Fox Sports will launch its new exclusive Major League Soccer package Saturday, with a major focus on providing linear TV exposure for the league's 28th season.

Fox Sports will distribute approximately 34 regular-season games as part of the four-year deal, with at least 15 regular-season games on Fox. The remainder of the games will air on FS1. Fox Deportes will air all Fox and FS1 telecasts in Spanish.

Fox will open up its coverage on February 25 with Nashville SC-New York City FC, while FS1 on Sunday will air the Seattle Sounders FC-Colorado Rapids contest, according to Fox Sports. 

Fox Sports’s MLS deal does not include streaming rights, which Apple TV purchased as part of a 10-year deal that includes all MLS regular season and postseason games. Apple TV's MLS Season Pass will feature all MLS regular and post season games for $14.99 per month.

Still, Fox Sports President and CEO Eric Shanks said that the deal emphasizes the continued value and importance of live sports programming on linear TV.

Also: Eric Shanks, Fox Sports Find Success With a Time-Tested Playbook

“Sure, [MLS] did an [Apple TV] streaming deal, but they really wanted to have games on broadcast every week,” he said.■

Fox Deportes said it has purchased long-term Spanish-language rights in the U.S. for Liga MX teams Club Tijuana Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente (Xolos) and Club Santos Laguna (Santos). 

“We are excited to have two Liga MX teams back on our network,” Fox Deportes executive vice president and general manager Carlos Sanchez said in a statement. “Soccer performs extremely well in Hispanic households, so adding Mexican soccer to our ever-expanding portfolio was a priority for us. We are looking forward to working with top-notch organizations - Santos Laguna and Club Tijuana – and offering viewers Liga MX matches.”

Related: Univision Deportes Nets Broadcast Rights for 18 Liga MX Matches

Under the terms of the global deal, Fox Deportes broadcasts all Xolos and Santos Liga MX and Copa MX home matches, international and friendly matches in Spanish in the United States, while Fox Sports Latin America will broadcast games in Mexico and across Latin America. In addition to linear offerings, Fox Deportes provides digital coverage on Fox Sports GO and across its social media platforms. The network will begin broadcasting Xolos matches in July 2018 and Santos matches in July 2019.

“We are delighted to partner with Fox Deportes in the United States and Fox Sports in Latin America to offer viewers unrivalled coverage of our matches,” Xolos president Jorgealberto Hank said in a statement.

Fox Deportes is home to multiple premier soccer properties including the UEFA Champions League, Bundesliga, Major League Soccer, FIFA Club World Cup, Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana. 

“The 2019 season will mark a new beginning for us,” Club Santos Laguna president Alejandro Irarragorri said in a statement. “Partnering with a global brand like Fox provides exposure across Fox Deportes and Fox Sports Mexico and Latin America, and we can’t wait to begin this new era.”

Twenty years ago, Fox emerged as a fourth major broadcast network — finally big enough to challenge the “Big Three” of ABC, NBC, and CBS. It was also two years into a game-changing contract with the National Football League.

Among its core primetime shows were The Simpsons; The X-Files; Melrose Place; Beverly Hills, 90210; Party of Five; Martin; America’s Most Wanted and Married … With Children.

With Fox in a major growth mode, Fox News Channel was born. So was an entire collection of Fox Sports-branded regional sports networks, thanks to a 50/50 partnership between Fox parent News Corporation and Liberty Media.

Among these nascent cable TV sports channels was a Spanish-language offering targeted specifically to U.S. viewers, named “Fox Sports en Español.”

Today, this network is known as Fox Deportes and continues to be a trend-setter in a marketplace that’s vastly more competitive than when the channel was born out of “Prime Deportiva” and its successor, “Fox Sports Américas,” as a channel expressly devoted to the growing base of U.S. Hispanic sports fans and their unique interests.

Carlos A. Sanchez is executive vice president and general manager of Fox Deportes, helming the network from an office on Sepulveda Boulevard in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Westwood, overlooking Bad News Bears Field and the San Diego Freeway. He joined Fox Deportes in March 2014 after six years as president and general manager of WNJU, the Telemundo-owned TV station in New York. He also spent several years as an executive at Entravision Communications, the largest owner of Univision affiliates.

“This network first launched as a multilingual channel, before Fox purchased 50% of Prime Networks in 1996,” Sanchez recalled. “Today, we are five years in to our Fox Deportes branding, and we are continuing to evolve as our audience has.”

Fox Deportes must stay ahead of not just 24/7 networks ESPN Deportes, beIN Sports en Español, and Univision Deportes, but also Telemundo and sibling NBCUniverso, as well as a host of niche networks from across Latin America.

What defines Fox Deportes as unique?  “The Super Bowl,” Sanchez said.

