the beginning, what was your childhood like?

I was born in Rouyn-Noranda in Northern Quebec, Canada. My parents were born and raised there but when I was six months old they decided to move across the country to British Columbia, which is kind of this country’s California. We lived in a small saw and pulp mill town in the mountains between a couple of ski resorts called Castlegar, about 2.5 hours from Spokane, Washington. It was a great place to grow up with a small town life. There are about 10,000 people there, mild temperatures, snow in the winter but never too cold.

My father worked as a business manager in the hydro dam construction business and my mom worked at the local high school. My dad traveled a good bit, so I spent a great deal of time with my mom, usually on the way to some athletic practice. Then my dad would come home and take us on the road trips for tournaments. They were very very supportive. I couldn’t have done a lot of things I did without their backing.

So you had the childhood dominated by athletics as many of us can relate to?

Oh, for sure. My dad played fairly competitive hockey and my mom was a figure skater to a certain point in her life, but they never pushed it on me. I kind of stumbled into it. I wasn’t the most focused student in the early years. In 3rd grade I ran into a pretty tough teacher. She laid the law down, said I was wasting my time if I wasn’t going to pay attention. She encouraged me to get involved with sports and made me go into public speaking because I was talking all the time in school. I did some public speaking contests and a bit of MC-ing at Christmas concerts. “If I was going to talk,” she said. “I might as well do it for a reason.”

Funny how you can track all of this back to this one teacher.

Yeah, I never really thought about it at the time; it took me a number of years later to narrow it all back to this lady, Mrs. Townsend. She has since passed away, but she was tough, a great example at the time for sure.

Your childhood sounds a lot like mine, and I’m sure countless others. How long did you stick with sports?

Soccer was the first organized sport I played. I don’t know why because there is no history of it in my family. But it was popular in that area because of the mild temperatures, and there was a large Portuguese population. I think that had an influence along with the fact that soccer was offered at all the schools.

Being Canadian, what with so much Hockey around, I started getting into that as well. Those two sports—hockey and soccer—dominated things until I was about 14, and then I had to choose between the two. So after that age I actually played very little soccer. I was playing at the highest level of Hockey in our area and decided to pursue it. I played some exhibition games for the University of Alberta in Edmonton where I got my undergraduate degree, a BA in recreation and administration. But they are a perennial national power so I never really made that team. I was a goalie on the fringes when I graduated and moved to Ontario to attend Queen’s University, which is sort of one of Canada’s Ivy League schools if they had such a thing. I did some graduate courses in sports sociology as part of a masters of arts program and played hockey there for one season.

At the time I was 22 and most of the students in my program were older and had an idea about what they wanted to do with their lives. They were much more focused and driven than I was. “Well, I’m going to school and playing sports because that’s what I do.” When it came time to nail down a thesis topic, I was like whoaaaa and knew it was time to move on. I went back to Edmonton and looked for work. After a short time I decided I missed hockey even if I didn’t miss school so I made a bunch of phone calls and rustled up a tryout in the minor leagues team that doesn’t exist anymore called the Louisville Ice Hawks, in Kentucky. That was the East Coast Hockey League (ECHL). I survived a few cuts, but just before the first pre-season game I was released. That was the end of that.

Back in Edmonton I found a job in social services mostly as an employment counselor and career planning coach. I did that for about five years before going back to school when I was 27 and studied broadcasting.

Now you had a brief affair with public speaking as a kid, but without that anecdote this seems like a radical transition.

It’s funny the way life works sometimes. You have these moments of clarity I guess. I was doing career planning workshops with people who were all on social assistance or with young people who had dropped out of school, with people who were new to Canada (We call them New Canadians, most people know them as immigrants). I’m telling these people that one of the keys is to identify your passion. What gives you energy? What are you excited about? What matters to you? You have to identify those things and match them up with whatever your skills and talents are so that there is no manufacturing of passion for your work. You get up and want to do it. You’re curious about it. You have an energy about it, and it pushes your career forward, furthering your drive, ambition, and satisfaction. So I would do this day in day out with these people. On my coffee break or after work I would go read Sports Illustrated or The Hockey News and try to catch a SportsCenter update somewhere. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, was making a career change. The whole thing got thrown into the pot between my ears. I went for a walk late one night and said, “What am I doing? I’m in the wrong field. I better change before I get any older.”

