The television package is in place for St. Louis City SC, the local team in Major League Soccer that will have its inaugural season next year. But the club’s radio home has not yet been announced.
The league has sold its TV rights for the next 10 seasons to Apple TV+, with the video-streaming company reportedly paying $250 million annually for the games. It will carry the league’s entire schedule and currently charges $4.99 a month to subscribe.
That is a leaguewide deal, meaning there will be no local productions — similar to the way the NFL’s regular-season TV deals work. However, there is a provision in the MLS-Apple contract in which some matches could be simulcast on conventional television channels. That’s what the NFL does with Amazon Prime’s Thursday night streaming productions, also having them shown on an over-the-air station in the cities of the teams that are playing in the game.
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But nothing is concrete about the team’s radio carrier.
“While there have been a number of really productive conversations with local stations, the team has not yet finalized a radio broadcast partner,” City SC chief revenue officer Dennis Moore said Thursday.
One thing is known — KTRS (550 AM), which has broadcast many local soccer games in recent years and has a couple of weekly shows devoted to the sport, will not be airing the club’s matches.
The station is in its 12th season as the St. Louis radio home of Missouri football and basketball broadcasts, and KTRS general manager Mark Dorsey said he tried to reach a deal with the soccer team but could not because he wants to be on a station that can carry all its contests.
“We didn’t want to part ways with Mizzou; we have a long and wonderful relationship with them,” said Dorsey, a self-described “soccer lifer” who acknowledges that he really wanted to air the games for personal as well as business reasons.
“But I said all along that not under any circumstances are we giving up Mizzou,” said Dorsey, a member of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ NCAA Division II national championship team in 1973. He also played locally as an amateur for many years thereafter and has been a long-time youth soccer coach in the area who is now in the St. Louis Soccer Hall of Fame. “We have a long-term strong relationship with the Missouri alumni base here.”
He estimated that there would have been only five or six instances in which Mizzou and soccer contests would overlap and said he had made arrangements for those City contests to be carried elsewhere. He added that KTRS also would have devoted a considerable amount of programming time to the club outside of game coverage.
“I think they missed it on this one,” he said.
Some recent games of the team’s developmental squad, City2, aired on or were streamed by KMOX (1120 AM), but it is not practical for that powerhouse station to carry the main club’s broadcasts. It has St. Louis University basketball early in the soccer season, then Cardinals baseball almost daily during the bulk of the MLS schedule.
All-sports station WXOS (101.1 FM) would also have a lot of overlap, as it is the Blues’ flagship station and the teams could often be playing simultaneously.
KFNS (590 AM), St. Louis’ other sports-intensive station, had an interest.
The team “reached out to us a few months back about us airing their games,” KFNS owner Dave Zobrist said. “We gave them our best offer, but we didn’t end up being the station chosen.”
A couple of industry sources said they wouldn’t be surprised if the broadcasts end up on an FM music outlet that is part of a group of St. Louis stations owned by the same company, allowing a lot of cross-promotion opportunities.
Billikens men’s basketball back on BSM
St. Louis University men’s basketball guard Yuri Collins runs through drills during the first practice of the 2022-2023 season at Chaifetz Arena on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022. Photo by David Carson, [email protected]
David Carson
Bally Sports Midwest again will televise a significant amount of St. Louis University men’s basketball games, it was announced this week.
It has 11 Billikens contests on its schedule, beginning with their home matchup with Murray State at 7 pm on Monday, Nov. 7. That will be carried on Bally Sports Midwest Extra, the secondary channel BSM uses when it has multiple games taking place at the same time. The Blues’ contest in Boston will be on the main outlet that night.
More Bills games could be added to the package.
Dan McLaughlin, Bally Sports Midwest’s Cardinals play-by-play broadcaster, will call BSM’s SLU games for the seventh consecutive season. He will again be joined by analyst Scott Highmark.
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