The numbers:
According to the U.S. Soccer Federation, governing body of the sport in the United States, there were only 103,000 registered youth soccer players in the U.S. in 1974, but there are approximately 1.5 million now.
According to the USSF, there are 8 million registered and unregistered under-19 players in the U.S.
According to the Soccer Industry Council of America, more than 15.3 million Americans under 18 played soccer at least once in 1988.
And, wait, here`s a news flash: According to reliable sources, more than 230 million Americans polled last week admitted knowing that a soccer ball is round.
That may still be all most Americans know about the sport, even if a lot of their kids now play it. Playing the numbers game with soccer to show how the game is booming only reinforces the notion that statistics can be made to support any argument.
Which numbers accurately reflect the state of U.S. soccer is almost impossible to ascertain. No matter which way you figure, it doesn`t yet add up to the major-league future that has always been predicted for the sport in the U.S.
The time has come to do the math again. The opening of the 1990 World Cup tournament in Italy Friday begins a critical four-year period for soccer in the U.S. It culminates with the next World Cup, the world`s most popular sporting event, being played in the U.S. in 1994.
Two generations of sports fans have grown since the U.S. last played in the quadrennial World Cup, in 1950, but now the American sporting public will see Team USA in two straight. The U.S. made the 1990 World Cup through regional qualifying, and it gets the host`s automatic spot in the 24-team field for 1994.
Soccer`s future in the U.S. may not be now, but it is at least at hand. The question is what that future will be.
Is it best measured by these numbers?
ESPN`s telecast of the historic victory over Trinidad & Tobago last November that earned the U.S. soccer team a place in the 1990 World Cup drew a 0.8 rating. That was less than one-third of the audience that watched the routine NASCAR auto race (2.7) aired before the soccer match. ESPN`s 14 World Cup telecasts in 1986 averaged a 0.4 rating. Exactly 22 minutes of soccer were broadcast among the 180 hours of Olympic action shown in the U.S. in 1984. An ABC executive recently sniffed, ”Any women`s bowling match does better than soccer.”
Or these?
The 1984 Olympic soccer tournament in the U.S. drew 1.4 million spectators, an average of 44,456 despite having 12 of the 32 matches in stadiums with capacities of 30,000 and 22,000. There were two crowds in excess of 100,000, and three others in excess of 78,000, making soccer the best-attended sport at the Games. In their four-year heyday, 1977-80, the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League drew six crowds of more than 70,000. In the past year, the U.S. soccer team played to crowds of 61,000 and 42,000.
Or these?
The Los Angeles Heat of the American Professional Soccer League had an average attendance of 300 in 1989. This year, for the weekend of May 11-12, the seven games in the APSL`s East Division drew crowds of 718, 1,093, 1,288, 517, 2,972, 3,271 and 501. The weekend of May 4-6, the Marlboro Cup of Chicago barely drew 10,000 combined for four games involving two World Cup teams, the Polish national team and a Mexican club. The NASL, born in the 1968 merger of two leagues hastily formed in 1967, died before the 1985 season.
”In as little as five years,” Phil Woosnam, then the NASL commissioner, said in 1977, ”this country could be the center of soccer in the whole world. In five years, the Soccer Bowl will be as big as the Super Bowl.”
Woosnam`s optimism was based on having the 1977 Soccer Bowl between the Cosmos and Seattle drew 35,548 to a neutral site (Portland, Ore.). Woosnam was only the most hyperbolic of those saying soccer was going to be the sport of the 1980s in the U.S. The decade ended with no major outdoor professional league in the U.S.
”It is clear that having the World Cup here in 1994 presents the greatest opportunity U.S. soccer has ever had to take a quantum leap forward into the U.S. sports consciousness,” said Scott LeTellier, president of the World Cup `94 Organizing Committee. ”It`s inevitable soccer will re-establish itself as a pro sport, and we will accelerate that development.”
It was, after all, the first telecast of a World Cup final (1966) in the U.S. that spurred the development of the NASL. Having the U.S. play in consecutive World Cups and having one of them in the U.S. must do more. If soccer is ever to become more than a splendid recreation and extracurricular activity in the U.S., it must do it during the next four years.
”The cat has only so many lives,” said Jim Trecker, press consultant to the World Cup `94 Organizing Committee and former chief publicist for both the NASL and the Cosmos.
The national team, at least, is more alive than ever. It qualified for both the 1988 Olympics and this World Cup, in which its making the second round would be as incredible as it is unlikely. The U.S. probably needs a victory and a tie in first-round games against Czechoslovakia, Italy and Austria to advance.
”I recently went to the United States, where soccer is nothing,”
Austrian coach Josef Hickersberger told a French soccer magazine. ”It interests no one. Their (the U.S.) presence in Italy is frankly useless.”
Countered U.S. midfielder Tab Ramos: ”We just want to do our little bit for U.S. soccer.”
Ramos` attitude echoes the realistic expectations that even U.S. soccer boosters have started to accept after years of blaming all the sport`s problems on inadequate media coverage.
