I think there is a financial aspect to sports popularity. Consider this: soccer requires an inexpensive ball, an empty field, and very little in the way of uniforms or protective equipment. For poorer countries that don’t have fancy tennis courts or can’t afford football helmets and pads, soccer is a practical alternative for mass participation.
Coaching.
In the '70’s you had millions of kids playing soccer. Bad soccer. It was a moving scrum wherever the ball was. There just weren’t enough people who knew the game and had the dedication to teach it to fill the coaching ranks. The coach was someone’s mom or dad. Nowadays you see kids of 9-10 spreading the field, making backpasses, etc.
You had lots of kids who played back then, only a few of whom kept it up into High School and College, and only recently are they beginning to volunteer as coaches. I expect to see a very rapid advance in the skills of the Americans. It’s already happened with the women.
This makes sense and might explain why I see no real strategy in the game. So maybe it is ready to make an impact in another 10 years. I was just part of the 70s and early 80s scrum. 
Jim
This is just a basic primer, Jim, scroll down to 2 General team tactics to get an idea. If you read through it, I think you’ll get an idea that coaches and tactics have almost as much to do with the game itself as the players do.
There are, of course, any number of TOMES written on the matter – but I am not going to waste your time getting into the game’s nuances.
BTW, any footy fan worth his salt is also a coach by default – as in we all know better than what the real coach is doing…especially if we’re losing 
PS-As a general rule, the Italian game has a long history of being based on defense and counterattacks - say a 4-4-1-1 formation is not unusual in Italy. Which usually leads to rather tangled matches played mostly in midfield with few offensive opportunities for either team.
OTOH, England’s well know for the long ball. Lot’s of speed and full steam ahead, thus a 4-4-2 or even a 4-2-4 are not unheard of in the Premiership. Fun league, really – unless we’re talking about Mourihno’s Chelsea (uugh!)
Spain? Footy with a Latin flourish, plenty of dribbling and tricks, emphasis on control, touch and keeping the ball on the grass. Besides the traditional 4-4-2, the 4-3-3, 3-4-3, 4-2-4 or even the odd/ancient 3-3-4 are not unusual there.
Of course, you also have to keep in mind that tactics flow during a match, depending on the score, flow of the game, substitutions, etc.
Right. I’ll stop boring you know 
Yeah, they were predicting soccer would hit the big time decades ago, back when Big Band music was supposedly making a major comeback. That didn’t quite materialize either.
Soccer is fine as a youth/high school/college team sport. I played and enjoyed it. I have little interest in seeing professional soccer and have never attended a game played by our local MLS team. To me it’s one of the dullest TV spectator sports ever, rivaling bowling. I suspect this is a common view.
Why should it bother people that pro soccer franchises are still struggling? Is it some form of essential validation for soccer to become the National Sport? As long as the amateur version is going strong, who cares?
Possibly the increase in the Hispanic immigrant population will strengthen interest in pro soccer in the U.S., though I doubt we’ll see any major shifts soon.
This didn’t stop major league baseball from being wildly popular in its formative years. Just read Eight Men Out on the excitement in Cincinnati during the 1919 World Series.
Even if the Columbus Crew reached the MLS championship, I question whether the city would be agog over the game. For most it would be a minor interruption in the semi-continuous coverage of Buckeyes football.
~7 years, +2000 posts, still the only thread I ever started that had +60 posts
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=115800&highlight=soccer
You may be onto something here. Isn’t it valid to turn the question around and ask why some countries don’t enjoy some sports like baseball or American football? Baseball caught on quite well in some Caribbean countries and Japan so we know it can have grass-roots cross-cultural appeal. It was probably just history that some countries picked it over soccer even though both have mass appeal even at the simplest levels. However, American football requires expensive equipment even in the early years and major cash in the college level and beyond.
Perhaps it is possible that Europeans didn’t have the infrastructure or systems in place to support other sports so they went with the same thing that more primitive countries did. What are some other world-class European team sports by country? Maybe soccer was the only thing left that fit their needs well.
Can’t tell you what I don’t know, so I’ll respond with what I do know - especially concerning Spain as a world-class contender in each:
1-Football. Real Madrid named best club of last century. OTOH, we always seem to under perform at the NT level. A mystery unsolved for we’ve always had quite a roster of quality players to this very day.
2-Basketball. Current World Champions.
3-Tennis – both individually and as a Davis Cup team.
3-Cycling. Three different Tour winners along with numerous medals in international competition.
4-Roller-hockey – only Portugal presents a challenge.
