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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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back on our profit in order to buy the games. We want you to help pay that bill by not taking payments from us.” So that everybody got a squeeze, and the League owners were the ones who profited from it.

Whether this will continue on Fox or not, I don't know. It could be that football has just about reached its climax, or the top of the curve--and might even be going down. Attendance might not be as strong this coming fall. Not because of television, but because of so many other sports. Soccer is lurking right around the corner. In fact, I went to Geneva many years ago, where the soccer world, or the international soccer organization is headquartered, to explore the possibility of starting a league in this country.

Q:

Really? That's interesting.

Stanton:

In anticipation of the day when we might lose football and it would be a good thing to have another sport; and soccer is a very good television feature. It never took hold in this country, but that doesn't mean it couldn't, if it had a lot of programming. My idea at that time was to take twenty big markets in this country where we had profitable affiliates, and say to them: “You start the league in your own community. On your own, where we have stations, we'll program the network for it, and when the thing comes into its own, you'll profit not only having the gate receipts but the television receipts, and we'll be off to the wild blue yonder.”

Now I could not get the affiliates interested in it. I was interested in it, because I had spent a lot of time in Europe and had seen soccer and knew the impact that it had--because in London and places like that it really just grabbed the attention of the entire population. In





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