Soccer has been the biggest sport, but what has been a differentiation point is that Fox has taken risks,” Sanchez noted. “Fox Sports has provided us with alternative sports to soccer.”

That’s helped diversify Fox Deportes’ programming while giving advertisers highly rated options that go beyond a kick and a ¡Goool! to market around.

“Three years ago, Fox Deportes aired the Super Bowl [in Spanish] for the first time,” Sanchez said. “To this day, we have the record for the biggest audience in Spanish for the game.”

Super Bowl XLVIII in 2013 saw the Seattle Seahawks defeat the Denver Broncos 43-8 in a game played at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

Despite the lopsided victory, the game featured big stars and a halftime show starring Bruno Mars. The 2016-17 NFL season has been a ratings disappointment for CBS and NBC, and the trade press has fixated on reasons as to why. Could Fox Deportes see a similar decline in viewership?

“I don’t think so,” Sanchez said. “The NFL is a unique property for our viewers and we are still introducing the NFL to many of our viewers.”

One way Fox Deportes is bringing an “NFL 101” approach to its viewers, which include less-acculturated Latinos from across Latin America, is with the recently launched studio program NFLEROS.

Initially an early Friday prime offering when launched in Week 1 of the NFL season, NFLEROS now airs on Sunday nights. This allows host Pablo Alsina and a team of commentators, including former NFL player Brady Poppinga, veteran broadcaster John Laguna and reporters Valeria Marin and Jessi Losada, to discuss Sunday’s matchups rather than offering a preview of what’s to come.

“We realized that there was an opportunity,” Sanchez said of the new night for NFLEROS. “It just made more sense to recap than to preview the week’s games. With our social-media focus, there is lots of interaction. We also see social media influencers and celebrities involved with the discussion.”

The shift to Sundays for NFLEROS puts a Los Angeles-produced program in front of viewers in a timeslot where the Mexico City-produced NFL Impacto had aired. That move was made because the U.S. Hispanic sports viewer is different than those in Mexico or points south and east across the Caribbean.

GLOBAL COMPANY, WORLDLY OFFERINGS

Aside from Fútbol Americano, Fox Deportes has found its groove with two Mexico City-produced studio shows — Central Fox and La Ultima Palabra. News and highlights show Central Fox and airs five times daily, while La Ultima Palabra is the network’s “flagship debate show,” Sanchez said. “It does very well for us, and boasts big-name talent.” Among its talent is Daniel “El Ruso” Brailovsky.

Meanwhile, the two-year-old Fox Deportes en Vivo has been an important connector for marketers who wish to get involved with major sporting events to which Fox Deportes might not have rights. The program’s hosts and production shift across the globe to the sports world’s hot spots, giving viewers and advertisers shoulder programming for such events as the FIFA World Cup. (Though Fox Sports holds English-language U.S. rights to the quadrennial men’s and women’s tournaments, NBCUniversal’s Telemundo is the Spanish-language U.S. rightsholder.) 

There are, of course, events where Fox Deportes is the rightsholder. Fox Deportes en Vivo has gone to Germany for Bundesliga matches and travels throughout the U.S. for NASCAR, UFC and Major League Baseball events.

Fox Deportes is currently enjoying the riches from this year’s eagerly anticipated World Series between the Chicago Cubs, who haven’t taken home a title since 1908, and the Cleveland Indians, who haven’t won a world championship since 1948. “The ratings have been record-breaking so far,” Sanchez said. “For Game 2 in Cleveland, we had 87% more viewers aged 18-49 than we did in 2015.”

Game 1 yielded similar growth for the network, he adds.

Then there is NASCAR, a sport that is growing in popularity with Fox Deportes viewers.

“Motor sports are important to our audience, and obviously Hispanics love cars,” Sanchez said. “There is [Mexican driver] Daniel Suarez, a driver important to Hispanics. The Daytona 500 is now a big event for Fox Deportes. NASCAR is definitely not one of those sports that people think about when they think of Hispanic sports, but we’ve been able to introduce a lot of these sports to our audience. We see ourselves as a global company, and that extends to how we view our programming. The world is getting smaller.”

With an audience that is 70% bilingual and technologically savvy, Fox Deportes seeks to be at the forefront of the cutting edge approaches to serving Latino consumers. With ATSC 3.0 on the way, OTT unleashed and live sports still a huge draw for Latinos, Fox Deportes’ silver anniversary is set to be a bright one. 

Two high-profile Spanish-language sports figures have joined Fox Deportes’s stable of announcers.

Jessi Losada, one of the most visible anchors and reporters on  the Telemundo Deportes roster, has joined Fox Deportes and will call National Football League and college football games, as well as Premier Boxing Champions matches. His first assignment was a Sept. 22 PBC card with analyst Daniel Ponce de Leon, a retired champion boxer.