4-Handball. Numerous medals, both team and NT, including one WC.
5-Water-polo. Bronze in past WC. Gold and silver in the past. Hungary and Croatia lead the way.
6-Jai-Alai – totally dominant in all modalities, though almost completly restricted to its region of origin: Basque country.
7-Indoor soccer. Two world Championships, a number of European ones
8-Motorcycle racing – if you’re willing to grant it team sport status. But we have world-class racers in all categories.
9-Track and Field – specifically, 1,500 mt runners. Second only to the Africans. 1-2-3 in last European T&F Championships. Copious medals before that. Marathon runners and walkers also highly rated.
Individual sports:
1-Tennis yet again. Most amount of players in the top hundred consistently.
2-Recent development: Two-time world champion Fernando Alonso. Before him, F-1 was virtually a non-event in Spain other than holding an annual Grand-Prix. Now, almost every race breaks all sorts of rating records.
3-Golf. Ever since Severiano Ballesteros, we’ve always had a top-ten player in the list. Sergio Garcia is the current standadbearer.
4-Motorcycle Trial. Not a well-known sport. Bur Spain consistently produces/dominates world-champs in said discipline.
On a lesser scale:
Gymnastics, synchronized-swimming, judo, karate and long-distance swimming have all produced metals in world-championships.
Hope that helps even if its only a one-nation perspective.
How many people play a sport is simply not very relevant. Very few people ever play football, but it’s very popular. Very, very, very few people even participate in motor racing, but NASCAR is very popular. A small handful of people ever compete in figure skating but it’s the biggest draw the Winter Games has. And you’d be hard pressed to convince me those are unusually exciting to watch on TV. I think auto racing and figure skating are tedious, and football is pretty slow and really only fun to watch with friends and beer.
By 1919 the Cincinnati Reds franchise was 37 years old; the National League of which they were a member was 43 years old. The average attendance of a Cincinnati Reds game in 1919 was a staggering 7,600 per game. And at the time **baseball was the only major league team sport in the United States of America. ** So it was WAY past their formative years, and it wasn’t like they were flooding the ballpark.
If you could keep a stable soccer league going for 43 years I bet the league champions would draw a bit more than 7,600 fans a game. Actually they all draw more than that now, I think.
Okay, I see the strategy is more like the ever changing strategy of Basketball. It is more of a game plan. Not detailed, play-by-play stuff that Baseball and NFL fans like to Nitpick to death.
I think I have two insights thanks to this thread.
- When I played soccer, the coaches were clueless to how to teach the game. (I mean completely clueless!)
- I like Baseball & Football the best of all sports for the same reason I like Chess and Turn based Computer Games as opposed to 1st person shooters or Real Time Strategy games. I like to be able to think out the next few moves and not just react from a set of skills.
Jim
This seems to contradict your earlier statement that baseball was “a sea of shifting franchises and failed rival leagues for the first forty years”.
You’re overlooking several factors. Paid attendance at major league ballparks in the early days is a poor measure of the popularity of baseball, which also included an enormous amount of amateur and semipro ball in earlier years. This competed for the attendance of sports fans, who while avidly following the local pro club often did not have the time (or the money, low as ticket prices seem from our vantage point) to regularly go to major league games. Remember, night games didn’t begin until the '30s, allowing fans to attend after work.
As far as Major League Soccer attendance goes, it’s less than one-fourth that of Triple-A baseball.
I don’t know if the latest incarnation of pro soccer in the U.S. has the capacity to last another 40 years, or what interest will be at that time. Maybe our enchantment with overpaid pros and greedy owners in all professional sports will have waned by then, and we’ll be paying more attention to good amateur competition (and taking part in it ourselves).
There are two main reasons why Association Football (soccer to us Yanks) is not popular here in America:
- Gridiron football won the hearts of the Ivy League schools.
Here follows a history of the sport of football in the English-influenced world that is not intended as comprehensive, but is relatively accurate.
In the late-1800’s, football was at a watershed. While football had been around for millenia (one imagines the Romans, even the Greeks, playing a related game, since kicking things is quite natural), the sport now called soccer (short for Association Football, or Assoc. Football, called Assocer, then simply soccer) derives from rules established around 1840 by English prep schools, who looked for a game to teach their “young gentlemen” which embodied the ideals of physical effort, teamsmanship and sportsmanship. But a dispute arose among the schools as to whether the person in possession of the ball should be able to pick up the ball, and, if so, whether or not opponents should be allowed to physically grab him and drag him down to the ground to dispossess him (to tackle him, a term which simply means to disposses one of the ball). While some schools ardently insisted upon a pure concept of "foot"ball, Rugby and a few others adopted the more physical game as their own.
