Let me first start this entry by saying that depending upon who you are you may or may not agree with the title. If you are the typical American sportsfan who loves football, baseball and especially Nascar you'll have to agree with me; I just don't get this game. If you are "soccer elitist guy/gal" your response would be that I don't get soccer and probably never will; and trust me I've been hearing that alot of over the past week.
The FIFA World CUP kicked off last week in South Africa and has been the leading sports topic over the last week. Since I only have one chance every four year to comment about soccer I will take the time to do that now. Let me first compare soccer to hockey and trust me there is one glaring similarity. Let me be honest, the only hockey game I've seen in the past 5 years was this year's Olympic gold medal game between the USA and Canada, and I think my 80 year old grandmother and my cat caught that one (My cat's not even a tv-watching pet).
But back to my point, after that incredible Olympic match all of the hockey supporters were screaming that the momentum from those Olympics would carry the sport for the remainder of the NHL season. Now to be fair, ratings have increased since then, but the NHL still can't match other pro sports leagues in U.S. viewership. I had to see a link on CNN just to know who won this year's Stanley Cup and that's saying something for a guy who never misses playoffs or championships series in sports (By the way congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks). But the reason hockey and for that matter soccer will never rival any of the "Big 3" sports is because the majority of the viewing audience in this country can't relate to the product on the ice or field because the big moment for each sport occurs every 4 years. For hockey it's the Winter Olympics and soccer it's the World Cup. All other major sports have momentus occassions occuring yearly, monthly or even weekly. Unfortunately, these two sports can't say that. I imagine myself at my job telling my boss that I will be really good once every 4 years; um yeah, that's just not good enough.
Now I will say that both soccer and hockey are probably two of the most physically demanding sports on the planet in terms of toughness and endurance. In fact, on average a professional Mid-Fielder can run 6-8 miles during a normal soccer match; that's more than I've run in the past year. That being said, the sport just doesn't translate to most Americans. Futbol is just not as entertaining as football. And I know that "crazy soccer guy" will rebuttle that soccer is the fast growing and most popular sport in the world and he's right. One thing we have to keep in mind is that America is not the world, no matter how much we think it is. And that's the problem, most Americans don't care what the world likes, we like what we like. Maybe that's why we are the fattest country in the world, because we just don't care what other people think or what they like. But why is soccer so dull to the majority of American viewers? Answer: there is no action, there is little excitement, and we don't see the players as superstars. There is also a cultural barrier that is holding back the sport in this country. So what's the solution?
Well of course the game needs to be more exciting. Imagine watching a basketball game in which no one scores for 60 minutes or better yet a NCAA tournament game that ends in a 0-0 tie. Unfathomable and you wouldn't watch if there was a possibility of either of those two outcomes. My solution give more points to a scored goal. Have you ever heard a man complain if he spends 4 hours watching a football game that ended in a 14-7 score? Well probably not and in soccer that's a 2-1 game. Each goal can count as 6 points and then there is penalty kick for the "extra" point as there is in football. I can hear soccer purists cringing at this suggestions, but it makes sense. Also, no game will end in a tie because there will be a shoot-out to determine a winner always. What about the problem of soccer being irrelevant in the U.S? Well I have some bad news; that will never change. The reason is the cultural differences I referred to earlier. As an example the average soccer player in the Premiership (England's Top League) is paid around $100,000 - PER MONTH. The average salary for an American soccer player in the MLS (America's Top League) is $90,000-PER YEAR. The average MLS attendance is 15,000 compared to 34,000 for an English Premiership game. That would explain why people in Europe are far more passionate about the sport than we are; they are actually watching the games. Do you think that we would care about Tiger Woods, Lebron James or Alex Rodriguez as much as we do if they were making 92.5% less in salary than they do. Of course not. We love our superstars and the MLS has only 2 that I can think of.
Back to my question, "How can we fix the world cup and soccer in general?" The answer is we can't until the games are more exciting so that people attend more games to allow ownership to pay higher salaries. After all money does equal fame. And finally, you can't rely on every 4 years of moderate excitement to produce interest in a country which is raised on backyard football and NFL Sunday afternoon football. In this case futbol is not even close to football.
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