“We are pleased to add one of the industry’s all-time broadcasting heavyweights to our roster,” Fox Deportes executive vice president and general manager Carlos Sanchez said. “Losada is a highly respected and knowledgeable journalist and media personality with 37 years of experience who will help to deliver unmatched insights to our viewers. He has made great contributions not only to Hispanic television but to the industry as a whole, and we are thrilled that he is joining our team.”

At Telemundo, Losada hosted a variety of telecasts, including Titulares Telemundo, Boxeo Telemundo, Los Triunfadores and Junto Al Tri, a pre-game show produced for Mexican national soccer team telecasts. Boxeo Telemundo was U.S. TV’s most-watched boxing show regardless of language, according to the network.

Losada also served as an anchor for Telemundo’s Spanish-language coverage of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2012 Olympics in London. He is also the first person to offer Spanish-language play-by-play of a National Basketball Association game and an NFL game to U.S. audiences.

Losada began his broadcast career in Los Angeles with Spanish International Network (SIN), a predecessor to Univision.

Separately, a face familiar to Univision viewers can now be seen on the CONCACAF Cup coverage of Fox Sports 1, the English-language sibling of Fox Deportes. Fernando Fiore, best known for his 16-year run as host of Univision’s Republica Deportiva, served as a contributor to the network’s special 90-minute pre-game show ahead of the U.S.-Mexico match on Oct. 10.

Fiore also contributed to Fox Deportes’s pre-game coverage on Fox Deportes en Vivo.

The network did not elaborate on any future appearances for Fiore, who announced his departure from Univision in July 2014.  

Arizona will open the 2015 playoffs against Carolina on Saturday afternoon in ESPN's first-ever NFL postseason telecast.

The battle in Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium also marks the kickoff of the most expansive NFL playoff coverage in Spanish, as ESPN Deportes will jump in with its own presentation of the Cardinals-Panthers. Later that night, NBCUniversal’s mun 2 will televise the Baltimore Ravens-Pittsburgh Steelers matchup, which also will air on NBC.

On Sunday, Fox Deportes, alongside Fox Broadcast, will showcase the Detroit Lions against the Dallas Cowboys. 

Last season, Fox Deportes became the first Spanish-language network in the U.S. to televise the NFL’s title tilt. This year that distinction falls to Comcast’s programming unit, as mun2 will culminate its transformation to NBC Universo on Feb. 1, Super Bowl Sunday.

Left unanswered:  Which network will televise Super Bowl L in Spanish. CBS will air the golden anniversary of the NFL’s Big Game from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. next year. However, CBS doesn’t have a Spanish-language outlet.

All of the league’s extant parties expressed interest in securing the rights to the contest. However, talks have yet to materialize. “We have not had discussions with the NFL; we expect them to take place soon,” said Carlos Sanchez, executive vice president and general manager of Fox Deportes.

Although the NFL is growing among Latinos – a 2013 ESPN Deportes Sports poll found that 60% of all Hispanics are NFL fans, more than boxing, NBA and MLB, and the game trails only soccer and Olympics overall. Moreover, among U.S.-born Hispanics, the NFL is the most popular sport.   

Despite such sentiment, and this year’s expanded postseason, the NFL, which has set a goal of raising its revenue base to $25 billion, from $10 billion today, by 2027, has not fully capitalized in this arena. ESPN Deportes’ coverage of Monday Night Football aside, there are only a handful of other regular-season games in Spanish-language play.

Could Spanish-language media leader Univision’s cable networks Galavision, or its dedicated sports network, Univision Deportes, be in the mix for an NFL package and/or Super Bowl L?

The league declined comment about its Spanish-language television game plan.

As for the 2015 postseason, the networks are sanguine about the ratings and commercial prospects.

*ESPN Deportes.  The Carolina-Arizona affair marks the apex of a long run with NFL that began before the network’s full-time bow. Fred Rolon, vice president of programming and business, noted that the service in 2001 -- when ESPN held the rights to the Sunday Night Football package -- made the games available in Spanish through ad hoc telecasts that were carried by Comcast and Time Warner Cable. ESPN Deportes launched as a 24/7 network in 2004.

The 2014 Monday Night Football schedule scored as ESPN Deportes’ most-watched and highest-rated season on record. During the recently completed campaign, the service averaged 59,000 Hispanic households and 85,000 of those viewers, up 31% and 25%, respectively, from 45,000 and 68,000 in 2013. Its coverage was highlighted by the 100, 000 Hispanic households and 128,000 watchers for the Oct. 27 game between Washington-Dallas, which stands as the second-most-watched MNF telecast behind Chicago Dallas on Dec. 9, 2013.