As the 19th century reached its fourth quarter, the labor class in England took up the more foot oriented version we now call soccer. Thus was born the first mass participation in the sport, which resulted in the establishment of the Football Association (which is the reason it was called Assoc. Football in the results pages of the papers). This interest by the common fold spurred a counter-interest among the upper-class schools of England, notably Oxford and Cambridge. As a result, Rugby-style football became the norm at these schools, and at their feeder system.
At about the same time, American colleges were also undecided about which to play. Soccer actually had a large following in America, a following which grew as the country drew in immigrants from countries where soccer was flourishing as a sport. It seems that most everywhere the English had trading interests, there the sport grew in popularity dramatically in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Thus Germany, Italy, etc. got very interested, as did much of South America (where the British were quite active). You will note that, at the time of the original World Cup, America was one of the participants, and actually acquitted itself quite well (3rd place - 1930). But the decision of Oxford and Cambridge sealed the fate of soccer in this country. Harvard, Yale and all the other Ivy League schools, as well as other similar institutions, chose to emulate their English brethren. Thus was born the American version of gridiron football. Soccer, meanwhile, became a sport of immigrants, and slowly faded from the scene.
When the national press seized upon college football in the first quarter of the 20th Century, the die was cast. The country now had a fall sport to go with their summer sport of baseball. Eventually (1920), professional American football was established, and the rest is history. Soccer became an eccentricity.
Which leads to the second reason that soccer is an also ran here:
- We already have three sports (summer, fall, winter/spring) to keep us occupied.
In the spring and summer, we lionize baseball (which goes back to the 1860’s as a professional sport here). In the fall, our version of football captures our heart. In the rest of the year, we have indoor sports (remember that the climate in the Midwest and Industrial East here is much harsher than in England, where they can play outdoor sports all winter) such as basketball. Each of these sports has our attention; amid such a crowd, soccer has little room to make headway.
Now, I will also add a third reason why the sport has trouble making an inroad among our spectator sports, even though millions of kids play the sport. It has nothing to do with the quality of the soccer played here (frankly, while not top-notch, I’ve refereed quite adequate soccer games here for over 10 years, which are not in any way bumblebee soccer.). Rather, it has to do with the nature of the sport and how we run leagues for professional sports in this country.
Basically, leagues here aren’t local. Yes, they are local in the sense that they are housed in a particular city. But look at the way it works. A “franchise” is simply the right a particular owner or group of partners has to field a team during a season. These franchises are mobile, and unlike their brethren elsewhere, do not consist of the best “local” players. So not even a small-market team like the Packers consists of local football talent any more. Thus, there is less inherent emotional investment in a team. Yes, we have plenty of “fans.” And yes, in Philadelphia, you are likely to be subjected to considerable abuse as a visitor. But I contend that there is more emotional investment on the part of a parent watching his son’s 0 - 0 U-10 soccer game than there ever is in watching his favorite football team’s 0 - 0 gridiron game. Don’t believe me? Just referee such a game and allow a winning goal by the visitors under potentially disqualifying circumstances. Or, for that matter, any circumstances.
Yes, yes, top soccer leagues (the D-I leagues) of other major nations are no longer truly local. Manchester United isn’t a bunch of Manchester lads going at it with the boys from North London in a game against mighty Arsenal. But damn sure that this weekend, when Blackpool host Tranmere, the locals are going to identify with the local lads, because the club is a local club in a way we simply do not capture, even with minor league baseball any more.
WHICH is why a 0 -0 game of soccer is dramatically exciting to the fans, and deadly boring to the casual viewer. And in a nation of 300 millions, the vast majority are casual viewers rather than rabid fans. So we need action, meaning scoring, plays, highlights, something to attract our attention and hold it besides the emotion of hanging on by a thread while chance after chance after chance goes whizzing by your teams woodwork, or manages to clatter against it from time to time, stopping your heart until you see the ball swept out of danger.
Which, in a nutshell, is why soccer will always be a rather distant fourth (at best) to our three major sports. Indeed, it is doubtful it can ever overtake golf, and golf is one of the admittedly more boring sports we watch (perhaps even as boring as cars making perpetual left turns ). Which is too bad, because soccer is damn fun to play, referee, and watch.
Just so non-U.S. Dopers don’t get the wrong idea here, 0-0 football (as opposed to soccer) games in the U.S. (NFL, college or even high school) are virtually non-existent. Ties themselves are highly unusual in the upper levels of the sport.
