Why is soccer perceived the way it is in America?

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

But with the way the league is scheduled, it's always going to get going against the NFL and College Football, and their contracts with ESPN. In my mind, you're not going to close to a better rating if you play the game on Tuesday at noon. In fact, you're going to get a worse rating and fewer fans in the stands.

You want to give people something to watch on a Sunday night when they've already watched upwards of seven hours of football, including pregame shows, and might be looking for something else. And conveniently, it just happens to fall at a time when ESPN has the one primetime slot it can give it.

 

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

Since others are doing lists....
1. The MLS has made gains, but the lack of a top-tier, American-based professional league has turned soccer into a niche sport. Even the Premier League games are on either in the middle of the afternoon on weekdays, or early Saturday morning -- out of necessity for a live broadcast, but still. It's not exactly primetime.
The small number of major colleges playing the sport on a high level hasn't helped, either. College football and basketball have a ton of scholarship opportunities. Hockey and baseball are more niche sports, but there are North American-based pro leagues to take up the slack. Those opportunities just aren't there in soccer.

2. Orange slices and the helicopter parents who bring them. Silly-sounding whitebread, hippie names like Dakota and Montana. Minivans and then SUVs. It all breeds the image, rightly or wrongly, of the rich douchebag you love to hate. At some point, everyone knew one of these people and were either secretly jealous of their perfect life or openly despised it.
The depressing part is, this trend has seeped from soccer in the 1980s and 90s to youth baseball today. That also feeds into the notion that soccer, a foreign sport, is trying to infiltrate American culture on some conspiratorial level.

3. The Zendejas brothers. Skinny little guys with foreign names who looked like they had no business being on a football field. Fans in the 70s and 80s rooting for guys like Jack Lambert or John Riggins saw these kickers as people who had one job to do and often failed to do it well.
For every tackle they whiffed on on kick returns, for every missed 35-yard field goal at the end of a game, or for every goofy-looking celebration they threw out there, soccer took a step backward. It was guilt by association.

4. Players who fall to the ground as if they'd been shot, only to pop back up 30 seconds later when they realize the call isn't coming their way. In the last World Cup, I saw a guy go down and get carried off on a stretcher. By the time the stretcher got to the sideline he was sitting up. The trainers set the stretcher down, and he stood up and went over to re-enter the game.
Closest parallel to that in American sports is wide receivers who beg for a penalty flag after every incomplete pass thrown their way. They're not well-liked by most fans, either.

5. Just for the hell of it, this sort of sums the whole thing up:

 

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

I would counter that since soccer in general, and MLS, has had to build from the ground-up since the 1994 World Cup, and it has had to do so without the in-built advantage that sports like football, baseball, basketball and hockey have had in their heritage in this country. As such, MLS becoming the NFL, NBA, MLB or even NHL isn't going to happen soon.

But, having said that, it is growing every year, and with each new set of fans that puts money into the sport, the higher the revenue streams become, the higher the salary cap can rise, and the better players can be brought in to elevate the on-field product.

The big thing is that it can't be rushed. We saw already when happened when people went crazy with their checkbooks in the 70s and 80s, and we don't need the entire thing imploding again. It's got to be a slow and steady wins the race, and the fans, to make sure that the league stays a viable one, for the players and owners to make money, and to grow the game in this country.

 

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

I agree completely. The MLS has been smart about its growth, going for the slow and steady approach instead of over-expanding and overreaching. Building their own, smaller soccer-only stadiums has helped too. Better to sell out a 25,000-seat stadium than play in a half-empty 50,000-seater.
In another 10 or 20 years it wouldn't surprise me if they overtake the NHL and NASCAR (which haven't been smart about their growth) and break into the top five sports leagues in the country.
Right now though? MLS is still a niche league. If gaining full acceptance is like running a marathon, they're around Mile 10 right now. Get another World Cup in the U.S. and the league will probably take off like a rocket. That's still at least 10-15 years away, though.

 

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

Let me ask you a question:

Why the obsessive need on the part of soccer zealots to push their chosen sport on America with the zeal of a Jehovah's Witness?

I just don't get it. Is it about the money? A need to be liked? Are soccer fans lonely?

No doubt with the World Cup on the horizon the soccer zealots will soon be out in mass with their predictions for the imminent arrival of soccer in the USA.

 

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

A few things I didn't see touched upon:

It's generally considered a European sport here, and "European" has girly/sissy connotations to a lot of blue-collar 'Mericuns who think the continent still owes us for WWII. The stereotypical European (through American eyes) is thin, artsy and liberal -- not the alpha males we want our sons to grow up admiring.
Is it right? No. But that's the way I've heard it in small-town U.S.A.

