About 4 years ago the only games they televised was only whoever Bayern was playing (and sometimes Dortmund) even if that was the Bayern vs Paderborn cupcake match. In recent years they start showing competitive matches and tried to showcase American talent in Germany. And I'll watch a game I don't have a dog in the fight, just to watch good soccer.
But they just never got it right. I especially hated their 2.5min highlights of the game where they showed kickoff and the 3 goals from 10 different angles and didn't bother showing amazing saves or any red card fouls. That's fine for 5 different angles when NBC makes 15minute highlight reels, but not when FOX compresses it into 2 minutes.
I hope ESPN can build the Bundesliga in USA into something bigger than FOX ever did with it. Although FOX usually had them on semi-basic cable channels, so I'm hoping ESPN at least places 1 Saturday morning game on ESPN Deportes as well without the extra buy-in subscription.
where Nascar truck races push the games off FS1/FS2 and onto FSP. The cadence of highlight shows, things of that nature were not regular like NBC did with the EPL.
I think ESPN will put some time/money into their shows. Considering the BuLi produces their own shows that FS1/2 would show at odd times, ESPN+ would just show as is.
Considering what Fox did to make it better than what GOLTV offered, I enjoyed the coverage. ESPN will make it even better.
Whereas the EPL stretches their games out all over Sat and Sunday, I'd say of the 9 weekly games, 5 are usually all at 0930 eastern which makes it difficult to televise numerous of them, especially if the potential high rating games are at the same 0930 time.
However there is actually more to the scheduling than that and the German fans are not happy with it. I was at a Werder Bremen vs Hertha weekday game last September in 2018 and the fans were pissed because the TV schedulers were forcing games at odd hours of the day, one starting at 6pm making it difficult to make it to the kickoff after work, but so they could televise another set of weekday games again at 8pm. So the entire stadium and Suporters Section was silent and no flag waving for the first 10 minutes of the game and unfurled a banner stating (I'm paraphrasing) "Bunesliga is for the fans, not for the television stations". I'm sure the visual on the televised match was dull and awful, so perhaps they got the message.
It would be like NBC optioning to televise all the ND games at 12 noon because they wanted to show something else later in the day just because they could make more money that way. Football fans would rightly be pissed.