My apologies if this has already been posted.
Just wanted to offer this article about the difference in development of young football players in the US and Europe.
Why would any of them make it? If you’re playing football at university, you’ve missed the boat. Professional players start playing for clubs at 16, 17, 18 etc.
That’s a mighty low bar to set; hockey is a wasteland of American indifference. The NHL has been barely clinging to life since its lockout.
I haven’t watched a MLS game, but if the world cup announcers are anything to go by the reason I’m not enthused about soccer is that I have no idea what is going on at this level of play and no one is explaining it to me.
The first ever hockey game I watched was the Olympic match of USA v. Canada. I knew nothing about hockey before I watched it, but by the end I knew enough to enjoy the game and figure out what was going on. I learned most of the basic rules, and even why the players might be doing what they do. I now like hockey and plan to go to a game sometime. Why because the announcers explained the sport to me as the game went on.
I watched the USA v. Britain. This was a match that obviously might be the first for many American fans (it was the first for me), but if the announcers took time to explain the sport I missed it. I have no more knowledge of soccer after than I did before. I’ve heard it said a few other times on this board that people get bored because they don’t understand the nuances of the sport and unless some effort is made to fix this it won’t change.
A couple of thoughts here:
–I read in an old SD thread that soccers’ popularity with tweens and women actually hurts the popularity of soccer with young men. In most of the world soccer has a very macho image, while the fact soccer players are mostly younger kids and women tags it with a “sissy” image.
–Soccer is very popular with immigrants but that’s tempered by the fact they mostly have allegiance to their old country’s teams. I lived in an area with a large Mexican population, and you never saw them wear MLS jerseys and T-shirts. They preferred Mexican teams, even if they were second generation.
–Outside of scattered locations, the only popular sports in high school/college are football and basketball. Baseball, a hugely popular sport at the pro levels, is rarely attended by anyone besides family and friends at the amateur levels unless the team is highly successful.
Thanks for the article, I found it quite eye-opening and interesting.
One reason that probably needs more emphasis, why soccer isn’t that popular in the US, is that it’s much, much poorer on TV than live. Live soccer is fantastic: you can see the whole field at once, watch the play develop, all of the things that’s very difficult to note on tv. Even with the sound off, or watching Univision feeds, it’s still much better live. All IMHO, of course.
American Football, OTOH, almost seems to have been designed to be watched on TV instead of live. For my own experience, I’ve seen two NFL games live, and would have had a much better time watching on TV.
Soccer has reached the point in this country where hand-holding is generally not needed by the announcer. You might try watching with someone knowledgeable about the game? Or I’m sure that fans here would be happy to answer questions.
This is very true. Wide screen/HD definitely helps, but it’s so much better live.
There is a deep-seated cultural bias against Soccer in the US, and it seems to be rooted in the notion that there is a binary choice between Association and American Football. I wonder if this is somehow passed down in our sporting legacy from the days when the rules of American Football were being first codified, and the camp pressing for a more Rugby-style game won out over the camp pressing for a more soccer-style game.
It often seems when soccer is mentioned in a group or on a non-Soccer-specific fansite, the discussion will quickly degenerate into how inferior soccer is compared to American football, and the soccer fans are forced to spend time defending their decision to watch soccer, rather than be permitted to discuss the World Cup, MLS, or the Premiership.
Children who are playing soccer are often just marking time until they can play “real” sports. There is often little decent instruction in these youth leagues, unless one plays for the serious “select” teams. My youth team in the mid 80s won the league two seasons in a row. We kicked off like American football teams do - the center forward would simply boot the ball as far as he could downfield (which often ended up being right into one of the other team’s forwards).
Soccer developed the reputation of being a “foreign” sport and the fans and telecasts do little to disabuse this notion. Many of the world cup games on ESPN have commentators with foreign accents. Fans prefer the non-US leagues to the MLS. The sport contains vocabulary like “clean sheet” “50/50 ball” “fixture” “kit” “touchline” “sent off”, and fans and media use these terms when the concepts exist other sports which will share vocabulary such as “shutout” “contested” “game” “uniform” “side line” “ejected”; the use of this vocabulary reinforces the notion of soccer as a foreign game.
I suppose the fact that soccer is well known as being by far the world’s most popular spectator sport in no way refutes this argument.
So has hockey, but that didn’t stop the Olympic hockey announcers from doing it and it won them at least one new fan (me). It just makes sense that when you have a game that lots of new and ignorant potential fans might watch, like England v. USA, to make some effort at extra explanation.
I’d love to ask questions but I don’t even know what I don’t know and I know no one who’d qualify as knowledgeable about high level soccer either.
So why perpetuate it with the following sentence?
Football isn’t a “child’s game”. It’s a game children can play, albeit not at a level that people are prepared to pay good money to watch. Children haven’t got the athleticism or the coordination to play the game how it’s meant to be, ie. fluid, dynamic, graceful and yet, aggressive.
If you didn’t mean to be disparaging, you should be a little more careful with your descriptors.
I disagree about that last paragraph: in American Football coverage you very rarely get a shot of the entire field-they invariably zoom in on the QB/ball carrier, such that the coverage of the secondary, and what they and the receivers are doing (on a pass play) is an almost and complete mystery. In the future, when a la carte broadband cable becomes common and I can personally choose which camera feed I want, this issue will disappear (for all sports).
There is a lot of information here and I apologize if I missed someone making the point, but I’ve always thought it was a scheduling problem. Effectively the European Soccer season lasts September to May which cuts across the four major sports seasons in the U.S. (NFL, Coll. football, NBA+MarchMadness, and Baseball). MLS goes during the summer instead to better avoid the immense competition.
I will propose that if Baseball were the dominant sport in the US, Soccer might be a bigger deal simply because the two mesh well together by starting during the playoffs of the other.
No, you didn’t. :smack:
It was a child’s game. Participation above the age of 15 in the USA was nearly non-existent.
Soccer’s biggest problem in the US is that it’s always “10-15 years away from being the biggest sport in the US.”
But that’s nonsense.
Soccer pundits have to realize that overthrowing football and baseball and basketball is never going to happen. These sports are huge going concerns with decades (in the case of MLB baseball, over a century) of history. Soccer doesn’t have that.
And that’s OK. Soccer doesn’t have to be the biggest sport in the US. When the pundits finally accept that it can be popular without being the most popular, soccer will have a much easier time in the US.
Getting the World Cup back in 2018 or 2022 will probably help too.
England I mean. Told y’all I was ignorant about the sport. 
Who says this?
It’s been said multiple times in this very thread. And here are three articles from the first page of a Google search for “soccer popularity us”
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/soccer/worldcup/2006-07-06-soccer-in-the-us_x.htm
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1566893/why_is_soccer_not_popular_in_the_united.html
The grass will always be greener.
I can recall seeing soccer matches on the TeeVee here in the US several years ago … I think it was MLS’s first season … and the announcers were interminable.
“And the ball goes over the touch line. It’s called the touch line because once it goes over that line the player may *touch *the ball.”
“The goalie picks up the loose ball. Now, the goalie is the only player on the field allowed to use his hands.”
“It’s a corner kick. Now when the defense puts the ball over their own end line, the other teams gets to place the ball in the corner of the fields at which piont his teammates will congragate in near the 18 yard line. It’s called the 18 yard line because it is actually 18 yards from the end line.”
It was like watching a broadcast meant for 5 year olds.