She moved from Edmonton to Calgary to continue her career change, and I followed soon after, still working in social services until I could get into school. I ended up going to Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), and studied Broadcast News. I played soccer by the way there. It was the renaissance of soccer for me. I came back as a 27-year-old rookie who had not played organized soccer for 12 or 13 years. But I heard that they would pay your tuition if you made the soccer team, so I went with about 50 other guys to an open tryout. After a few days the assistant coach pulled me over and said, “What’s the deal?”

“What do you mean,” I asked.

“Well, you’re obviously older than most of these guys by quite a bit. You’re not necessarily in the best shape, and you look a little rusty. But you seem awfully serious about this.”

I said, “Well, I played a lot of hockey, but I love this game and wanted to give it one last try before I couldn’t do it anymore.”

I think it was a 16-person squad. Maybe it was 18. Whatever it was, I was the last guy selected.

I started on the bench, but worked my tail off. And being 27 I had a completely different appreciation for it. Every day was special to me because I knew my organized sporting career was about to end. I just loved to practice and be around the game. I think my maturity made me a better than average player. It wasn’t skill, because I didn’t have any, but I had very good fitness and my head screwed on. I wasn’t going to give anybody anything. I was going to do what I could do with the limited tools that I had and see where it took me. It was very rewarding even though we were not very good, finishing 2nd or 3rd to the bottom in the Alberta Athletic Conference. At the end of the season I was very fortunate and was named All Conference Academic and Rookie of the Year, not for the league but for my team, which was a bit of an inside joke considering I was so old. It was the best experience of my sporting life for sure.

You played only one year, meaning you only did one year of school. Did you drop out again?

It was supposed to be two years but after the first year I was engaged, already had a university degree, and even had a few job opportunities in broadcasting, so I decided I better get started trying to make a living at it. So I moved into a play-by-play job with a Junior A hockey team (a league where many NCAA players come through, and the odd NHL player) in Canmore, Alberta, a beautiful resort town just over from Banff and outside of Calgary. I commuted from Calgary to Canmore to do the games. It was about an hour’s drive each way. I got paid $50 per game with gas, food, and everything up to me. The equipment was pretty primitive; it was for a small AM station. But they let me do play-by-play of their 30 home games. I got to hanging around at the rink in Calgary and got to know a Major Junior team called the Calgary Hitmen, named after Bret the Hitman Hart.

(editor’s note: right here I explode into laughter. If you only knew how many couch springs I destroyed and pillows I quickly re-stuffed before Mom saw them and me pretending to be a WWF superstar, launching myself off the arms and backs of furniture. I saw one live WWF event at the OMNI in Atlanta. My dad and uncle took me and a friend as a pre-teen birthday present. All I remember is seeing a old lady in the front row screaming at the Ultimate Warrior and flipping him the bird. good times.)

The guy who was doing the play-by-play at the time is now a national sports anchor, Mike Toth. I just hung around and hung around. I did some color commentary for the visiting teams when they came in because they would only have a single play-by-play guy and after a while they asked me to sit in for the home team. I bounced around a lot from there doing a bunch of hockey play-by-play and sports radio shows for local audiences. Eventually I made it to the NHL – as host of Calgary Flames radio in Calgary for three seasons.

So from Junior A league to the NHL, what are we talking in terms of time frame?

My first A-league job was in 1995-6, and my first season with the Flames was 2000-1. In Calgary I also hosted an all-sports radio show and a hockey-only prime time show. Late in my third year there was a quirky thing that happened. There is a regional sports network in Canada called Rogers Sports Net, kind of along the lines of Fox in the U.S. They cover hockey of all sorts, including the Western Hockey League, which is a significant developmental league in Canada through which a lot of NHL players come. They had a guy who was their play-by-play guy. I saw him at the rink before a game and his voice wasn’t too good. Just making small talk I asked if his voice would be alright for the game. And he said, “yeah, I’ll be fine; it’s happened before.” So I went and did my radio show which was a supper-hour show from 5-6. I came off the air and check my voicemail, and there is a message from the guy who now had virtually no voice basically saying, “help.” They were supposed to go on the air clear across town at the Flames’ rink in about an hour. I phoned my wife and told her that I’m going to go down to the rink, Roger is not feeling well. There is a decent chance I will be home within the hour, but if not, turn on your TV. I drove down there, got caught in traffic, and pull into the media parking lot just before face off. Roger was standing outside by the TV truck waving at me frantically. He grabbed me by the collar and took me into the truck and told the director and producer that here is the guy who is going to do the game. We sprinted upstairs, introduced me to the color guy, threw on a headset, and they dropped the puck about 30 seconds later. That was my debut as a play-by-play guy on TV.

