Soccer Crap

[KrisZ]

Like I tweeted to Meltz earlier when he was talking about it....there are a lot of pundits who believe that soccer will be the #2 sport in the US in 10 years. Soccer as a brand is growing big

[Johnny Sorrow]

Like I tweeted to Meltz earlier when he was talking about it....there are a lot of pundits who believe that soccer will be the #2 sport in the US in 10 years. Soccer as a brand is growing big

Dude, Ive been hearing that since the Seventies. I'll believe it when I see it.

[funkdoc]

i can actually buy into that re: soccer now, for a specific reason that didn't exist before

 

with what we've learned about brain injuries in recent years, i see lots of parents not allowing their kids to play football in future generations. and where do you think those kids will go? i expect soccer to be the biggest beneficiary here...

[Eduardo]

From my limited understanding, there still is some issues with concussions in soccer, especially women's. I remember hearing some people upset about how they handled Abby Wambach getting knocked out cold in a game last year. But again, I don't follow it too closely, and sometimes perception matters more than reality so you may be right.

 

But through Latin@ folks in America, it'll become bigger sport in this country as we move forward. Most of my close friends all prefer to watch soccer over all the major American sports. I'm the only that doesn't watch soccer or care about it in my circle of friends. Not that I dislike it or anything, I just spend too much time already with wrestling, MMA, boxing, football and basketball.

[Bix]

i can actually buy into that re: soccer now, for a specific reason that didn't exist before

 

with what we've learned about brain injuries in recent years, i see lots of parents not allowing their kids to play football in future generations. and where do you think those kids will go? i expect soccer to be the biggest beneficiary here...

You mean the sport where you need to be able to headbutt a soccer ball that's traveling at a high rate of speed?

[tim]

When did soccer start this upswing in the US? Around the World Cup 2006? I've always been around forums online with a lot of British posters so I've always been used to hearing the team names etc. online but then a couple of years ago you'd start seeing people wearing Man U shirts around or whatever and it just seemed so odd to me.

[ohtani's jacket]

 

i can actually buy into that re: soccer now, for a specific reason that didn't exist before

 

with what we've learned about brain injuries in recent years, i see lots of parents not allowing their kids to play football in future generations. and where do you think those kids will go? i expect soccer to be the biggest beneficiary here...

You mean the sport where you need to be able to headbutt a soccer ball that's traveling at a high rate of speed?

Heading the ball doesn't cause concussions. Heading the ball incorrectly can lead to accidents that do. Most kids don't do headers anyway

[Dooley]

 

i can actually buy into that re: soccer now, for a specific reason that didn't exist before

 

with what we've learned about brain injuries in recent years, i see lots of parents not allowing their kids to play football in future generations. and where do you think those kids will go? i expect soccer to be the biggest beneficiary here...

You mean the sport where you need to be able to headbutt a soccer ball that's traveling at a high rate of speed?

 

 

Oh come on.

[cm funk]

I don't know how relevant this is to this conversation, but I was a kid in the 80's and played soccer from like age 4 all the way through high school. I also played baseball and basketball. My parents encouraged me to play those 3 sports, but they wouldn't let me play Pop Warner when I wanted to go out for it. Soccer is very popular in terms of youth leagues and camps and as a high school sport. It's also one of the easiest/least expensive sports to play. All you need is a foot and a ball to kick around, and you can play it anywhere on any sort of surface. My parents wouldn't let me play organized football because, mostly my mom, thought it was too violent. But I think there were also economics in play. So I'm not gonna be surprised at all if football loses popularity due to injury risk and economics. It's still going to be huge, there's a massive football culture from youth leagues to high school to college to the pros and that will always be huge, but there's definitely a big opening for soccer in this country

 

I also noticed the NFL has started running commercials regarding youth football and promoting that every coach needs to pass some sort of testing in regards to head/neck injuries and needs to be certified. I thought that was interesting.

[Matt Farmer]

Here in Seattle soccer is big business! Of course I think we have the highest average attendance in the league. It's average attendance for the last five years has been something like 44,000 fans. Merchandise is also very common, and you will always see bars promoting their matches.

 

I think it has the ability to catch on.

[Al]

When did soccer start this upswing in the US? Around the World Cup 2006? I've always been around forums online with a lot of British posters so I've always been used to hearing the team names etc. online but then a couple of years ago you'd start seeing people wearing Man U shirts around or whatever and it just seemed so odd to me.

World Cup '94. The latest upswing I think is the rapidly increasing ability to follow foreign leagues live. NBCSN had live premier league football about every time it was available. And when you get to watch top level teams rather than the poorer quality domestic teams, that makes a real difference.

