Tuesday was the date for the annual meeting between Major League Soccer's defending champions and the President of the United States. The meeting always generates publicity for the league, but the 2012 version was even more high profile than usual. This visit included such big names as David Beckham and Landon Donovan.

This weekend, the Houston Dynamo will open the 12th soccer specific facility in the league, BBVA Compass Stadium. In honor of the event, today's post will focus on the Dynamo. Before we get to the stadium, the team has just announced a new partner. The team's new official energy partner is Direct Energy.

Some quick thoughts before we get to the Major League Soccer attendance. First, I've started to see promotions for MLS during the NBC broadcasts of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. As previously noted, the hockey games draw huge eyeballs and regular promotions should drive some traffic to NBSCN telecasts of soccer.

In the wake of Dave's intellectual discussion from yesterday, here are a few mundane business notes. In an item from last week, the SBJ reported that Comcast Spectator and its Front Row Marketing subsidiary are promoting the French Trophee des Champions to Red Bull Arena to open the Ligue 1 2012/2013 season.

We are on the road tonight, so here is a vault piece from the start of last season. This was part of our series that looked at the art of televising soccer.

The Major League Soccer 2011 season got started on Tuesday night with a nationally broadcast match carried by ESPN. Fans of all sports are frequently critical of the television presentation of sports events and soccer fans are no different.

Our Major League Soccer experts Jason Davis, Tony Edwards, and Justin Shaffer answer five questions for the new MLS season. The MLS schedule starts Saturday with games available regionally, moving to nationally available broadcasts Sunday and a Monday night game on ESPN2. What's your top story in 2012?

Martino will not call the game in a conventional sense. Instead, he will occupy a role "Between the Benches" during matches with White remaining in the broadcast booth. From this vantage point, Martino is expected to provide unique field level insight in addition to game analysis. NBC currently employs a similar technique during their hockey coverage, using an "Inside the Glass" analyst.

Less than two weeks until First Kick and the pace of preseason is starting to pick up. The various tournaments started up over the weekend with MLSSoccer.com offering high quality streaming of matches. Various team Twitter accounts used the matches as an opportunity to reach out to fans by providing updates and play-by-play of the games.

(The entry is formulated based on the transcript of the media release issued by Starhub, the official broadcaster of the S.League 2012)
StarHub, the Official Broadcaster of the S.League, is extending its ‘live' match coverage to everyone (including non-StarHub subscribers) via frequency 76.

With Fox committed to the Premier League and no longer involved nationally in the business of Major League Soccer, how does an MLS team get involved in what Fox is doing with their live Premier League broadcasts? After all, it's not as if the show itself is likely to address MLS news. Simple, they buy advertising.

The first live telecast of an English Premier League game on a United States over-the-air network was seen by 1.3 million viewers last weekend, more than double the high for previous broadcasts on cable television.
Fox says Thursday that Manchester United's 2-1 win over Arsenal on Sunday received a 0.

Photo by ISIphotos.com

Sunday will mark a significant milestone in the progession of soccer in America.

When Fox airs the Arsenal-Manchester United match at 11 a.m., it will be the first live Premier League broadcast in the United States on network television.

The hunt for Arlo White's replacement ends with Kasey Keller announced as the analyst and Ross Fletcher (formerly of BBC Sport) hired as the new voice of Seattle Sounders FC. Oddly enough Fletcher lived just minutes away from White in the East Midlands. The transition back to a two-man booth will be smoothed by the presence of a man that Fletcher simply calls a "hero.

Well, I promised it and here it IS A MERRY CHRISTMAS SHOW for all my listeners!!! Just some LUFC gossip and updates and a much happier part two, for this week's broadcasts! Interviews with the manager (who hasn't been sacked since the first part of this show), about the loan window and Howson's injury.

Women's Pro Soccer may not be failing, but it is in danger. Their sanction is in doubt as there are only five teams in the league for 2012. There is a lawsuit against WPS from a former team owner. While attendance was significantly up after the Women's World Cup there is an issue about revenue not being greater than costs.

