Photo: Paul Rudderow

Philadelphia Union

The broadcast of Saturday’s season opener on 6abc was the highest rated local broadcast in club history, earning an average rating of 1.5, with the last 15 minutes peaking at a 3.2 rating. Union CEO Nick Sakiewicz said in a press release, “Our passionate and growing fan base combined with continuous improvement of our broadcast production quality obviously is being rewarded with these outstanding ratings increase. While we already have an established brand name, we continue to grow on a daily basis and it speaks to the hard work of everyone in our organization and our great broadcast partners as we look forward to continued growth.”

What does a 1.5 rating mean? This explanation says,

That’s an estimate of the percentage of the audience watching a particular program. If “Channel 6 News at 6:00” has a household audience rating of 15, that means Nielsen has estimated that 15% of the market’s household audience is watching it…A household audience measures homes, not people. So technically, “Channel 6 News at 6:00” is on in 15% of homes — one person might be watching in one home, four in another. The household measurement doesn’t take into account that difference.

And so, the Union’s 1.5 rating means 1.5 percent of the households in the Philadelphia broadcast market were watching the Saturday’s game. (A broadcast’s rating is different from its “share,” which is “is an estimate of the percentage of how many households using television are watching the program.” And so, “If “Channel 6 News at 6:00″ has a market share of 30, that means 30% of the homes watching TV at 6 o’clock are watching that newscast. This number eliminates those cooking supper, at the movies or doing anything else.”)

Sports Illustrated has named Ray Gaddis to its Best XI for Week 1. Plays from Gaddis and also Andrew Wenger are included in a highlight reel of top plays on Saturday from across the league.

The Union has video highlights of Saturday’s game that includes comments from Fernando Aristeguieta, Maurice Edu, Steven Vitoria, and Sebastien Le Toux. Good stuff.

At MLSsoccer.com, Dave Zeitlin has a piece on the debuts of Aristeguieta and Vitoria.

Clint Irwin’s save on that Conor Casey header is SBI’s Save of the Week.

Are you ready for some power rankings? Of course you are! At ESPN, the Union come in at No. 15. At SI, they come in at No. 13.

If you watched Sunday’s game between Orlando and NYCFC on ESPN, you may have noticed the network forgot to include the Union on a list of expansion teams. Taylor Twellman later apologized on Twitter.

Former Union backup goalkeeper Brian Holt has signed with New York Cosmos. You will recall that Holt also played for Reading United and Harrisburg City Islanders.

Local

New USL side St. Louis FC has signed Jamiel Hardware, the Jamaican midfielder who made 44 appearances with Harrisburg City Islanders over the last two seasons.

Ocean City Nor’easters have a post on former captain Shawn McLaws signing with New York Red Bulls.

At the Washington Post, Steven Goff reports on efforts to create a union for USL players, the USL Players Association.

MLS

ASN has some highs and lows from the opening weekend of games.

World Soccer Talk reviews some of the highs and lows of last weekend’s games on national broadcasters UniMas, ESPN, and Fox Sports 1.

Orlando head coach Adrian Heath delicately tries to answer questions about three of his players being yellow carded for simulation in the draw with NYCFC on Sunday. “Every time someone falls over doesn’t mean it’s simulation…I know we make it hard on referees sometimes, but I think it’s something we’re going to have to be really, really careful about.”

NYCFC has surpassed 15,000 season tickets sold. And in response to demand for tickets to their home opener on Sunday against New England, the team has announced the it has opened the the entire upper level of Yankee Stadium. More than 30,000 tickets have already been sold for the game.

American Soccer Analysis and Brotherly Game on the new CBA.

Reuters reports, “The New York Cosmos have won approval to play the Cuban national soccer team in what would be the first professional sports team visit to the Caribbean island nation since December’s rapprochement between Cuba and the United States.” The game would take place in Havana on June 2.

US

Resting Carli Lloyd, Ali Kreiger, and Megan Rapinoe for their final group game at the Algarve Cup — Kelley O’Hara, Rachel Van Hollebeke, Heather O’Reilly, and Tobin Heath each got their first starts of the tournament — the USWNT couldn’t find the back of the net against No. 20 ranked Iceland and had to settle for a 0-0 draw (quote sheet here). The draw was nevertheless enough to advance to the tournament championship game on Wednesday against France, who defeated the US, 2-0, in a friendly in Lorient on Feb. 8.

Iceland head coach Frey Alexandersson said of the US performance, “If this was my team I would be very unhappy. We forced them to play the long ball since after watching their first two games, we saw that when they get under pressure they tend to resort to the long ball. I don’t understand it because they can play the ball on the grass. I would expect a team 20 seeds (ahead of us in the world rankings) would trash us.”

US head coach Jill Ellis responded (rather lamely), “Maybe he’s unhappy because his team is at the bottom of the group.”

More on the draw at Fox Sports, Soccer America, and the AP. More on Alexandersson’s comments at Soccer Gods and the Equalizer.

US Soccer announced on Monday, “The U.S. Under-23 Men’s National Team will travel to Bosnia and Denmark for a camp running March 23-April 1 in its preparation for Olympic qualifying later this year.”

According to ASN, the semifinals of the CONCACAF Olympic qualifying tournament will be held at Real Salt Lake’s Rio Tinto Stadium. The tournament will take place Oct. 1-13. One can’t help but note the Union have no games scheduled at PPL Park between Sept. 26 and Oct. 25.

Elsewhere

Check out the latest Footy on the Telly for listings of today’s Champions League games.

Outgoing FIFA Executive Committee member Theo Zwanziger has once again called on Qatar to be stripped of the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup. “The best solution would be not to play in Qatar and to rectify this wrong awarding…Qatar was not suitable to host such a World Cup for a number of reasons…One has to tell candidates (for World Cups) that sports, football, the clubs and FIFA, they all represent values that we expect to be observed.”

Looks like Barcelona is getting used to the idea that maybe, just maybe, Messi won’t remain with the club. Barcelona international sporting director Ariedo Braida said in a TV interview, “I believe it’s very difficult that Messi will leave Barça but at times in football strange things happen. Now with these clubs that have so much money like [Manchester] City, certain amounts don’t seem to have a value. In football things happen that appear impossible but I hope he will remain.”