The beautiful game.

Uruguayan soccer is known worldwide for the honor displayed by its teams and players. Now GolTV, a soccer cable channel owned by Uruguayans and financed entirely by the owners, has taken on a crowded field of competitors long used to dominating the segment: Fox Sports, ESPN and, to a lesser degree, TyC.

One might think the larger channels might meet demand for matches, in additional to considerable local TV soccer coverage. In 2002, one of the more ambitious attempts to add coverage, known as Panamerican Sports Network (PSN), closed down, having paid too much for transmission fights just as Latin America as a whole began to suffer a sharp economic downturn.

The Uruguayan owners of GolTV, former soccer star Enzo Francescoli and well-known businessman Paco Casal, are undaunted. They have been operating since early 2003 in both Spanish and English for U.S. audiences and are poised to begin their assault on Latin American viewers. "We're going to be different from PSN" says Constantino Voulgaris, programming vice president of GolTV in Miami. "PSN did things backwards, launching first in Latin America and then in the United States. And they bought any rights at any price; it was a different time, when money was no object."

GolTV's programming for the region will be a bit different from the U.S. version. It will provide matches from the European leagues, such as Spain, Italy, Germany and France but not cover local leagues. The outlook for the broadcaster is good; it has 95 employees in the United States and reaches 9.5 million homes. "In the United States, we surpassed Fox Sports in Spanish in just three years" says Voulgaris. "The business model has developed much faster than we had thought it would, and we broke even before we expected. Plus, unlike other channels, GolTV only broadcasts soccer."