Why soccer will never make it in the US
Soccer, or football, which the rest of the world outside of the United States calls it, is surely the most popular sport in the world. Every four years, the world championships of soccer, the World Cup, is watched by literally billions all over the world, beating out the Untied States professional football’s Super Bowl by far. It is estimated that 1.7 billion television viewers watched the World Cup final between France and Brazil in July of 1998. And it is also a genuine world championship, involving teams from 32 countries in the final rounds, unlike America’s baseball World Series that involves only the United States. But although soccer has become an important sport in the American sports scene, it will never be as big as football, basketball, hockey, baseball, and even golf and tennis is. There are many reasons for this.
Recently the New England Revolution beat the Tampa Bay Mutiny in a game played during a horrible rainstorm. Nearly 5000 fans showed up, which shows that soccer is, indeed, popular in the United States. However, the story of the game was buried near the back of the newspaper’s sports section, and there was certainly no television coverage. In fact, the biggest reason for soccer’s failure as a mass appeal sport in the United States is that it doesn’t conform easily to the demands of television. Basketball succeeds enormously in America because it regularly schedules a “television time out” as well as the time outs that the teams themselves call to re-group, plus half times and quarter breaks. Those time-outs are ideally made for television commercials. And television coverage is the support of American sports. College basketball lives for a game scheduled on CBS or ESPN (highly recruited high school players are more likely to go to a team that regularly gets national television exposure), and one might even say that television has taken over the pace and feel of American football. Anyone who has attended a live football game knows how commercial time-outs slow the game and sometimes, at its most exciting moments, disrupt the flow of events. There is no doubt that without television definitely would not stay the same in the homes and hearts of Americans. Also, without the money from advertising, the teams couldn’t afford the sky-high salaries of their superstars.
