Soccer might be the most popular sport in the
world, but for decades, Americans have managed to resist its charm. Their
attention has been focused, of course, on the big three American sports:
baseball, football and basketball. And while soccer is rapidly gaining
popularity among younger Americans, the older generation remains detached
from the game, even when the rest of the world is glued to TV screens
watching the 2006 World Cup matches. Now, with the luckless U.S. World Cup
team booted out of this year's competition, soccer's uphill road to become
an American sport seems steeper than ever.
It's not as though soccer is a stranger to American shores. The U.S.
national soccer team played in the first World Cup in 1930. But from the
start, the game had an image for many Americans as an immigrant sport.
Still soccer began to attract more attention in the United States after
the 1974 World Cup.
The following year, the country got its first professional soccer
teams, with the launch of the North American Soccer League. The New York
Cosmos became the league's flagship franchise when it acquired a stellar
roster of players from 16 different countries, including the Brazilian
soccer legend, Pele, the high-scoring Italian great, Georgio Chinagalia,
and German superstar Franz Beckenbauer. By 1977, attendance at American
soccer games had grown to a record 62,000.
Peppe Pinton, a veteran soccer player and the executive director of the
Cosmos soccer camps, likes to recall those golden days when American fans
packed the stadiums to watch some of the world's best soccer players -
most of them playing on the same team. "Americans are used to watch
winners," Pinton says. "Americans are used to watch superstars, great
players in all sports, and they are not settling for inferiority. The
Cosmos team was not successful in the early years, but it was successful
when those players came here."
People lined up to get into the stadium like they would line up to get
into a popular restaurant, Pinton says. "People attracted people. And the
Cosmos made this happen all over the U.S," he says. "It drew record crowds
in Seattle, in Miami, in Tampa, Boston, in Chicago and then they went all
over the world. They went even into China when nobody was reaching to
China those years."
But for 40 years, the U.S. was unable to qualify for World Cup games
because most of the players on its soccer teams were not American
citizens. Finally, in 1990, with enough home-grown or naturalized players
on its rosters, the U.S. was able to field a World Cup team.
Peppe Pinton says the American victory in the first women's World Cup Championship in
1991 paved the way to a record attendance by American soccer fans
when the U.S. hosted the 1994 World Cup games. "When the World Cup was
here in 1994," he recalls, "you may recall,every single stadium was packed. So
you see, Americans love events, number one. They do not like boredom and
they love winners. So tomorrow, if I could assemble again the Cosmos, with
Ronaldo, Raul, Zaidan, and I play at the Giant stadium any international
team, I would pull 70,000 people to the Giants Stadium."
But the average U.S. soccer team today is NOT packed
with superstars, and despite the growing interest American young people
have shown in playing the game, pro soccer has simply not caught fire with
a sports-obsessed American public. Even though the U.S. has qualified for
the World Cup five times in a row since 1990 --
and even reached the quarterfinals in 2002 -- the poor performance by the
U.S. team in Germany this year could set back
efforts to boost the image and appeal of American
soccer.
Peppe Pinton has a few ideas about how to make soccer
a big-time sport in the United States. "It will take a stronger league,"
he says, "one that can play all year round. And we need to import
stronger coaches. They are the teachers of the game, not people that are here just
for the money, but because they understand that the job has to be done.
And there has got to be a total organizational structure that every
single [soccer] entity work together. It has got to be a strong unification
among the organizations and hopefully they will bring more international
stars to help the young Americans, and attract the fans to
stadiums."
Peppe Pinton, like other American soccer advocates, points
out that things are looking up. Soccer is already the fastest growing
sport in the United States, and some experts predict it could rival
American football, basketball, and baseball in... maybe 25 years?
In the meantime, soccer fans in this nation of
immigrants don't need to feel too disappointed by the U.S. team's loss in
the 2006 World Cup. They can vent
their passions as expatriates, cheering on virtually every other
World Cup team still playing in Germany this
year!
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