Ted Lange as your Bartender said:
Did they put all the crappy games on at 6 this week on purpose? As in 12 and 3 are the prime time games for them? Or was it pre determined when they did the draw?
S. Korea - Russia
Cameroon - Croatia
Japan - Greece
Honduras - Ecuador
It's almost like they threw the US a bone giving us the 6 pm start on Monday instead or Iran - Nigeria.
Just curious as it's hard to see the afternoon games some days.
They are scheduling Euro teams in the 12 and 3pm slots since that is 5-6pm and 8-9pm over there. The 6pm games are around midnight over there. The US (I mean ESPN) requested the 6pm games for the US audience.
The US game at 6 on Sunday isn't because the US requested it, it was originally Sunday's 3 PM game. but because they determined they couldn't play Manaus games during the afternoon, they bumped it back to 6. Same with Italy-England last week, that was only the evening game because it was in Manaus
Link to article outlining when FIFA changed 7 start times:
http://www.espnfc.com/story/1644323
The original schedule had pre-set start times for all the games. Only after the international players union pressed the issue did FIFA move some games in order to take the hottest venues out of the heart of the day and put them into early evening.
While international TV is very important, the original schedule was not designed to accomodate it for specific teams (i.e. the original schedule was laid out before all teams positions - except Brazil as A1 - were known).
Europe already is accomodated in the sense that the start times are noon, three, and 6 EDT - that's pretty much the earliest they could be local time (actually I think the local times might be 11a, 2p, and 5p.
Remember 34 of the 48 games feature European teams. There's always going to be games on in European primetime b/c, well, there's just a ton of games with European teams.
Summarizing the games moved:
England-Italy and Cameroon-Croatia got moved to 6pm from 3pm. This is worse for European TV (especially a marquee matchup like England-Italy in what really was their first truly meaningful World Cup match since the other was a 3rd-place match). They moved these games b/c of the heat.
Ivory Coast-Japan got bumped back to 10p local time (9p Eastern) - also b/c it was in a tropical climate Since these games were being moved, they made the pragmatic decision to move Japan's game to this latest time so it was at a more attractive time for them, as opposed to putting a Euro game here.
As part of the Cameroon move, the Spain-Chile game got moved up to 3pm ET - clearly better for Euro TV. Totally reasonable that this was a "happy coincidence" with the other changes.
US-Portugal was moved later b/c of the rainforest and heat - certainly not for TV. The game starts at like midnight in Europe - a game featuring CRo vs the USA would not be put at such a time normally. The US-Portugal move did put Belgium-Russia in a friendlier time for Europe, it's true.
South Korea-Algeria got moved to 4pm from 1pm local time - worse for Africa, better for Asia.
Anyway, only 7 out of 32 games moved after the draw and the team spots were known.
-QG