Before we delve into the MLS off season, here are some business notes from MLS Cup and the entire soccer weekend. We'll start with the MLS Cup overnight rating, which was reported by SBJ on Twitter as a .8. To put that number in perspective, the .8 is double the 2010 rating but slightly less than the 2009 rating.

In what comes as little surprise Grant Wahl reports that NBC Sports is pursuing Arlo White as their primary play-by-play man for their first season covering MLS and the United States national team. NBC isn't stupid and, like Sounders fans, feels that Arlo is one of the best voices in soccer right now.

According to a story that broke in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday evening, the Galaxy are set to announce a 10 year, $55 million deal with two new Time Warner Regional Sports networks to televise Galaxy games. The new networks (one in Spanish and the other in English) are fighting for content in the crowded LA Sports market and this deal guarantees live programming from March to October.

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Birthday for QPR's Brilliant Winger, Dave Thomas
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- Throughout the day, the QPR Report Messageboard has news updates, comments and perspectives - even links to other board comments of interest re QPR matters (on and off the field) along with football (and ONLY football) topics in general.

The result, in the end, was something approaching an honorable draw, which both sides of this particular argument will now likely try to claim as a victory. The Premier League vs Karen Murphy had gone to the European Court of Justice to try and determine how the concept of a single European market weighs up against the country by country rights selling system which, amongst many, many others, the Premier League uses to sell coverage of its matches.

We are on the road tonight, so here is a vault piece from earlier in the season. This was part of our series that looked at the art of televising soccer.

The Major League Soccer 2011 season got started on Tuesday night with a nationally broadcast match carried by ESPN. Fans of all sports are frequently critical of the television presentation of sports events and soccer fans are no different.

Big week and weekend of games in MLS, so we'll start right in with a look at attendance. Starting with the Monday game, more than 20k were in KC for the Galaxy and Sporting match. 16k came to PPL Park for the thrilling 4-4 draw with the Revs. The game was rescheduled from a couple of weeks ago when Hurricane Irene blitzed through the Northeast.

Former FC Dallas player and current broadcaster Bobby Rhine passed away last night after suffering a heart attack at the age of 35. He played over 200 games for the MLS team over his 10-year career, and moved into the front office and later match commentary post-playing career. I heard his broadcasts a few times and he seemed to be coming into his own as a commentator.

Malaysian XI 3-6 Liverpool | Friendly match report

• Malaysian XI 3-6 Liverpool • Rahim 40, Mohd Sali 79 80; Adam 27pen, Ngog 68 69, Rodríguez 76 90, Kuyt 94 Alberto Aquilani and David Ngog, two Liverpool players who appeared closest to the exit at Anfield, have been given public backing from the club's owner, John W Henry.

This is my second day in Frankfurt for the 2011 Women's Football Symposium (which begins tomorrow) and Women's World Cup Final (on Sunday). It's been pretty low key so far and has given me a chance to catch up on time zones and mingle about.

Now I know I don't have the on-camera eloquence of my friend Emma Hayes (who called the game for Eurosport last night in England), or the TV personality of Fox Soccer Channel's Mark Rogondino (who used to do all the WPS broadcasts and is now on the MLS tour of duty), so getting ready for my video intro this morning put me to task.

Great weekend for soccer in the United States. Before we get to a our weekly wrap of MLS attendance, here are a couple of other business stories from the past couple of days. First, ESPN couldn't have asked for a better match-up than Brazil/USA in the WWC quarterfinal. Despite the 11:30 start time on the East Coast, the lenghty match started to bleed into better ratings windows in the later stages.

The talk today is all about ratings with Fox Soccer issuing a self congratulatory press release because of its outstanding ratings from the Gold Cup Final. The FSC broadcast reached more than 950,000 viewers, crushing the previous FSC record set during the last Gold Cup Final. The Nielsen rating for the match was a solid 1.

