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By Matthew Futterman 

Less than three months after Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal committed to spend about $950 million to air English Premier League soccer games in the U.S., the deal is starting to look like a rare commodity in the hot market for sports rights: a bargain.

In August, when the media company announced the new deal, which extends an earlier partnership and spans the 2016-17 season through 2021-22, NBC Sports Chairman Mark Lazarus predicted the company wouldn't make money on the transaction, positioning it more as a loss-leader that would support the broader NBC sports portfolio.

But as the U.S. audience for the Premier League surges, he already is hedging those comments, saying in a recent interview: "We won't make money at the beginning." Premier League matches are just about the only major sports property in the U.S. showing any significant long-term growth in a splintering media environment in which executives declare victory when audience sizes remain flat or dip only slightly.

NBCUniversal, which has owned Premier League rights since 2013, outbid 21st Century Fox Inc. and BeInSports--a spinoff of Qatar's Al Jazeera Media Network--in the most recent Premier League bidding.

Thus far, in the third and final season of NBCUniversal's original $250 million Premiere League deal, matches are averaging 563,000 viewers each across all channels, a 19% increase over last year. Matches mostly are shown on Saturday and Sunday mornings between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. Eastern Time on the NBC Sports cable channel, but also now appear regularly on the NBC broadcast network and other channels the company owns, such as USA.

By comparison, Major League Soccer games garnered an average audience this season of about 200,000 on FoxSports1 and about 250,000 on ESPN's channels. On average, television audiences for MLS games have seen limited growth in recent years.

A spokesman for NBC Sports said most viewers watch Premier League matches live, though on the West coast, where the earliest contests air at 4 a.m., more recorded viewing does occur.

Audience size has risen 150%, on average, compared with three years ago when the games were on Fox and ESPN, which is majority owned by Walt Disney Co. In addition, fans have streamed 139 million live minutes of NBC Sports digital coverage this season, which began in August, 44% more than the same period last year.

"I think they have come up with a cost-effective, NFL-style package," said sports media consultant Lee Berke. "It's like finding a sleeper draft pick in the fifth or sixth round and realizing this could be your franchise quarterback."

The Premier League still has a long way to go to rival the top U.S. sports leagues in popularity. The National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association still attract far larger audiences.

For example, ESPN's telecasts of Major League Baseball games have averaged about 1.25 million viewers each the past three seasons. However, audience sizes for national, regular-season baseball games are nearly 40% lower than they were a decade ago, and the average baseball viewer is about 56 years old.

In addition, under its new deal, ESPN is paying MLB $700 million a year in rights fees, more than four times what NBCUniversal will pay the Premier League. The Premier League audience is about 38 years old on average, among the youngest in major televised sports and a demographic advertisers covet.

Sports media experts say they are more bullish about the future of the Premier League in the U.S. than they are about any other league, with the exception of the long-dominant NFL. Sunday football games on CBS and Fox routinely attract some 20 million viewers.

Frank Hawkins, a founder of New York-based consulting firm Scalar Media Partners LLC and a former NFL executive, said continuing shifts in the U.S. population and its tastes have led him to believe that the Premier League may eventually become the second-most watched sport in the U.S. behind the NFL. He cited the growing immigrant and Hispanic populations, the declining participation in youth football and baseball, and soccer's popularity among both men and women.

"In the past, soccer being big in the U.S. was measured by the popularity of its domestic league," Mr. Hawkins said. "That's not true anymore."

NBC's game coverage is led by Arlo White, a Briton who had covered American football from the U.S. for the British Broadcasting Corp. and did play-by-play for the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer beginning in 2010. Former Premier League players Lee Dixon and Graeme Le Saux provide color commentary.

Standing in the media gantry high above the field at a recent Chelsea-Arsenal showdown at London's Stamford Bridge stadium, Mr. White said success now lies in finding the balance between teaching the game to more sophisticated U.S. fans without being patronizing or using soccer phrases popular in the U.S. but nowhere else.

"I'll never say 'upper-90' or 'PKs,'" he said, rolling his eyes at the American vernacular for the top corner of the goal or a penalty kick.

NBC Sports says it sees opportunities to use Premier League matches to lead into the rest of NBC's weekend sports coverage and, like the Olympics, believes it can help secure increases in carriage fees pay TV distributors pay for its channels.

According to media-research firm SNL Kagan, the NBC Sports Network, which is in 83 million homes, receives just 30 cents a month for each subscriber from cable companies and other pay-television distributors, compared with 98 cents for FoxSports1 and $6.64 cents for ESPN.

The new deal also gives NBC the option to sell the matches for customers to watch online and to license digital clips of the matches.

Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 28, 2015 17:17 ET (21:17 GMT)

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