I got a bit of publicity from that and some interest in terms of other work. So I decided after the end of that season, the 2002-3 season, that I wanted to move full-time to TV. I ended up in Regina, Saskatchewan, which is a prairie community of a few hundred thousand people. They have a CFL team, the Roughriders, and I worked for them through a national network called Global TV. After about 5 months I saw a job posting through the company for an opportunity for something called Fox Sports World Canada and the Fox Sports World Report in Winnipeg to do more anchoring more days a week in a larger community, so I thought it was a good stepping stone. So I went out to audition with people telling me, “You know this is a soccer show, right? All you’re going to talk about is soccer.” I said, “Well, I like soccer; I’ve always been interested in soccer.”

“Yeah, well,” They said. “pretty much just soccer. There’s a bit of rugby and auto racing, but you’re gonna just be talking about soccer.”

“Yeah, I know that,” I told them. “That’s fine. I like soccer.”

And they said this to you because you were seen as a hockey guy or because they were surprised anyone wanted to talk about soccer?

In Canada, soccer is popular but its not in the mainstream here in hockey country or even on par with the Blue jays (MLB) or the Raptors (NBA) or the Canadian Football League. It’s a lot like the U.S. in that regard.

And you were coming from Hockey and CFL, so they thought it was a step down.

Yeah, exactly, some people were like, “why are you going there?” But I just thought it would be fun. I really liked soccer, even though I must admit at the time, four and a half years ago, that I was not a big follower of the sport professionally. When I was a kid, I watched the Vancouver Whitecaps all the time back in B.C. I watched “Soccer Made in Germany” on Sunday mornings. But I really had to bury myself in the sport and re-learn so much and catch up from the years I didn’t pay attention. And it’s an ongoing process. But the lucky thing about being on a show like this is that when you are writing introductions to highlight packages or writing voice-overs and things like that you kind of control what you need to know. It’s not like an open-line radio show where you have to answer a billion questions off the top of your head. So I got to learn a lot on the job. And with that education, I think, comes a bigger passion for the game.

The other great thing was when Toronto entered the MLS. CBC, which is the mainstream national network, not sports, but a general station like CBS or ABC, made a deal with Toronto FC to carry their games. I was very fortunate to be hired by them as a commentator on their broadcast. I started last year commuting from Winnipeg doing sideline reporting and some broadcast hosting. I did play-by-play for the home game against Dallas on June 17th of last year. I then got to help with the Under-20 World Cup, traveling around doing player interviews and other things.

What have been your impressions of the changing landscape of professional soccer in North America since you started covering it in 2003?

It’s a funny thing. It’s such a niche, the service that we provide. The people who watch and follow the sport are knowledgeable and passionate, but that mainstream audience has yet to buy in. but having been involved with Toronto FC, there is a tremendous model for soccer in this country, and people in the U.S. can see that as well I think, from the sold-out crowds and the phenomenal support. People love this game, and I believe that Toronto FC and perhaps one or two other MLS team in Canada in the future will help spread that love. I wasn’t around to know much of the business-side of the NASL or to say that this soccer thing has come and gone before, but I, like many people, really think it is different now. MLS has a very good business model, and I hope they don’t deviate from it too much because it has worked well to get them where they are. With a strong domestic league and with the television contracts that they have, you are going to see a bigger percentage of soccer players and their moms and dads making it out to stadiums as part of their lives. So it goes from just a recreational sport to a sport that you can take part in as a fan on the professional level, talking about it at the dinner table like you might talk about March Madness or the NHL playoffs. I don’t know if we are close to that. But I think that is out there as a possibility. I’m not out on the street with my work very much, but more people seem open to it.

And those would be the streets of Winnipeg mostly. Explain to me how the Fox Soccer Report ended up being broadcast in Winnipeg.

