Sorry, soccer fans, but sitting on my ass for 90-minutes to watch a match end in a 1-0 score isn’t going to get Mr. Bishop to purchase season tickets anytime soon.
I’m not saying that soccer players aren’t tremendous athletes – the amount of conditioning required to play the game is substantial. Elite soccer players, like other professional athletes, spend years of training, competition, and sacrifice to be the best at their sport. Out of respect for the players and the game, I tried, unsuccessfully, to become a soccer fan while working in Germany for a year. If anyone could turn my opinion on its head, it would be the soccer-hungry Germans.
It didn’t work, and it wasn’t because of the vuvuzelas.
I take most of the blame here, folks, so try not to crucify me just yet. Unlike American Football, where commentators will happily point out a 4-3 defense, a spread offense, and the subtle chess match between coaches to finesse a win, I never received the same education from commentators during the soccer games I watched. I played soccer as a young man, but that wasn’t in the same universe as a national team.
I try to imagine what the NFL would look like to someone unfamiliar with the rules, scoring, etc. However, the amount of analysis before, during, and after the game is a huge benefit for new, casual, or hard core fans, and that’s something I don’t see soccer (at least in the US market) accomplishing.
For the layperson, this is how a soccer game plays out: Team 1 kicks ball to another Team 1 member somewhere down the field. The sender isn’t laser-accurate, so possession goes to Team 2, who repeats the exact same strategy. Variations on this theme is to occasionally see multiple members from Team 1 bounce the ball back and forth for a bit, and maybe get close to the goal until the ball either gets picked up by the Goalie or it simply gets kicked away by a Team 2 defender. It’s basically tennis without a net and with a snail’s pace. Every so often a referee throws a yellow or red card, and that is usually the highlight of the match, as you get to see some Oscar-winning performances from both teams hoping to plead their case (or do their best impression of a catastrophic injury).
Yes, I grossly oversimplified the game of soccer, but that goes to show just how little US soccer has dedicated to generating interest in their sport. The US has been sending the NFL to Europe for years, and they have built a fairly decent fan base on that side of the pond. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there are certainly some die-hard soccer fans, but they are a niche-group at best. I was a salesman for a brief period, and we had free tickets to events to give away to accounts. Every season, without fail, I was stuck with a pile of Sounders tickets leftover – the fan base just wasn’t there.
When I heard that the US Men’s Team failed to qualify for the World Cup, I have to admit I shrugged. To me, hearing that the Men’s Team wasn’t going to the World Cup made as much impact as hearing that Call of Duty players at UC-Santa Cruz weren’t making it to the E-Sports finale in Vegas. In both cases, I recognize the time, effort, dedication, and joy that the players and managers have for their chosen profession, but neither entity has made a case of why I should care.
So what is the solution? How do we get folks like myself excited about soccer? First step is to start making the games exciting, and not just for folks that played soccer their entire life. Maybe hire some commentators that could pull interest away from other sports, especially in the off-season. I’m not saying it would pan out, but maybe if you had a Kirk Herbstreit or ripped off the format from College Game Day, it could result in higher viewership/interest. Pull back the veil on game planning and show idiots like me the strategy behind what looks like kicking a ball downfield and hoping that your teammate is somewhere in the vicinity. Also, do you know how many commercials I’ve seen starring a soccer player? A handful, and the only folks I recall are David Beckham and Mia Hamm. Am I aware of any of the Sounders’ players, their backgrounds, or the charities they support? Nope – even coverage by local news is brief, because they understand demographics.
These are just my opinions, folks. If you want to throw some ideas out for me to consider, I’m open. As stated earlier, the folks that play this sport professionally are gifted athletes, no doubt, but there needs to be an effort to move the sport out of the niche (read: rut) it is currently in and generate more mainstream interest.
Thank you for reading!
Necessary Motto 