Soccer is more subjective than American sports culture is used to. It has little apparent calculable structure, and numbers are part of the game for fans of the big three sports. Reggie Bush had 70 yards rushing in the first half yesterday. Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs on steroids in 1998. These are numbers I can apply to explain a game, season, team or player. Goals and assists don't exactly tell the story of a 1-0 match.

This need for structure also applies to the field. Soccer has a rectangle with two goalie boxes, four small circles for corner kicks, a line through the middle with a circle at center -- and the last three items arguably don't even need to exist. Now, look at a football field; it's four rulers on grass. In baseball, we put freaking chalk all the way to first base so batters run there in a straight line. Basketball courts have evolved into postmodern hopscotch surfaces. Even hockey keeps things tidy with three zones.

These aren't gripes, just my observations.

 

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


I would argue that the claim soccer wasn't on TV in past decades.

The day we got cable - a glorious 1982 May afternoon in my home - I got all the NASL I could handle. Jacksonville Tea Men. Vancouver Whitecaps. New York Cosmos. On USA Network. It was on all the time -- and I was kind of into it. NASL was on more than the NBA on basic cable back then, unless you lived in a market with an NBA team.

For a brief flicker in the 1980s, indoor soccer (MISL with the orange ball) was a big deal. In one city, St. Louis, the MISL team outdrew the Blues for years, between 1981 and 1984. The Kansas City Comets outdrew the Kings for the "winter sports dollar" to the point where the Kings picked up and moved to Sacramento.

We are in a different age with sports and TV in 2010. The NFL is FAR better at home, on a new TV, than at the stadium. I'll take 4 games on a Sunday in my basement with no drunk fans, no $200 tickets, no $25 to park. College is almost at that point as well for me -- I'd rather have my TiVo record 13 games on Saturday and watch them all instead of committing to one place unless it is a "destination" and we're going for the campus visit instead of just the game.

Some sports are better in person. For me: NBA, baseball, college basketball or hockey.

This brings us to soccer...

I think the problem, now, with soccer in America is this. We don't like ties. We especially don't like the feeling that we could miss something.

Look at our favorite sport, football:
- You pretty much know when the big moments are about to come. Sure, you may miss an 80-yard TD run right after a kickoff if you're in the bathroom or buying food but, for the most part, a fan knows not to leave his seat with the home team down 24-17 with 5:18 left in the 4th and getting the ball back.

Other sports: You can leave a baseball game for a few minutes when the 7-8-9 hitters come up. Basketball? Go get something when LeBron sits for two minutes. Hockey can be similar to soccer but a hockey watcher knows to pay attention during a 5-on-4 or a 5-on-3.

In soccer: If you're at a 0-0 game, you can't get up because you don't want to miss the possibility of the only goal in the game. Sure the tension builds but a score could hit at anytime. You could be looking down at your BlackBerry and, whoop, there is the only score of the game.

I think the real trouble is there is no guarantee of a 'payoff' in soccer. You invest 90+ minutes in something that you can't leave because you don't want to miss the one score that could happen.

 

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

Then, why do so many people continue to watch Duke basketball?

 

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

I think many of the perceptions between soccer bashers and soccer fans more as a disconnect of time than of the actual sport. A lot of the hardcore complaints don't fit today, but they did apply to the old NASL.

The idea of soccer being a wimpy sport makes far more sense when I think of it rising in the late 1970s, a time when Americans felt weak, and then the NASL house of cards collapsing during the chest thumping Reagan years. The old league, while riding high during expansion, trumpeted itself as the sport of the future and that people better pay attention to soccer like the rest of the world. (“In 10 or 15 years, we see soccer as bigger than football in this country.”) Sort of a sporting version of the metric system or disco. Not a bad idea, but oversold at the exact wrong time.

 

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

By the way, since I've been over here, I've been to more than 40 games at a bunch of different levels, mostly semi-pro in what's known as the non-league structure (another huge difference between Europe, the UK in particular, and the US -- no one's going to go watch a team of plumbers and binmen at the ninth level of the soccer pyramid).

I've yet to see a 0-0 game, and I've seen five 1-0 games. Yesterday I saw a 9-0. (That is, obviously, an exception.)

There was one 0-0 game in the Premier League yesterday, and that was down to a heroic performance from the Hull goalkeeper, who made four or five world-class saves. If you're looking for exciting moments in a game, those are just as good as goals.

But it's difficult to communicate that, of course, and that's where the gap probably lies. A 0-0 game can be a thriller, or it can be dull. Same way a 7-3 football game can either be a defensive war for the ages -- or a stifling display of offensive ineptitude. (And many times, it's in the eye of the beholder. It tends to be much more exciting if your team has the 7.)

 

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

Incidentally, if my quick math is correct, there have been 206 English Premier League games this year, with 606 goals scored, an average of nearly three a game. So this 'every game is 1-0!' crap is just that -- crap.