Over my years reporting and writing on sports media, as well as consuming online sports content, I have found no group of viewers harder on broadcasters than soccer fans. I would put SEC football fans a close second, then a toss-up between a number of sports including NFL viewers.



This is, of course, a subjective view.



What is not subjective is this: Soccer viewers are extremely tough markers. They are unforgiving on player mispronunciations, superficial in-game analysis, and particularly hard on studio analysts and hosts who bloviate or don’t know tactics. (Having once been a terrible host of the Sports Illustrated Soccer Podcast, I experienced a small sliver of this fury.)



I’ve thought a lot about soccer viewers over the last four days with the start of the FIFA World Cup in Russia. My Twitter feed (see Item No. 2) has been inundated with commentary on Fox’s English-speaking coverage (far more negative than positive in the early...