ESPN will air what essentially amounts to a three-hour pregame show for David Beckham‘s MLS debut on Saturday, July 21.
The network will air an episode of SportsCenter at 6:00 p.m., which will include pre-match reports from The Home Depot Center. Then, at 7:00, another more MLS-centric edition of SportsCenter will air, followed by the hour-long documentary “David Beckham: New Beginnings” at 7:30. At 8:30, Rob Stone and analyst Julie Foudy will host a half-hour MLS pregame show.
The match itself, an international club contest between Chelsea F.C. and the Los Angeles Galaxy, will be called by the team of Dave O’Brien, Eric Wynalda and Tommy Smith, and feature nineteen cameras — “including Skycam, super slo-mo cameras and robotic goal cams”, a “Beckham cam”, which will focus on “Beckham’s every move”, and a “celebrity cam”. New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush, at the beginning of what looks to be a summer of massive overexposure, will also make an appearance during the telecast, to discuss the ad campaign he and Beckham worked on for adidas.
Considering the level of exposure for the game, one wonders why ESPN did not simply arrange to have this match air on ABC, using British Open coverage on the network as a lead-in to an afternoon broadcast.
