A few weeks back the European soccer season got underway. In particular the English Premier League. Around this time of year for the past few years I find me telling myself I am going to invest more time paying attention to and more importantly - watching - European soccer. Why? Well, European soccer boasts some of the top athletes in the world playing in top leagues in the world. There is not much better than a bitter rivalry in sports, and the EPL has plenty of those, and Spain's top league might have the most bitter rivalry in all of sports. I find the World Cup highly entertaining every four years, so by following the European leagues I will be that much more "in the know" when world cup time rolls around in 2014. Also, soccer played in Europe fills a time slot when there are not other sports to watch on TV (usually the best games are early on Saturday or Sunday mornings Pacific time, or before 2pm Monday through Wednesday, a perfect time to watch a game online on a secondary monitor at work).
So how was I going to stay more dedicated to my...um...dedication this year? I decided that once a week I would go through the soccer schedule for the next seven days, do a little research to figure out the best and most important games, then jot down the day and time those games would be played. Basically make myself a little schedule of the matches I would try and watch each week if I was at home or if the game was available online. After a couple of weeks my schedule was working, I was in fact watching more soccer and looking forward to each week. Last week the football season kicked in, probably my favorite time of year as football is easily my favorite sport. I had to integrate the important college and NFL games into my soccer schedule so I could figure out which games would earn TV rights in the man cave when there were overlaps. Although this was fun the first week, I decided the schedule was going to get tougher to make as the football and soccer seasons went deeper into their league years and the games gathered more importance. I decided to do some googling to see if there was a site or blog out there that would give a schedule of all the big sporting events for a week and try to attach some sort of loose ranking system to them so the reader could decide which events to watch. It did not take long to realize there was nothing like this in existence yet.
Thus, the idea for this blog was born. If I am going to spend the time every week to build a schedule of the important sporting events for that week, why not share it with the world in case someone else is looking for the same thing. For now we are just going to incorporate soccer (mostly EPL with an occasional match from Spain's and Italy's top leagues, along with any important Champions League and international matches thrown in) and football, both college and the NFL. There may be some baseball mixed in as we get closer to the end of the season and playoff spots are up for clinching. If this blog is still going strong in the spring, we may look to "hire" someone to do a weekly baseball schedule. I would love to mix in some hockey, but again we might need to "hire" a hockey expert for that. I expect we'll also be mixing in some college hoops once they get underway in mid-November.
At first, expect the weekly schedule to include a little blurb on each game and why we think it could make for compelling viewing, and probably the start time and maybe even the network you can find it on. As the blog develops more, we expect to incorporate some type of enjoyment/rating system (think rankings along of the lines of "can TiVo and watch later" or "cancel anniversary plans with wife to watch live"), and some type of reader voting system where our loyal readers can vote on their excitement level for an event before it happens, and see how those results compare to the ranking of an event after it concludes. Also, we will try and incorporate any reader suggestions that would make this blog better. We welcome any and all feedback and please, tell all your friends and enemies about us!
-- The Watch This Sports Team