 

And personally, English soccer is great because it runs completely opposite the baseball season. October to May with games frequently airing on Saturday mornings (before my wife decides we should be productive). It jives perfectly with my schedule.

[victory]

My Father-in-law ( grew up in Italy) is a die hard soccer fan. Europe leagues only as he finds U.S. soccer inferior. It seems most people in his group of friends have this mentality. I will admit that is a small biased sample size.

 

It doesn't seem U.S. soccer is embraced here in Chicago at all. I couldn't even tell you the last time I saw somebody wearing a Fire shirt. This is only a four sport town and soccer isn't one of them from my view.

[BillThompson]

At this point in my life I much prefer soccer to football, which continues to operate as pretty much a reprehensible sport at every level full of terrible people. I still watch sometimes, but my fandom for football has waned incredibly.

 

On the concussion front though, Nowinski's group has actually been looking into soccer as it is nowhere near as safe of an alternative as its proponents suggest. And yes, there have been studies popping up that do highlight heading of the ball as attributing to concussions or concussion like syndromes.

[goc]

I was just listening to The Sporting Life of ESPN radio and they were talking about new studies that show soccer is not the "safe" sport for head injuries that everyone thinks. Also talked a lot about the link found between soccer and ALS.

 

http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050323/news_1c23alsside.html

[ohtani's jacket]

The research that was in the news most recently was this -- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/06/130614-soccer-heading-concussion-brain-injury-science/# Soccer players pick up concussions, but not from heading the ball.

[funkdoc]

good links, everyone! if nowinski goes in hard on soccer then my previous statement would be wrong, most likely. in the national consciousness, he is basically woodward & bernstein combined on this issue.

 

i was going off the fact that US media coverage of concussions in sport is something like 90% focused on football. and the remaining ~10% is split between a bunch of sports - hockey definitely seems to get the 2nd most attention thanks to sidney crosby, and i would say even pro wrestling has more of a stigma than soccer atm because of benoit. plus all of these sports (or "sports") had reputations for violence already, so parents relying on "common sense" wouldn't see how soccer is anywhere near their league. whether it remains this way depends on the direction the media & advocates go...

[Edwin]

Soccer has been booming a lot in the US and is only going to continue grow specially in the last 4 or 5 years. The MLS is just continuously growing stateside with things like David Beckham starting a new franchise in Miami and more American TV channels picking up foreign EPL, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A matches. I don't think it's farfetched that it could be the second biggest sport in the US within the next 10 years.

 

This reminds me of that one time when Dana White said that the UFC was as big as the NFL and that it was almost as big as soccer...

[Death From Above]

For me it depends on if you rate soccer in general being strong, or the MLS.

 

The MLS is a C league. That's not going to change because why the fuck would more than a very rare sample of top prime players give up Champion's League money in Europe to come play for Salt Lake and maybe play some random team from Guatemala in the Fake Champions League. But it's also a lot better than it used to be too, and is clearly a league with a really strong fanbase in a number of markets at this point. If people are waiting for the MLS to become the new La Liga before they'll call the sport #2, good luck with that. But really I don't even see how it's relevant. All the real power is in "what are people watching on TV" at the end of the day.

 

Meanwhile though the Premiership's game of the week will draw four time the global audience of the Superbowl routinely, and clearly the audience has grown tremendously for the game in general here. Hell I'm poor and I've got a specialty channel just to watch the Bundesliga. It's not exactly hard to access whatever you want in 2014.

 

As for upswing here, sure World Cup 94 was a huge part of it, because MLS had to be created as a condition of getting the event at all. But don't underestimate the media impact David Beckham joining LA Galaxy made. I openly mocked the move at the time as being a complete waste of money. And I was wrong. The north American media's treatment of MLS altered radically almost from the day he showed up. His celebrity really did do a ton for the league, sort of a mini-Gretzky-in-LA effect.

 

Kids have always played the game a ton here. All the Canadian hockey kids need a summer sport and it swung from usually being baseball to soccer like 30-40 years ago, but the professional game just didn't take hold until more modern times. Soccer destroys the NBA on TV completely here (well, what doesn't, product is next to unwatchable), and has been in really good shape for years.

[JerryvonKramer]

This will come across as heelish from me, but I believe that soccer will never be a major sport in the US because Americans like winning things and thinking of themselves as the biggest and best, and in soccer they have to play the rest of the world, unlike "American Sports" where they only really have to play Canadians. Just telling it how I see it.

 

If the US soccer team get thumped 4-0 by Brazil, most Americans can shrug it off: "soccer? Who cares".

If it's actually a major deal, then it's going to be damaging to national pride. And, let's face it, no matter how big soccer gets in the US, they aren't going to be winning the World Cup any time soon.

