About Author: Solitaire

So Jurgen Klinsmann said that soccer will never be popular in the United States, because here, it’s a rich man’s game. I respect Klinsmann, because he is a soccer god, and I think he is right to say that soccer is a rich man’s game here. You certainly do not see inner city kids playing soccer in the streets. They play street hockey on inlines before they play soccer, but is that the reason why we haven’t embraced what has really become the world’s game? Nah, I don’t think so.

You see, golf is popular here, and that is still very much a rich man’s game. You don’t see them building golf courses in the inner city, you don’t see inner city kids carrying their clubs down the street to their friends house to go practice their swing. Yet golf is popular. It get’s major network airtime, it draws crowds, it sells merchandise. Same thing with tennis. When I roll through the hood, I don’t see kids scattering, because I’m driving through their tennis match. Being a rich man’s game isn’t a good enough excuse when sports like tennis and golf are still very popular. So lets examine other reasons people have said soccer fails to crack the popularity meter.

The games sometimes end in ties

Big Woop! People think Americans are not used to ties. This is completely ridiculous. We have sports that end in ties. Football ends in a tie at times, (okay, its only ever happened I think once, but the biggest story wasn’t the tie, it was that Donovan McNabb didn’t know about it.) Hockey ends in ties at times. Americans are used to ties. In gambling, ties usually win, and whether you gamble on the street corner or in a legal casino, we are a nation of gamblers. We may not always like ties, but its not going to prevent us from liking a game. Especially if we get to keep on playing.

The games can go on with no scoring, and that is boring

Really? People that believe that must have never watched a baseball game in their life. If Americans can sit through 14 innings of baseball without a score, then 90 minutes of soccer shouldn’t be an issue. Baseball may not be as popular as it once was, but it is still in the top 3. It will never leave the top three. Nothing defines Americans more than baseball, and even a baseball hater like me can admit that. Scoreless play action can never be an excuse as long as baseball packs stadiums.

Bad officiating

I guess no one has ever heard of basketball either, or the scandals surrounding officiating in professional basketball. We are used to bad calls, stupid calls, blind refs, refs on the take, these things are nothing new to us. Sure we are going to show complete and utter outrage when we make a score, and it’s not counted because ref makes the most insane call, but in the words of Gallaraga, we turn the page and move on. As Americans that just means the next time we see you, we play harder to make up for the fact that the ref gave you an easy win.

No superstar player

Alexi Lalas anybody? Maybe Mia Hamm, Freddie Adu (for a hot minute), hell MLS even paid David Beckham a king’s ransom to come play soccer over here. We have had superstars of the game, and now we have Landon Donovan and Jozy Altidore. We have no shortage of superstars with the ability to sell the game to the masses. Problem is, that we can’t get people to care.

This is where I think the problem is, and why soccer won’t be popular in the US until this one thing happens. We need to beat the world on their own turf. Soccer will not be popular in the US until we win the world cup. We have to own the sport before it becomes popular here. Now some may say, we don’t own golf, we don’t own tennis. Uh, yea, we do. They may not have been invented America, and other countries may have been playing them longer, but we own those sports. Of the top five golfers in the world, four of them are American. In tennis, you can always count on a US player to pull a major upset. We play these sports, we go overseas, we beat their players on their home turf. Until we can do that in soccer, we wont own it, and we wont care about it. Soccer will always be a sport the rest of the world plays and calls football, unless we win the worldcup, and ram it down their throats so hard that they start calling it SOCCER!

Oh yea, and David Beckham looked fabulous as England’s sideline ornament!