We Americans love shootouts. Give us a knock-‘em-down, drag-‘em-out slugfest that goes down to the wire and we’ll be happy. We love 500-foot home runs and 80-yard touchdown passes, three-point shots and hat tricks. We pay so much money to attend these games and to watch them on cable and satellite TV that we feel cheated when we don’t see the scoreboard light up. “Nil” is a foreign word to us.
When watching a scoreless soccer game, we think nothing is happening. We lack the patience to appreciate the ebb and flow of shifting momentum, the building of tension, the anguish of missed opportunities.
But, because scoring is comparatively limited in soccer, it actually does seem more thrilling when a striker does finally boot one past a diving goalkeeper—much more so than the Peyton Manning touchdown pass or the Barry Bonds home run that we have seen so many times before. That’s why soccer announcers yell GOOOOOOOOOAL!!! as if it were the most exciting thing they’ve ever seen.
Soccer on the Rise
Professional soccer experienced a brief boom in the United States during the late 1970s when Pelé played three seasons for the New York Cosmos of the now-defunct North American Soccer League (NASL). The league folded shortly after he retired because back then American sports fans were more interested in the celebrity of the greatest footballer ever than in a sport that very few of them played while growing up. As soon as Pelé was gone, so was their attraction to the game.
Despite the failure of the NASL, however, the brief popularity of the league generated interest in soccer on the youth level. It soon became one of the more popular league sports for kids to play during the 1980s and remains so today. Now that generations of the past 25 years have grown up playing the game, spectator interest in the sport is built on the foundation of the game itself and not upon the feet of a single individual. Major League Soccer (MLS) has now been around for a decade and continues to grow steadily.
“Sports fans come out of people who grew up with the game,” says John A. Koskinen, president of the U.S. Soccer Foundation. “Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, virtually no adults played. Now you’ve got a set of people in their 30s and 40s who grew up with the game.”
The success of the U.S. Women’s National team, which won World Cups in 1991 and 1999 and made Mia Hamm a household name, has also sparked strong interest in the sport among girls. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of female student-athletes who participated in high school soccer during the 1990-1991 school year was 121,722; by the 2000-2001 school year, that number was 292,286, and it has increased each year since then.
Maybe, Just Maybe…
As for who he thinks will win the World Cup, Koskinen isn’t so bold as to predict a U.S. victory.
“It’s a tough draw,” he says of the U.S. team, which will be grouped with the Czech Republic, Italy, and Ghana. “We have one of the two toughest groups, but I think we’ve got a reasonable shot if we can get out of a group doing as well as we did last time.
“Brazil is everybody’s favorite,” he says when asked who he thinks will win it all. “They’ve got players who can’t make their team who would make virtually anybody else’s team in the world. The Czech Republic has a very strong team. Argentina and Italy are good teams.”
But maybe, just maybe, this could be the year that the United States, led by coach Bruce Arena, can steal a page from the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and perform a “Miracle on Sod.” Such a victory would either do wonders for the sport in this country or prove once and for all that Americans in general just don’t care about soccer.
Now there’s a thought to kick around.