Post by Macmoish on Jun 23, 2010 7:45:17 GMT
Washington Post
World Cup draws viewers, but soccer generally is watched by few Americans
By Neely Tucker Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, June 23, 2010
It's the World Cup! The globe is going nuts! U.S. television ratings are soaring! The United States plays what amounts to an elimination match against Algeria Wednesday!
These are heady days for soccer in America -- 14 million people tuned in for the first-round World Cup match against England, a number that might be surpassed by Wednesday's match for a berth in the tournament's final 16 teams -- but no one is expecting these games to collectively scream Gggoooaaaallll!!! to millions of American fans.
A generation after the Brazilian legend Pelé came to play for the (long since defunct) New York Cosmos, and 11 years after Brandi Chastain gave U.S. soccer its iconic moment, ripping off her jersey after winning the Women's World Cup for the United States, the trajectory of professional soccer in America has settled into steady, generational growth, its practitioners say, rather than a bombshell that might soon challenge the nation's big three sports of football, baseball and basketball.
"Over the past generation, soccer has become the number one participation sport in the country," says Kevin J. Payne, a co-founder of Major League Soccer in 1996 and president of D.C. United, the most successful team in the league. "We have a successful league of 16 teams and we're expanding to 18 next year. Our crowds and revenues continue to grow, not as fast as we'd like in some markets, but spectacularly in others. Merchandising is up. Sponsorships are up. I can't imagine any other sport that would not like to have the growth rate we do."
Payne's best player over the years has been a kid out of a small town in Pennsylvania, Ben Olsen. When Olsen began kicking a ball around in the early 1990s, he loved the game but didn't see much of a future in it. He "didn't know a single soccer player," and "could never get a game on television," Olsen says.
Still, he was named the Parade magazine's national high school player of the year in 1993, the collegiate player of the year (while at the University of Virginia) by Soccer America magazine, and Rookie of the Year for MLS, playing for D.C. United, in 1998. He played for the U.S. World Cup team in 1996.
Today, at 33, he's an assistant coach in a league that didn't exist until he was already a phenom in the sport. It irritates him, Olsen says, the endless comparisons people make between soccer and the nation's bigger sports.
"This league is at a toddler stage," he says. "You oftentimes get this us-against-them thing, you know, 'When is soccer finally going to take off?' That's not what it's about. It's about growing this league and getting better, and that's happening every day."
While more than 3 million kids or teenagers are enrolled in some sort of soccer league across the nation, the development of an adult fan base has taken time. D.C. United has won the MLS Cup four times, more than any other team, and plays in the cosmopolitan Washington area, where it is able to draw on a diverse fan base. And yet the crowds have averaged 15,000 to 20,000 over the past decade; plans for a new stadium have seating set at a modest capacity of 24,000.
On the collegiate level, the University of Virginia won the NCAA title in men's soccer this year -- yet averaged 1,822 fans per home game. The University of Maryland, the previous national champion, averaged 2,469 fans. Both were in the Top 10 of national attendance for the sport in college.
Given those numbers, the fact that a record 14 million Americans watched that first-round game in the World Cup might seem more like a blip of curiosity than a harbinger of sustained interest. But the head coaches at each school say those fan numbers are misleading indicators of the sport's popularity. The weekend games draw more than 5,000 fans each, they say, and the infrastructural growth of the sport is profound.
"When I had players go pro in 1996 to 1998, they were getting MLS contracts for about $24,000," says George Gelnovatch, the head coach at Virginia. "Today, the contracts for the top six to 10 players in the country are going for about $200,000. . . . When you compare that to in the 1980s, and I was a player, and the best thing you could hope for was a college scholarship, the growth in one generation is just astounding."
Sasho Cirovski, the head coach at Maryland since 1993, has taken his team to two national titles, and like Virginia, to its status as one of the elite teams in the country. He's also been chairman of the Division I soccer coaches association for seven years and, in that position, has fought for more television exposure. He says TV coverage is key for the sport's growth, and that soccer's fall schedule, when it has to compete for airtime against football and basketball, has been a hindrance when it comes to getting TV coverage.
"It's that time of the year when everybody's playing, and so far we just haven't gotten the support from the NCAA or ESPN in helping to grow the world's most popular sport," Cirovski says.
But with more than 100,000 fans routinely turning out for college football games, the Super Bowl drawing a national televised audience of more than 100 million, and college basketball's March Madness transfixing a large part of the country, not all soccer fans are sure that the sport should worry about converting mass numbers of American sports fans.
"We live in a culture that's ever more fragmented and niche," says Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic and author of "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization." "I'm not sure that soccer's ambition should be to rise to those sorts of levels. It may just be unachievable. But I do believe the sport's roots here are pretty firm and aren't going anywhere."
