Host Antonio Soave and Guest Host Bacel Al-Sheik in front of the Ummayad Mosque
Antonio J. Soave with Walter Zenga in Abu Dhabi in 2014
Soccer Academy Television, Inc. (“Soccer Academy”)
The Soccer Academy© is an uplifting and inspirational
television series for children, parents and soccer
coaches around the world. The show – produced as
half-hour episodes – began in 2003 with three initial7
programs that successfully ran as a three-part series on
CBS in Florida (Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa). The
show received a consistent rating of between 1.6 and
2.2 over the course of one month. The show then
expanded to six (6) episodes and aired for an eighteen
(18) month period in southern California on KJLA and
LATV, two of the largest bi-lingual networks in the
nation. Every Wednesday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. from
January of 2004 to July of 2005, The Soccer Academy©
was broadcast to nearly four million homes in the Los
Angeles basin. The show received a consistent 1.6 to
2.0 rating over the course of the broadcast. Given its
encouraging and uplifting content, it qualified as
“educational programming” for KJLA as well.
The Soccer Academy© was then picked up for
broadcast on a variety of ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates
(owned by LATV) in twenty-five (25) major U.S. cities
including Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston and
Miami. It is also broadcast on Direct TV and the Dish
Network in the United States.
Perhaps most compelling is that “The Soccer
Academy” has aired consistently in the highly coveted
Saturday and Sunday morning timeslot at 8:00 a.m. It
was also replayed twice per week in the after-school
slot at 4:00 p.m. on the same networks and channels.
“The Soccer Academy,” as primary children’s
programming, has recently received the prestigious
“educational/instructional” (E/I) by the Federal
Communications Commission in the United States. It is
now officially E/I sanctioned, embossed and approved.