Courtesy of the BBC News business section. Revenue-wise, it's not the Big 4, but the Premiership, the other Big 3, and Ligue 1.
And football's revenues keep climbing.
The most profitable league? Turns out that's the Bundesliga; also the league with the highest attendance. It also outpaced La Liga whose revenue growth is concentrated around a smaller number of clubs (Real and Barca).

Writing an article like this is comes with a bit of a disclaimer... Mainly because four out of five of these things I have on good authority that MLS is already to seeking to improve upon. Naturally, we all have our own lists of things MLS can do better so feel free to list them in the comments section below.

Yesterday we talked about the upcoming Fox broadcast of the Manchester United/Barcelona Champions League final. Last year, Fox felt so strongly about the ratings potential for the game that the network elected to show the match in lieu of its typical Saturday afternoon baseball. The Yankees/Mets game was bumped back a couple of hours and the Final was shown in its entirety.

Sorry for the delay in getting this out, Blogger was having issues for much of the day yesterday and even this morning and I was unable to get this post and the next one out yesterday.
On Wednesday I'd mentioned that it sounded like the US Open Cup qualifier against the New England Revolution would have no audio or webcast of the game.

The Philadelphia Union's clash with the Portland Timbers on Friday, May 6, will be the first of Fox Soccer's newly branded "Soccer Night in America" broadcasts. Playing off of "Hockey Night in America," which is broadcasted by a Fox affiliate in Canada, Fox Soccer has dedicated new technology and graphics to its weekly broadcasts of MLS games.

TV ratings for first 3 games double 2010 figures

Through three local broadcasts in 2011 – two on 6abc and one on The Comcast Network – the Union are averaging a 1.0 overnight rating, a 100 percent increase. For reference, a 1.0 HH (HH stands for household) is equivalent to approximately 30,000 households, each of which is estimated to contain 2.

JP Dellacamera is moving from ESPN to Fox Soccer Channel to become play-by-play man for its Major League Soccer telecasts.
Dellacamera will work FSC's 14 Friday night telecasts, which are exclusive to the network. He had been paired with John Harkes for U.S. national team broadcasts on ESPN and worked the World Cup on ESPN Radio.

- Jason Davis
It seems that in the interest of improving league broadcasts, Major League Soccer's broadcasting department has set up a Twitter account specifically for TV-related feedback. Under the name @MLSonTV, the account appeared yesterday with a call for any and all opinions fans might have on the way the league is presented on the magic box - from announcers to the use of replay.

- Jason Davis
My apologies for a dead, dead, dead-dead-dead Friday, but I'm pretty spent today. This always happens, my burning the candle at both ends and then melting into the weekend with nary a bit of energy left. It makes for really lazy Fridays where the closest I come to posting is considering a topic, thinking about what I would write, then forgetting about it altogether and staring out of my office window for an hour or three.

Major League Soccer announced on Friday that its broadcasting deal with Fox Soccer Channel has been extended for one year. FSC will broadcast 31 regular season matches and three playoff matches, including one conference final. All of the broadcasts will be in high definition. (Click here for the full schedule.

There is nothing official yet, but Coach Winter mentioned that the Dutch trialists below have been signed following the Turkish training camp. Bouchiba is the veteran player, but the other two are on the young side of 25.
The other news of late was the selection of TSN as the MLS Canadian broadcaster.

As we do every Monday, here is a roundup of some business issues from Friday and the weekend that we didn't hit in our previous posts. One of the big stories over the last few days has been an apprent increase in aggressiveness by various federal agencies seeking to close down sites that illegally stream live feeds of professional sports.

If you believe Columbus Technical Director Brian Bliss, it could be true.

#Crew96 TD Brian Bliss said he is doubtful the SuperLiga tournament will be played this season. Crew might sked some summer friendlies.

That is news a lot of MLS fans will be happy to hear.