“The NFL continues to build,” said Rolon. “This was ESPN Deportes’ most successful season so far with Monday Night Football and the Wild Card is an exclamation point for us.”

Rolon said there was strong interest in the game on Madison Avenue and great crossover with ESPN. He said a number of marketers have taken “a total market position” with a presence in both the Spanish- and English language telecasts of the contest.

That roster includes General Motors, Mars, Pepsi, P&G, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald's, according to ESPN officials.  

Fox Deportes. Now in the second of two-year deal, Fox Deportes has a quartet of playoff telecasts on tap: its Wild Card coverage of Detroit-Dallas on Jan. 4, Divisional round matchups hosted by Seattle and Green Bay on  Jan. 10 and 11, as well as the NFC Championship game on Jan. 18.

Last Feb. 2, Fox Deportes made history, when it became the first Spanish-language channel in the U.S. to air the NFL championship game.

Super Bowl XLVIII played big, setting a new record with an average audience of 561,000 total viewers to become the most-watched non-soccer sports event in Spanish cable history. Despite Seattle’s 43-8 shellacking of Denver, viewership built throughout the game and peaked at 794,000 total viewers and 568,000 adults 18-49 during the second half.  

“The first year proved to be very successful,” said Sanchez. “It was much better than we expected.”

The network averaged 49,000 total viewers with its Thanksgiving Day coverage of Philadelphia’s throttling of Dallas on Thanksgiving. Officials said the average audience performance was eight times greater than its competitors and was six times larger among Latinos 18 to 49.

Sanchez is confident Fox Deportes’ 2015 postseason schedule, featuring studio talent at game-site locales and telecasts highlighting Latino players and coaches that viewers can identify with, will perform well, even without the Super Bowl paydirt.  

“The NFL is growing sports among Latinos. We want to be involved with the league and keep our leadership position among viewers,” he said.

NBC Universo. With the Sept. 28 Hispanic Heritage Game between New Orleans and Dallas and the Thanksgiving night matchup of Seatlle-San Francisco in the books, mun 2 will begin putting the money end of its one-year primetime deal with the NFL in play on Saturday night. Mirroring NBC’s playoff schedule, the 40 million subscriber mun2 will televise the Ravens-Steelers encounter on Jan. 3, the Divisional game hosted by the New England Patriots on Jan. 10 and Super Bowl XLIX from Glendale, Ariz. on Feb. 1, when the service will officially morph into NBC Universo.   

Network president Rubén Mendiola, who is overseeing the change to a modern, general-entertainment cable channel for Latinos that will showcase FIFA, NASCAR and other sports action, said the programmer is “super-focused on the Super Bowl. This is the biggest transformation for the network. All of operations are moving to Miami and the changeover will culminate with Super Bowl,” he said, expressing thanks for the NFL assist the service is receiving from NBC Sports. “Their support has been tremendous. They are helping us with the look of our telecasts and their story-telling approach to sports.”

Mendiola said “it’s been very exciting to see how the market is reacting” to the shift to NBC Universo.

That includes media buyers who are supporting the network’s NFL slate. Mike Rosen, executive vice president of advertising sales for NBCUniversal Hispanic Group, said the team packaged the regular season, postseason Super Bowl together.

Those efforts have yielded “a mix of traditional advertisers that look to reach Hispanic viewers, as well as some new ones,” said Rosen. “The NFL postseason and Super Bowl will hopefully open more doors for NBC Universo going forward.”

Rosen wouldn’t disclose the sell-through level or identify the advertisers viewers will see in NBC Universo’s Super Bowl telecast. He did say the sales have “exceeded our expectations and there were high expectations.”

He said NBC Universo will deliver a bonus audience with its culturally relevant presentation of the title game:  “We hope the telecast will extend the reach of what will hopefully be another record audience with the Super Bowl.”

Fox Deportes will celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with a marketing campaign profiling Hispanic athletes representing a variety of sports, said the network officials.

Beginning this month and running through the end of the year, the network’s first ever campaign showcases athletes in a series of vignettes that will run across all Fox Deportes programming.

The campaign includes World Boxing Champion and Hall of Famer Oscar De La Hoya; U.S. Men’s National Team and LA Galaxy star Omar Gonzalez; Kentucky Derby winner on California Chrome, jockey Victor Espinoza; NFL rising stars Gavin Escobar of the Dallas Cowboys and Mychal Rivera of the Oakland Raiders (pictured); and UFC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis and number-one contender Gilbert Melendez, coaches of the new season of The Ultimate Fighter: A Champion Will Be Crowned.

 “FOX Deportes is thrilled to launch this campaign,” said Carlos Sanchez, Executive Vice President and General Manager in a statement. “The project gives us the opportunity to honor Hispanic athletes who really try to make a difference, and collaborate with our partners to celebrate our community.”