Why is soccer perceived the way it is in America?

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

Yes, they're similar in fashion to the headgears player's use when they've suffered a concussion, or have a soft skull, only for the upper body. You can see them, since most rugby teams have gone to more form-fitting uniforms. They're probably close to what a kicker would wear in football, only without the plastic shell on the outside.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

I cut my point off before I meant to, GB. I was going to continue by saying but there's a new boom, and it seems like this one is being sustained. The MLS has been around for awhile, and the U.S. team is certainly improved. Those are byproducts of sustained interest in soccer.

The soccer bashers are always going to be out there, but I'm not one of them. Some of my best youth sports memories came on a soccer field. And 0-0 soccer games are sometimes hard to write about, but I like challenges.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

I once tried to explain to an Australian acquaintance that what they often see and disparage as "padding" in American football is actually part of the weaponry, that players use the hard helmet and shoulder pads to increase the power of impact. I don't think he got it.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

GB-Hack makes very good points -- and if the soccer cognoscenti accept that progress for what it is, they'd be happy. (Not being the 32nd-best team at the World Cup this year would help the growth effort, but I digress.) Unfortunately, too many of those fans do not accept being roughly America's eighth-most popular sport now, with a possibility of moving into the top five someday. And the lack of reality is stunning sometimes. The MLS Cup took place on Sunday night, Nov. 22 -- at the exact same time as Eagles-Bears on NBC. I mean, is there no possible way to give a casual fan even the chance of stumbling across your championship game by putting it on Wednesday? The whole thing smacked of the attitude "our real fans know where to find us, screw the rest."

Eagle -- the viewership numbers of the NFL blow your theory out of the water. Millions and millions of people who never played the game and wouldn't know an A gap from an O-ring sit down to watch every Sunday.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

I don't buy that somehow the worst athletes in the US are playing soccer. If you took the traditional "beep test" or any other test of athleticism, I would be willing to bet that most MLS players would do fairly well against most MLB players. Most elite NFL, MLB and NBA athletes would make terrible soccer players. Kobe Bryant grew up in Italy and he admits that while he is one of the best NBA players ever, he'd make a terrible soccer player. NFL players as well would also make horrible soccer players, except for a few wide receivers.

Also US national team players like Jozy Altidore and Oguchi Onyewu could have played other American sports and reached the elite level if their parents weren't from Haiti and Nigeria and therefore instilled in them a soccer culture instead of baseball or football culture. One of the big massive changes in the last few decades about immigration in America has been that immigrants no longer try to assimilate and cast aside their foreign culture at all cost like they did in the past. 50 years ago a immigrant from Italy would have abandoned soccer and picked up baseball in order to fit in and be accepted, while today an immigrant from Italy will proudly wave his Italian flag during the World Cup and encourage his kid to play soccer. This is why today we have several channels dedicated exclusely to soccer, and why ESPN is showing the European Championship in full despite no Americans being in it and why its planning to have a big production around the next World Cup. The very nature of the American immigrant has changed, and its imporved the American soccer athlete as the immigrants no longer try to fit into the traditional American mould of football and baseball, but instead actively seek out soccer.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

Nowadays? Kids are becoming more and more specialized at younger and younger ages. I see it in soccer a lot, where from 10, 11 years old, a kid is dedicated to training with his club twice a week, and then at age 12-13 starts playing in local leagues, going to travel tournaments so that by the age of 14-15 he can maybe represent his state or his region in the Olympic Development Program.

Disney holds a Junior Soccer Showcase at their Wide World of Sports complex in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. every Thanksgiving. You get teams from as far away as Texas, Oklahoma and Illinois, and those from up and down the Eastern seabord at this thing, looking to get seen by scouts. They also hold an interregionals tournament, where the four regions (East, West, North, South) send their representitive teams to compete. From that, a kid from my area went to Mexico today to train for a week with a 38-player squad that is this year's U.S. Under-14 boys squad.

You think those kids are doing anything but play soccer?

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

1. Could you name the other seven sports that are more popular than soccer in the U.S. right now.

2. The MLS Cup final scheduling is, I think, a matter of where it can be on ESPN in primetime. Can't do it on Saturday, college football is in the way. Can't do it Wednesday night, NBA contract. Can't do it Thursday night, College Football Primetime.

They did what they could, and I think did pretty well ratings-wise with it being at night on ESPN instead of in the afternoon on ABC where it's going against the late NFL double-header.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

1. Football (I would argue college and pro are separate beasts and thus should count as two), baseball, basketball, NASCAR, hockey, golf and possibly tennis, though that last one is debatable.

2. Getting visibility for your marquee event should be the No. 1 priority of the league's marketing operation. The fact that it doesn't see the need to go out of its way to achieve this goal says, to me, that MLS believes it is a league that has arrived already, which is so very wrong. You can damn sure bet that in 1992 NASCAR would have run Daytona 500 in the rain on a Tuesday morning if it would have meant better TV ratings.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

This article makes a similar point:

http://wesclark.com/rrr/pads_and_helmets.html

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

I'll give you the first five, but I would seriously argue hockey and golf are both behind soccer now, especially if you factor in the ratings that channels like Telemundo and Univision get for Mexican First Division games in this country.

And getting your game on in primetime on ESPN is the right move for MLS. 2009's edition did a higher rating than the previous season's on ABC, getting over 1 million viewers, and of the six previous finals televised by ABC, only one did a better number.

Obviously, having one of the league's marquee teams, the L.A. Galaxy, may have helped that, but having a 9 o'clock kickoff and being the lead-in to SportsCenter is now a bad thing?

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

You wrote that people end up watching what they played. That just doesn't hold up.

 

Re: Why is soccer percieved the way it is in America?

GB -- Eh, I would still go with golf (especially when Tiger makes his comeback and the apocalypse is confirmed), I'll give you hockey, split the difference, yada yada. Point's still the same.

Regarding the TV, I would only say that you're comparing it to a 2008 time slot when it was also up against the NFL, so it doesn't really tell us much about how the league might fare by not counterprogramming against the one true behemoth left in American television; and on Sunday night, the lead-in to SportsCenter can be found on the aforementioned NBC.