Tuesday night’s Major League Soccer All-Star Skills Competition will integrate fan voting and be live streamed globally on Twitch and Twitter. The event is part of the league’s All-Star festivities taking place this week at Exploria Stadium in Orlando.
Fans watching on MLS’s Twitch channel or Twitter account will be able to decide which players should receive bonus style points during the “Touch and Volley” skills challenge, one of three challenges that make up the competition. The votes from both platforms will be combined.
“It’s sort of like the fans voting on who has the best form and style and flare when it comes to how they put the ball in the net when they’re served up from one of their teammates,” says Seth Bacon, SVP of Media at MLS.
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Cormac “Doolsta” Dooley, the 2019 eMLS Cup champion, will reveal the results. The 19-year-old Irish professional FIFA player will be part of a panel of celebrity judges that will include USWNT co-captain Alex Morgan, retired USMNT defender, and now Fox Sports analyst, Alexi Lalas, former Brazillian soccer star Kaká, and former NFL wide receiver Chad Johnson. The retired football player is an avid gamer and streams himself playing FIFA and Call of Duty on Twitch.
At the San Francisco 49ers and SportTechie Horizon Summit in June, James Ruth, senior director of properties at MLS, said that more MLS fans attribute their fandom to playing the FIFA video game series than to playing the real-life game of soccer. Twitch started life as a way to stream gaming, and the MLS’s skills challenge is the latest example of the league embracing gaming culture to grow.
“We’re starting to develop a really strong relationship with people like Chad [Johnson] and other celebrities or sports stars around the world. Soccer is the global game, it unites people. The way that FIFA and our eMLS program are bringing that to life and giving people more opportunities to be part of MLS in a different way, in a more digitally tech-first way, is something that is incredibly important to our fans and we know is where we need to be as we think about the future growth of the league,” Bacon says.
The Skills Challenge will also stream on a range of digital platforms in the U.S., including MLSSoccer.com, MLS app, ESPN3, FoxSports.com, Pluto TV and TUDN.com. In Canada, it will stream on TVASports.ca and TSN.ca. DAZN will stream the event to fans in Brazil, Germany, Italy and Spain, while ESPN will stream across Brazil, Latin American and Oceania. The lone linear distributor is TVA, the MLS’s Quebec-based French-language broadcast partner.
“We know that our fans are [the] youngest, most tech savvy, early digital adopters,” Bacon says.
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Bacon preaches a “first to digital, and digital first” mantra. He notes that MLS clubs such as LAFC, D.C. United and FC Cincinnati have already embraced that, securing local streaming deals with outlets such as FloSports and YouTube TV.
“By doing [the Skills Challenge] digitally, you allow yourself more collaboration between the broadcast partners because there’s not as much competition with linear networks going against linear networks. And it allows you to be more flexible in the production, try new things and take risks,” Bacon says.
During this year’s Skills Challenge, eight players on the field will also be mic’d, with viewers able to listen in as they chat among themselves. Bacon envisions major potential for further social integration in the Skills Competitions next year and beyond.
“In the future, maybe [the fans are] talking with the athletes in real time,” he says.
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