I don’t have all the cold hard facts on it; these stories tend to get a little fuzzy as they are passed around. But my version of it is this: Global Television in Canada got a license for a digital specialty channel which was going to show international sports. But in Canada you are required to have a certain amount of original Canadian programming. So they developed Fox Sports World Report as a way to get Canadian content on this digital channel. So the idea was that this program would be on for an hour, five days a week originally, and talk about international sports, show highlights–as long as it wasn’t of the mainstream Canadian sports. After a short period of time they sold the rights to air the Report on Fox Sports World in the United States. That, coupled with the need for more Canadian content here, took it to seven days a week. Then in late 2006, early 2007 it was changed to the Fox Soccer Report, dropping all the other sports and sticking just with soccer. So what started out as Canadian content for a Canadian digital channel ended up having an appeal to a US market and an international market, including parts of the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa.

It’s really blossomed. No other program offers highlights from so many leagues around the world all in one place in such a compact time frame. And it couldn’t with anything but soccer. You know, Major League Baseball is the best league for baseball. The NBA is the best for basketball. The NFL for football. But with soccer, not only is the best league not in North America, but there is no real best league. The English Premiere League is largely considered the best, but you have leagues in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and other good leagues in Holland, Brazil, Argentina, and even more that people want to hear about. So unlike having one big league that takes all the attention you have several big leagues and big teams within those leagues. The fact that we aren’t limited in that way makes it very interesting. And soccer fans understand that, want to keep up on all of it, and now with the technology available to them, they can. You can be a pretty darn good Premiership fan whether you live in Alaska, California, Saskatchewan or Portsmouth. You might even be able to watch more games here than you can over there.

Do you know how many viewers the show brings in on average?

I don’t. We sell the show largely by subscriptions, so there are no real Nielson-type ratings that I know of. But as far as I know it continues to grow both here in Canada and in the U.S. The Fox Soccer Channel has done a great job with their product.

Was there any consternation when the show went exclusively to soccer?

No, what a relief. Honestly, we all respected the other sports and some of the guys were more into the rugby and auto racing than I was—it wasn’t really my cup of tea—but I think we all felt a relief because when you are trying to keep up with all of these soccer leagues and then pretend to be an expert on Rally cars, you’re just faking it and that’s uncomfortable. It also just had too much momentum to be stopped, really, so we all saw it coming, asking, “when are we going to do this?” It was Hallelujah time when it finally happened.

I’m probably one of the very few that was upset at the loss of Rugby. That crushed me, seriously. I played in college and kind of just fell in love with the game. A few months in New Zealand didn’t help that. And now I have no access to any of it beyond, say, a pay per view World Cup final.

Yeah. That’s a tough one. And while the auto racing could be found other places, we knew Rugby was going to be the one that got neglected.

I don’t begrudge the channel model. I mean, it clearly makes business sense.

Yeah, I agree.

How has the show been doing financially, if you can comment on that? Obviously most viewers can quickly realize the difference in production budgets between the Report and, say, SportsCenter.

The general vibe is that we take pride in what we do. We know we have an audience that has a great love for the sport and values the information. So we take it upon ourselves to do the best work we can with the resources and type of presentation that we have. We always try to do whatever we can with the budget to make it as good as we can make it. We know we’re not SportsCenter. But we’d like to bring it incrementally in that direction. In the fall we’ll be moving to a different studio location, a more modern location with some technical enhancements, so hopefully that will help us to take a bigger step forward as the year progresses. But we know what we have and are committed to constantly improving.

Committed to constantly improving. That is a catch phrase for me with American soccer—how people make up either for the lack of support they are getting or the fact that they really are getting more—and its funny you use it here because I’ve held this idea that as Fox Soccer Report goes, so goes the game. Meaning, that as the production, funding, etc, grows for the Report the game will likely be building as well. So much seems dependent on TV. TV coverage, TV rights. If the game succeeds there will be a bigger want for a show like the Report. And I’d argue that to be the case no matter if ESPN ever decides to give real coverage to the sport.

We know nobody does exactly what we do. We also know in order for people to continue to value our service we need to provide the best program we can. We think we have something unique and we take pride in doing it the best we can. I think that’s an excellent observation on your part. I never really thought about that way, but I do think that our growth somehow parallels the growth of soccer in North America. We would love to be able to keep up with it. And of course as the sport grows there will be other outlets and we will have to be competitive. We recognize that too. It’s fun to be a part of and means so much when you go out to MLS stadiums and you run into viewers. You know I go to the super market and nobody knows who I am and that’s just fine with me, but if I go to a stadium I have people high-fiving me and asking me questions and calling me a jerk. It’s great. You walk right into your niche market and see that people care, they follow it, they want the information. It’s great, and not to be overly cheesy, but we are there to provide a service and if the people we are supplying it to are enjoying it and feel they are getting something from it, we’re doing our job. It’s not about us.

