When Josep Guardiola, former coach of FC Barcelona and probably best soccer coach on earth right now, was signed this past week by the German soccer club team Bayern Munich, seemingly no one in the United States cared about it.
This example is just one of many showing that the United States is soccer lethargic. Despite the desperate attempts by the U.S. soccer federation to establish soccer as a national sport right next to the four major sports, the average American only realizes that the sport still exists when the World Cup is happening.
After the United States is once again eliminated from the World Cup — and no, the U.S. has not ever won the World Cup, though they have tried nine times so far — soccer can be relegated to the back burner by endless insight on the Harbaugh rivalry.
Do you know who the latest Major League Soccer champion is? And by the way, who is the coach of the United States national soccer team again?
The reason why many U.S. citizens can’t answer these questions is obvious: American TV coverage for the world’s most popular sport is scarce. Whenever you turn on the biggest sports networks in the country, they talk about football. If it’s not football, it’s baseball, basketball, or hockey. There is simply no room for soccer.
But why should there be? Soccer is not attractive for TV. Unlike in all other major American sports media, timeouts are not available in soccer. For ESPN to broadcast a 45-minute halftime in soccer means a loss of millions in commercial revenue. Soccer just isn’t sustainable in a country where even a first down at a college is sponsored by a local bank.
Soccer just doesn’t fit in with the history of the United States. Baseball and football were both founded on this side of the Atlantic and grew with the history of the U.S. Americans are proud of their history and defend their own sports with all they have. Soccer, as a foreign sport brought in by immigrants, is just a thread in Americas’ proud sports history.
Still, the MLS doesn’t want to give up. Before 2007, it paid the TV networks to broadcast its games while the NFL made close to $2 billion that year. Unlike most other leagues worldwide, it has shifted its season from a summer to spring schedule to a spring to fall format in order to avoid interference with football.
During the past five years, five new teams have joined the MLS to expand the league to 20 teams. Still, soccer is only the fifth greatest sport in the U.S. — if it’s not behind golf.
But all in all, the majority of the United States isn’t complaining. To be a soccer fan only every four years during the World Cup, they don’t need to know that the Los Angeles Galaxy have won the MLS lately and that Jürgen Klinsmann is the national team’s head coach.
Do you think soccer has a chance of making it in the U.S.? Email him at am794811@ohiou.edu.