Here’s the thing, soccer is slowly growing here. I’m probably what you consider the ideal evolution of a soccer fan. I played in a local boy’s club league as a kid, in addition playing in baseball and football leagues. When I got al little older I played those 2 sports in high school and mostly forgot about soccer. Then during last year’s world cup, a co-worker kind of got me back into the sport. Now thanks to Fox Soccer Channel, I pretty faithfully follow the Premier League (Bill Simmons and I picked decided to be Spurs fans).
Now, however, soccer and I are at a bit of a crossroads. If I am to become a fan of the American game, there are several obstacles that are going to have to be overcome. The first is that the US still isn’t that good. I watched the national team game last week and the US played miscellaneous third world S. American country to a draw. This to me is not the high level of a sport that I expect to watch. If we were the best and another country like the Dom. Repub. was in our class (like in baseball) I could accept that because it would still mean we were playing the game at the highest level. But when we have to struggle to hang with the also rans, I kind of lose intrest.
My other issue with the US game is that MLS is still a joke, for several reasons. The first, its still not that good yet. That is a problem for me in the same way the above described national team mediocrity is. When MLS’s version of the championship league involves playing the Mexican Leauge’s top teams, that is a pretty big turn off of interest for me.
My second issue with the MLS is that none of the teams is worth of my interest. This is where I think that marketing and executive decisions has to be faulted. Sports leagues have to be led by flagship franchises. Usually these are in the biggest cities. And usually these teams have traditional timeless uniform designs. See for example: the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Cubs, Dallas Cowboys, etc. When a league gets away from this, it can be catastrophic. A perfect example of this is the NHL. They expanded into a league dominated by non-traditional teams with ridiculous names and uniforms like the Atlanta Thrashers and San Jose Sharks. The rise of these teams directly paralleled the decline of the traditional teams and the league suffered accordingly. It would be like if in MLB the league was overrun by teams like the Diamondbacks and D-Rays while the Yankees and Red Sox languished.
This is essentially what the MLS is right now. Most of the franchises have ridiculous names and uniforms that interest no one. I know they are the Red Bull now, which is an improvement, but the New York/New Jersey Metrostars? Its like they were deliberately trying not to gain fans or capture interest. They should have stuck more to the traditional script and stole traditional Premiership style names and uniforms. I think that its not coincidental that one franchise who did this, DC United, has also been one of the most successful.
I think that the teams need to really work on solidifing thier branding and also developing some kind of identity in the community. Its possible that Beckham’s move to the Galaxy may be the beginning of this. But until the level of play in the US improves, and until franchieses devlop a real and appealing identity in the MLS, I will largely sit US soccer out in favor of the leagues with the high level of play and established teams.
One further point, I think the one thing that more any other could really propel soccer in this country to the next level, would be if we could develop a top five world player with tremendous cultural appeal. Who would stay in the MLS, bringing it credibility; and also potentially attracting other top players here in large numbers.
I think that baseball has a serious advantage over hockey, though; one that soccer has over basket as well (basket being the second most popular sport in Spain, but only for the last 30 years). Baseball and soccer can be played almost anywhere; soccer is even easier. You can play soccer with a cumpled up can as the ball and four scrunched sweaters as goalmarkers; baseball requires a bat and ball but that’s it. Both of them can be practiced with only two people.
Playing, or even practicing, hockey, requires more intent. In most locations, so does basket, you usually need to go to the nearest school or sports club to find a hoop.
Actually, in suburban USA pickup street hockey games on roller-blades are fairly common. Almost every neighborhood in the North East at least has a Hoop up for Basketball. In NYC, there are many parks with many basketball hoops. I even have a small Basketball court in my backyard that a prior owner put in. The driveway courts are extremely common. Basketball in particular is simple for 2-4 players. IMHO, this has had a lot to do with Basketball’s increased popularity over the last 40 years.
Baseball is suffering in NYC by all reports. At least as recently as 1970, almost every neighborhood would stickball games all through the summer. Apparently, stickball is a dying sport. We use to have unplanned softball and baseball games when I was growing up in suburbia, but now baseball seems to be relegated to little league. Demographics and two working parents have changed summers for American kids a lot in the last 30 years.
Jim
He can’t be a top five player and stay in the MLS.
The thrust of my post was to address ways to interest me, as a fan of the international game, but not of soccer in the US.
I understand the reasons why what I suggest is quite unlikely to happen any time soon. Theoretically, however, this is the one thing that could, unquestionably and dramatically, raise soccer in the US and the MLS to the next level.