How much interaction do you guys have with the guys from Fox Soccer Channel proper?

Very very little. With us in Winnipeg and them in Los Angeles just geographically it’s a huge difference. Weather-wise good lord, there is a bit of a difference. We have a small travel budget so from time to time we’ll go to for example MLS Cup or an All-star game and we’ll run into the Fox Soccer Channel people there. I’ve been lucky with my CBC work to run into the guys maybe a little more often, get some more time with Max Bretos and Christopher Sullivan, but we don’t get very much interaction at all. It’s unfortunate. It would be nice if it were more of a family but really we’re parallel entities. They are truly a Fox property. So we’re very separate. They buy our product. They don’t own us, we don’t own them. But it is great when we get to meet up. Max and Sulli are good guys, knowledgeable with lots of passion.

Those two have kind of made themselves the premier broadcast team. They’re a good pair. Very different on-air personalities. Sullivan seems to take Max in stride. Sometimes Sullivan is so mellow it’s like he isn’t even sitting next to the more flamboyant Bretos. Sullivan this year seems to have made his name once and for all.

He is outstanding, and you know Max—I know he has his detractors—but you cannot criticize Max Bretos for lack of enthusiasm or lack of energy. The man loves the game. It is bursting out of him. He is very knowledgeable. He works very hard. We have fun with Max because he is such a character but he deserves a lot of credit as well. And Sulli is like a football savant, keeping together all of these formations and systems, positions, players, history. Fox Soccer Channel is very lucky to have those two guys.

What’s the working atmosphere around the Fox Soccer Report?

That’s interesting because we have four man team of anchors and we all work together at different times. There is a chemistry with all of us, but yet there is no set pairings. So we don’t have any “I’m with Derek and Carlos is with Jeremy.” And during the day we are quite busy because there is a lot of writing to go with the highlights. There a lot of days where we actually have very little to do with each other until almost show time, and you kind of just come together as the show comes together. Everyone has a different dynamic with each person but everybody gets along and everybody enjoys what they do. We can’t take anything too hard. It’s not like we’re sweating it out for a living.

Given the success of Toronto FC, is there something about Canada and soccer that the U.S. is missing? A reason why Toronto blew up like it did?

I’d be lying if I said I knew it would blow up. I didn’t foresee it being that popular. And I’m not an expert on the American markets to be able to compare them to Canadian markets, but what I can say is that being in Toronto and being around the stadium the energy is phenomenal. Someone who knows Toronto very well told me that this was the perfect storm because there is a generation or two of people who aren’t old enough to remember all the old failures of soccer in North America or Toronto specifically (Toronto did have a NASL champion in the seventies). And in that space they have been watching games on TV and playing soccer but never had a professional team around the corner. They love the game, they didn’t have a team, and in the back of their minds they don’t have that feeling that this is going to fail. That fresh mindset and enthusiasm, and the fact that Toronto is a very multicultural city must help. Looking at all the elements you can kind of go back retroactively and explain why it happened like it did.

Could we add to that list—and maybe Vancouver’s and Montreal’s list—that while soccer isn’t mainstream in Canada, at the same time it is not being attacked and ridiculed like it is here in the States. Be it in the public sphere or through the media. I wonder if that keeps minds open in Canada that an American machismo slams shut. You mentioned how people don’t remember the NASL and its demise. In the U.S., you are constantly reminded of the failed past.

I would agree. I don’t see that obstacle here. We don’t have a figure like a Jim Rome going after soccer day in and day out. In fact, I’ve seen some of the more influential members of the Canadian media step forward and trumpet it’s arrival. It’s the world’s game, now we have our own. Let’s see where it goes. Not only is it not being fought in Canada, it is recognized as having potential. That could be a big help to places like Vancouver and Montreal in bringing in a MLS team. As a Canadian, I can tell you it would mean a lot to the people here to have MLS teams in both of those cities. I don’t know if that fits into Don Garber and Major League Soccer’s plan—I know that TV right in the States is critical, and I appreciate that—but I’m sure that Vancouver and Montreal could put something like Toronto up in terms of fan support and enthusiasm. The game is not being fought here.

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banner photo of the Winnipeg skyline viewed from the West by John Harvie.

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