[BillThompson]

Actually, most analysts say it's only a matter of time until the US wins the World Cup. They have a far larger talent pool and the ability to produce more elite players than every other country, it's just a matter of them putting it all together. I can't remember which British analyst it was last year who said, "The US is becoming a force in our sport, and they will be a force for many years, because once they start winning, everyone else is in trouble."

[JerryvonKramer]

Where are finding these analysts? They should probably be fired.

[BillThompson]

It's most of them, American and foreign. When the USA puts their resources behind an international sports endeavor there's really no one else who can compete, that's why often times they still put on good showings with less than quality athletes. Maybe it won't happen, but I'm not about to go against a bevy of people within the sport who know way more about it than I do.

[JerryvonKramer]

I haven't heard anyone saying that and I consume on average about 10 hours of analysis a week. When football in the US was last brought up on Football Focus, the consensus from the pundits was "it's still got a long, long way to go and the biggest challenge will still be competing for TV time with American Football and other established sports". No one would say the USA will win the World Cup. And they probably aren't in the top 10 favourites to do so.

 

Big population and lots of money. So what? International football doesn't work like that. China is football mad and they aren't anywhere on the national stage with, what is it, 2 billion people? England has the best league in the world and a lot of money, and they are nowhere. Spain has a population of 47 million people and its economy is in the shitter, but they have dominated for a decade now. The USA have done okay in the past fifteen years or so, but there's a big difference between getting into the quarters and winning the whole thing. I will say though: they have relatively easy qualification to get there every four years.

 

---------------

 

There's another reason I don't think soccer will ever overtake the other sports in the US:

 

The US is US-centric. It REMAKES TV shows and films that are already in English, let alone shows that are in other languages. The MLS will never, not in 30 years, not in 100 years, compete with the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A or even the Bundesliga.

 

So if American fans want to get into football, they have to have their focus and attention on foreign leagues. The centre of action isn't in New York or LA -- it's in London or Madrid or Milan -- and I can't think of anything LESS American than getting into a sport where the biggest and best are based 3000 miles away.

10 years from now, I don't see anything changing any of that AT ALL.

[KrisZ]

What is helping the soccer push right now is there are a lot of sports media types and even the networks pushing it heavily and pounding people over the head with it so it makes people that wouldn't normally watch it check it out. Also the youth participation in soccer has grown exponentially in the last 10 years which also helps.

[jdw]

Like I tweeted to Meltz earlier when he was talking about it....there are a lot of pundits who believe that soccer will be the #2 sport in the US in 10 years. Soccer as a brand is growing big

 

If we're talking about participation, it's quite possible that it's already #2 behind basketball. We need to remember that football is a one-sex sport, so while a large chunk of boys play, close to 0% of girls do.

 

But participation is of middling importance. Soccer isn't going to be doing the $$$ that the NFL, NBA, MLB and College Football are. Not in 10 years in the US, and unlikely in the lifetime of any of us.

 

The comment about "I've been hearing that since the 70s" is a perfectly valid and reasonable one: I have been as well, and I was playing soccer starting in the mid-70s. That said...

 

It's reached a stage in the US that I thought was impossible once the NASL blew itself up. MLS has the potential to overexpand again, and their moves in that direction are worrisome. But attendance around the country is a positive. The building of quality soccer-only facilities, especially with realistic capacities, has been a major positive. TV deals have been a positive, and the decent popularity of the National Team (womens as well come WC time) is a major positive. Most striking is that futbol clubs, nations and competitions outside the US have become surprisingly popular. When I wear my Duke gear, I don't get many comments these days... and thats gear of the most popular college hoops team in the country. When I wear one of my United jerseys or Barca jerseys, I get comments. I've been in Home Depot browsing for something and have watched a 10 year old kid jumping up and down pointing to one of my jersey's telling his mom:

 

"XAVI~!!!!!!"

 

My dad gets comments when he wears his United hat. I've been with Hoback when he's wearing his Spurs jersey and dudes comment on it... and Spurs aren't exactly United, Liverpool, Gunners, Chelsea, etc.

 

That shit wouldn't have happened in 1979 if I was wearing a Dalglish jersey.

 

So...

 

There are limits to how big soccer will get in this country. It will be rather huge in 2026 when it's highly likely that the US will either be the host, or share hosting with another CONCAF country (Canada and/or Mexico). But... it's not going to be as big of $$$ as the NFL, NBA, MLB or College Football. I would be perfectly happy if it becomes a strong #4 supplanting the NHL and/or College Hoops. That would be pretty awesome to have seen in my lifetime.

 

John