I’m not a soccer guy, so I will leave it to others to weigh in on Fox Sports’ decision to use Gus Johnson on its game coverage.
Dan Levy of Bleacher Report thinks it is a huge mistake. He came down hard on Johnson’s soccer ability this morning.
A review like this one is a problem for Fox. Even if Johnson gets better on soccer, first impressions are often final impressions.
Levy writes:
Johnson is good at calling a lot of things*. Soccer is not one of them.
Fox either doesn’t agree, or doesn’t care. Either way, the network is wrong and the attempt to grow an American audience by using Johnson as its lead voice has so fabulously backfired, it’s actually driving viewers away.
And…
The experiment for Fox has been a disaster, Johnson has been exposed as an overmatched, amateurish soccer announcer with very little indication he will get better and, still, Fox continues to put him in the booth for big matches. What’s worse, Fox is doing Johnson no favors with his booth partner, recently pairing him with Ian Wright, who somehow manages to make Johnson sound like the most seasoned announcer on the call.
At least when Fox paired Johnson with a top analyst there was some ability to salvage that part of the telecast. When Johnson is paired with a broken record who can only talk about a team’s width for 90 minutes, the product is an unmitigated disaster.
And the final hammer:
Wrong. Fox won the rights to the World Cup in 2018 and 2022 and, per reports, this Johnson experiment was the beginning of Fox’s plan to have him be the voice of those World Cups.
Granted, five years is a long time, and Johnson could develop into a more seasoned soccer announcer in those years, but Fox has already ruined him for soccer fans in America by putting him on high-profile matches for which he was so blatantly unprepared.
Had Fox built Johnson’s work slowly over the next five years, the experiment may have worked. Now, Johnson is proving to be the network’s next big sports failure—the glowing puck, Digger the Gopher and Cleatus the Robot of the soccer world.
It isn’t that I don’t like variety. I was raised on Vin Scully, which meant that I was surprised to hear how Harry Caray called a game–but I understand that there are different strokes for different folks. Still, I have never been able to figure out why someone screaming like a maniac during a regular season game or playoff game, as though he is witnessing the Second Coming, can be so popular in so many quarters. What if he actually had to describe something really important?