I was having a discussion about whether soccer in America will ever see top players coming up like we produce for our “big” sports (baseball/football/basketball–arguably hockey as well.) The friend I was discussing it with said as long as sports like football/baseball/basketball exist it couldn’t happen, because our best athletes will always gravitate to those sports.
I disagree for a few reasons:
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The United States has over 300m people, among the largest of any of the countries that is in the World Cup and larger than I believe any of the “big time” soccer countries. This gives us a huge base of potential athletes that could all potentially go into several sports.
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Support for MLS is already decent. It’s not a big TV sport, and maybe it never will be. But look at baseball–baseball in my opinion has extremely good attendance numbers. The game of baseball continues to be tremendously strong in America, and the clubs continue to make big money even though baseball is not by any means the king of the TV ratings. People these days basically check the standings of their favorite team and mostly only watch the playoffs. MLS doesn’t have to beat football in TV to become a good league, and MLS doesn’t have to beat NFL in TV ratings for America to produce good soccer players.
The way sports in America are heavily driven by advertising dollars, NFL is basically 100% the perfect TV sport. Compare it to any other sport in the world, and nothing compares to American football in terms of suitability for TV. I’d guess given the continuous play and the fact you don’t get commercial breaks makes advertisers and even networks in America not huge fans of soccer games, they’ll always generate less revenue than airing American football games. But that’s okay, because as baseball shows even without being TV king you can be a viable sport in the U.S.
- Soccer isn’t necessarily competing with all of our popular sports for potential players. Hockey in America gets good attendance (the average is like 18k/game but remember NHL is played in indoor arenas and few hold more than 20k), but in terms of kids playing it and producing good hockey players it’s more a regional thing with the strongholds being around the Great Lakes and New England.
Football and basketball both primarily select, even at younger ages, for kids who are both big and tall. Football with an emphasis on big, basketball with an emphasis on tall. This is simple genetics, and it excludes many kids from ever being big in football. One of my best friends growing up was a muscle bound monster by age 17, but he was 5’11 and 280 lb (and trust me, most of it was not fat, I’d say he was at 20% body fat–he was squatting 700 lbs in high school.) He always played football, but always on the offensive line, he ended up getting a scholarship to play at a Division II school, but it wasn’t really easy and he and his Mom had to work hard sending videos out to get any interest in him. The reality is he probably should have been playing a different position, because it doesn’t matter how strong he as or how well he had learned that position up through the rest of his life, at 5’11" he was never going to get a chance at a big time college and certainly never could have played professionally. And while you can say maybe he should have played a different position, the one thing about this kid was he was explosive off the line but he was slow generally. He was too slow to play really any position on defense, didn’t have the hands to slim down and be a fullback or running back etc.
My point basically is football and basketball moreso than soccer exclude people from the highest levels based on things that can only be controlled via genetics–namely size and height.
Not that general athletic ability isn’t influenced by genetics, but you can go to soccer camps your whole childhood and play constantly and if you’re of average height and really physically fit you can be a very good soccer player. That’s not really true of American football and basketball.
Baseball doesn’t filter out people so much either, other than that a pitching prospect will rarely be given the time of day if they don’t clear 6’ (there have been successful 5’10" or so MLB pitchers but they have to have real stuff for a scout to give them a second glance at that height.)
So I think there’s actually a large pool of athletic kids in America that are never really going to be suited for the two of the big money sports (football / basketball) that are available to be developed into soccer players.