Goooaalll!! ESPN Wins U.K. Soccer Rights

ESPN has finally delivered on a longstanding Anglophile desire: the right to broadcast English Premier League soccer games -- or should we say football matches -- in the birthplace of the sport.

The self-styled Worldwide Leader in Sports has struggled, that moniker notwithstanding, to gain much of a viewership at all in the U.K, where it currently has two little-watched channels, one dedicated to U.S. sports and the other to historical sporting fare.

But with the deal struck Monday in London with the Premier League, ESPN obtains a guaranteed audience of diehard fanatics, and the advertising cash-flow that's sure to follow. ...