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062204694.html?hpid=topnews
World Cup draws viewers, but soccer generally is watched by few Americans
By Neely Tucker Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, June 23, 2010
It's the World Cup! The globe is going nuts! U.S. television ratings are soaring! The United States plays what amounts to an elimination match against Algeria Wednesday!
These are heady days for soccer in America -- 14 million people tuned in for the first-round World Cup match against England, a number that might be surpassed by Wednesday's match for a berth in the tournament's final 16 teams -- but no one is expecting these games to collectively scream Gggoooaaaallll!!! to millions of American fans.
A generation after the Brazilian legend Pelé came to play for the (long since defunct) New York Cosmos, and 11 years after Brandi Chastain gave U.S. soccer its iconic moment, ripping off her jersey after winning the Women's World Cup for the United States, the trajectory of professional soccer in America has settled into steady, generational growth, its practitioners say, rather than a bombshell that might soon challenge the nation's big three sports of football, baseball and basketball.
"Over the past generation, soccer has become the number one participation sport in the country," says Kevin J. Payne, a co-founder of Major League Soccer in 1996 and president of D.C. United, the most successful team in the league. "We have a successful league of 16 teams and we're expanding to 18 next year. Our crowds and revenues continue to grow, not as fast as we'd like in some markets, but spectacularly in others. Merchandising is up. Sponsorships are up. I can't imagine any other sport that would not like to have the growth rate we do."
Payne's best player over the years has been a kid out of a small town in Pennsylvania, Ben Olsen. When Olsen began kicking a ball around in the early 1990s, he loved the game but didn't see much of a future in it. He "didn't know a single soccer player," and "could never get a game on television," Olsen says.
Still, he was named the Parade magazine's national high school player of the year in 1993, the collegiate player of the year (while at the University of Virginia) by Soccer America magazine, and Rookie of the Year for MLS, playing for D.C. United, in 1998. He played for the U.S. World Cup team in 1996.
Today, at 33, he's an assistant coach in a league that didn't exist until he was already a phenom in the sport. It irritates him, Olsen says, the endless comparisons people make between soccer and the nation's bigger sports.
"This league is at a toddler stage," he says. "You oftentimes get this us-against-them thing, you know, 'When is soccer finally going to take off?' That's not what it's about. It's about growing this league and getting better, and that's happening every day."
While more than 3 million kids or teenagers are enrolled in some sort of soccer league across the nation, the development of an adult fan base has taken time. D.C. United has won the MLS Cup four times, more than any other team, and plays in the cosmopolitan Washington area, where it is able to draw on a diverse fan base. And yet the crowds have averaged 15,000 to 20,000 over the past decade; plans for a new stadium have seating set at a modest capacity of 24,000.
On the collegiate level, the University of Virginia won the NCAA title in men's soccer this year -- yet averaged 1,822 fans per home game. The University of Maryland, the previous national champion, averaged 2,469 fans. Both were in the Top 10 of national attendance for the sport in college.
Given those numbers, the fact that a record 14 million Americans watched that first-round game in the World Cup might seem more like a blip of curiosity than a harbinger of sustained interest. But the head coaches at each school say those fan numbers are misleading indicators of the sport's popularity. The weekend games draw more than 5,000 fans each, they say, and the infrastructural growth of the sport is profound.
"When I had players go pro in 1996 to 1998, they were getting MLS contracts for about $24,000," says George Gelnovatch, the head coach at Virginia. "Today, the contracts for the top six to 10 players in the country are going for about $200,000. . . . When you compare that to in the 1980s, and I was a player, and the best thing you could hope for was a college scholarship, the growth in one generation is just astounding."
Sasho Cirovski, the head coach at Maryland since 1993, has taken his team to two national titles, and like Virginia, to its status as one of the elite teams in the country. He's also been chairman of the Division I soccer coaches association for seven years and, in that position, has fought for more television exposure. He says TV coverage is key for the sport's growth, and that soccer's fall schedule, when it has to compete for airtime against football and basketball, has been a hindrance when it comes to getting TV coverage.
"It's that time of the year when everybody's playing, and so far we just haven't gotten the support from the NCAA or ESPN in helping to grow the world's most popular sport," Cirovski says.
But with more than 100,000 fans routinely turning out for college football games, the Super Bowl drawing a national televised audience of more than 100 million, and college basketball's March Madness transfixing a large part of the country, not all soccer fans are sure that the sport should worry about converting mass numbers of American sports fans.
"We live in a culture that's ever more fragmented and niche," says Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic and author of "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization." "I'm not sure that soccer's ambition should be to rise to those sorts of levels. It may just be unachievable. But I do believe the sport's roots here are pretty firm and aren't going anywhere."
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062204694.html?hpid=topnews