As our streaming schedules grow ever larger, but not quite big enough to break them down by individual sport (as always, we’re working on it!), we have decided to provide a bit of commentary (with a dash of data visualization) on the almost overwhelming number of events across all the “obscure” sports we track.

Most of our data viz week-to-week will focus on how the events are distributed by sport, time slot and sport day of the week and this “report” will be released as a supplement to our usual streaming schedule releases on Monday morning and noon on Friday as well as a second weekly newsletter in addition to Wednesday flagship edition.

We don’t want to inundate your inbox with two additional emails each week, so we’re going to start with sending this out on Mondays and see how it goes. If that proves to be the epitome of just too muchery, we’ll also probably just scale back down to the one weekly traditional newsletter (while running this as a regular post the way we have with the streaming schedules themselves). But we’ve been wanting to expand our project for a while now and this seemed like the best way to do so in terms of providing a service for our readers.

Speaking of which, enough of this jibber jabber, here now the news:

With this week’s streaming schedule, we are on the other side of what has been a massive influx of soccer matches as the schedules of the fall-spring leagues smashed up agains those with spring-fall schedules. That’s not to say our schedule is lacking for soccer matches, as you can clearly see based on this handy-dandy graphic representation:

There is still an absolutely insane amount of soccer games on this week (and they make up a significant percentage of the total number of games), but it’s mostly a manageable number, as opposed to something like the 97 that streamed on ESPN+ (for the USL Championship and USL League One¹) and FIFA+ (literally all of the other leagues on our list) that happened this past weekend.

We should mention that FIFA+, despite the many many many faults and flaws of its namesake organization, may be the best single sport streaming service out there in terms of “bang for your buck,” at least in terms of cost (free), availability (most dedicated streaming devices and smart TVs) and sheer amount of content available.

Of the matches we’ve tracked since starting this feature in February, they have shown games for at least 61 separate leagues, national cups and second-tier international competitions. We don’t track every single league on the service, as they also include second and third-tier leagues from places like Albania, Venezuela, Korea and France and even we have our limits. But for the ones we do, it’s truly remarkable how many can be found on their at essentially all hours of the day.

This includes an in-house favorite of the Obscure Sports America home office, or at least one of Brad’s favorites, the Liechtensteiner Cup. Airing tomorrow (May 5th) at 14:00, and I decided to have a quick conversation with Brad about what makes it, if not worth watching, at least knowing about:

As you may have also noticed, “European” or team handball features fairly prominently in this week’s streaming schedule, with the third most games of any sport we track (behind only cricket and soccer). We only track one domestic league — the top German league, known for sponsorship purposes as the Daikin HBL — but also keep a keen eye on the supranational competitions throughout the continent. And that’s where two-thirds of this week’s haul of a dozen handball matches come from, with four matches each in the men’s EHF² Champions³ and Europe⁴ league competitions.

Like their soccer counterparts, these supranational competitions stretch thin the availability of leagues with heavy participation, like the DBL, with just one match in that league featuring a team that has qualified for either of the aforementioned tournaments: Recken-TSC-Hannover playing at home against SC DHFK Leipzig.

Having to plan for their best teams to take part in these competitions is a double-edged sword, as doing well in them help boost the profile (and presumably the profits) of these leagues, but need to be balanced with service the fans at home who want to see the best play the best. As this project progresses — meaning ours, not the “European Experiment” of international cooperations — we will be looking at this push and pull more in-depth, including infographics to delight and amaze.

For Brad and I, our first (not-futbol) connection⁵ on obscure sports was darts, and while we don’t necessarily have time for the Premier League (beyond our picks pool) there are very few things we love as much as the European Tour, which starts back up this weekend with the Austrian Darts Open after a few weeks off following the European Darts Grand Prix (which took place in Sindelfingen, Germany in mid-April).

Our breakdown of the first half of the darts calendar can be found here, and for those unfamiliar with the way the naming conventions work for the Euro Tour, I’ve created another handy/dandy graphical representation of which tournaments will be/have happen(ed) when, both this year and in the past:

Coverage start at 7:00 for the morning (our time)/afternoon (theirs) session, with a break between the end of that run and the start of the afternoon/evening session which will start at 13:00 EDT.

Finally, we would also be remiss if we didn’t mention that this week feature(s/d) not one, but two world championship this week. Around the time this newsletter makes its way into your inbox, Shaun Murphy and Yu Wize will be trying to beat the other to an 18th frame in the finals of the Snooker World Championship, taking place at the Crucible theater in Sheffield, England for the 50th(!) consecutive year.

And starting this Friday, the Professional Squash Association will begin the tournament to crown their men and women’s world’s champions in Giza, Egypt. Friday is first of two days of opening round action. To be completely honest, neither Brad nor I know that much about either sport, but if you do how they work, please understand we are so happy for you and are excited that you’re excited about what’s about to happen (or, depending when you are reading this, just did).

As will be the case for each of these going forward, we will finish off this “report” with a graphic breakdown of the distribution of events for each day covered in the streaming schedule (which conveniently link to their corresponding day in the streaming schedule proper):

Please let us know if you feel like we missed something in the sports we track or want to see something added to the list itself. Our motto is “All Sports are Good Sports,” so don’t worry if you feel like whatever your niche interest is too niche, because here at OSA HQ, there’s no such thing.