Chivas USA announce local TV deal for remainder of 2014 season

Chivas USA announced on Friday that they have reached an agreement with KDOC-TV to broadcast the team's games locally in English for the remainder of the 2014 season. However, they will only broadcast 10 of the 23 MLS regular season games left in the schedule, including tomorrow's game against FC Dallas, while Univision's networks will also broadcast six of those 10 games in Spanish on their channels, though those nationally televised games in Spanish were already known.

The deal comes as good news in a sense, in that people with access to LA56 can now watch Chivas USA on TV. It's also good news that six of the 10 games are on the road or not against the Galaxy, so those games would have been impossible to attend for most fans anyway.

The bad news, of course, is that the team went without a local TV deal for the first 10 games of the season and will end up broadcasting less than a third of their games in English this season. While it makes sense on a practical level, since I wouldn't be surprised if the team paid for their games to be aired and there isn't much of a market for a team going through an ownership change's TV rights, it still seems like a lame duck, small time move. I mean, the team is probably stuck between a rock and a hard place here, and I get it. But on the fan side, it doesn't look like a different policy from the Vergara regime, where you'll recall that the team did not have a local TV deal until the final nine games of the season in 2013. 10 is better than nine. And May is better than August.

Still, here's hoping there's a sea change regarding local TV deals and this team starting next year. Congrats to the team for making it on the air in LA, but let's keep working for something better in the future.

Here's the TV schedule for Chivas USA the rest of the season (note: all the remaining games are available on MLS Live, but that's a paid subscription service, if you don't already have it).

What do you think? Leave a comment below!