The U.S. may have a youth soccer boom and more colleges playing soccer than football, but it is still a Third World nation in soccer, which is called football just about everywhere else. That stature is especially ironic, because soccer in the U.S. is essentially a white, middle-class, suburban sport, just the opposite of the game`s demographics in most of the world.
Soccer, which has its modern roots in the English working classes, became the world`s preeminent sport early in the 20th century, when British armies and workers exported it to colonies around the globe. By then, the U.S. had already created its own mass sports: baseball, football and basketball.
According to Italian sociologist Beniamino Placido, interviewed by the newspaper Repubblica, soccer was rejected by Americans because it was ”too English, too European. People who fled Europe because they were attracted by new horizons, a new frontier and new perspectives on life want to stay far from memories of what they left in the old continent.”
Even though organized soccer has been played in the U.S. for more than 100 years, it was limited to a few adherents: European immigrants and Anglophile students at Eastern colleges and prep schools. There have been professional or semipro leagues in this country almost continuously since 1921, but they rarely advanced beyond minor-league status.
A substantial professional league is considered necessary both as a marketing vehicle and as a way to develop the players who could make the U.S. consistently competitive at the highest levels worldwide. The surge in participation over the last 15 years has not translated into enough spectator interest to support such a league.
”The numbers playing are a remarkable untapped resource,” LeTellier said.
The mainstream has never been tapped for a variety of reasons:
– Many of those who began playing soccer in the past 15 years either had no league to watch when they became old enough and/or do not yet have children whom they, as parents, would take to games.
”We`re just approaching the generation that has grown up with soccer and is interested in watching it,” said Clive Toye, the NASL`s last commissioner and a soccer executive in the U.S. for the last 23 years.
”The foreignness isn`t a problem anymore. The game has become an American game. You can tell that by turning on TV and seeing advertisements for cars with kids being driven to a soccer game or for soap with soccer uniforms being washed.”
– The sport has been marketed poorly in the U.S. From the wild spending in the NASL to lure foreigners, to the corruption of the game by indoor soccer, to the promotion of the U.S. national team by the U.S. Soccer Federation, there has been no sensible, consistent approach to selling the game.
”It is a confused marketplace, and we don`t have a high level of confidence that programs will be executed,” said Hank Steinbrecher, director of sports marketing for Quaker Oats, which, through Gatorade, invests in youth soccer.
Steinbrecher, Bruce Hudson of national team sponsor Anheuser Busch and Jim Paglia of Chicago`s Tassani Communications all were highly critical of the USSF during a recent Soccer Industry Council of America symposium.
”The United States Soccer Federation has historic and structural constraints to deliver on sports marketing programs,” Steinbrecher told the meeting. ”We believe-at least I believe-that they (the USSF) lack a professional infrastructure to support large dollar commitments.”
This anecdote is considered typical: In his initial meeting with Steinbrecher five years ago, USSF President Werner Fricker spent the first 20 minutes explaining the game. Steinbrecher, who would not comment on the incident, had played in college and had coached a college team for 12 years.
Another case in point would be the USSF`s inability to get good turnouts for clinics organized by a national team sponsor. So would the fact that potential sponsors often are given the same proposal from a variety of people claiming to represent the USSF. So would the USSF`s consistent overestimate of its properties` value.
”When USA Soccer Properties (the USSF`s marketing agent) comes to us and tries to sell us a package to sponsor the U.S. national team 12 times a year, and they give us some time on a telecast and some board signs and they want $1.5 million a year . . . my senior management looks at it and laughs,”
Hudson told the symposium. ”I`ve got to believe other corporate sponsors are doing the same thing.”
Woosnam, a partner in USA Soccer Properties, said such criticism is ”not well informed.”
– The USSF itself, which is also the legal parent organization for World Cup
`94, has been under siege for several years. It has a large debt, rebellious constituencies and a bunker mentality, the last a reflection of Fricker, its volunteer president.
Fricker, who would not return phone calls, is considered responsible for a byzantine network of alliances that has both kept his Central European faction in power and assured that Bob Gansler, of German-Hungarian stock, will be the national coach through 1994, no matter what happens in Italy.
– A rose-colored view of the sport`s future that sees Brazil`s Maracana Stadium, with its 200,000 seats filled, instead of Hershey (Pa.) Stadium, with its high school football field, where 12,063 saw the U.S. national team beat Poland 3-1 on May 9. There is already talk of a second U.S. pro soccer league beginning in 1992.
Asked two weeks ago to reflect on his 13-year-old idea that soccer would be bigger than the National Football League, Woosnam said, ”I believe one day that will be the case.”
Others are more reasonable. Steinbrecher feels that by the year 2000, soccer will have a professional league that ”given cultural phenomena, will be subjacent to the Big Three (football, baseball, basketball) and some day will be equal to hockey.”
”I don`t know if in my lifetime we`ll be a truly major league,” said Toye, co-chairman of the American Professional Soccer League. ”That`s not as important to me as being meaningful to a significant number of people.
”Why worry about other sports? We are our game, building ourselves and our marketplace. It doesn`t matter if we draw 2 million a year. This country is big enough that a number of entities can be successful, and doesn`t need to prove it by saying, `We`re better than them.`
”As long as we give someplace for the game to grow and the U.S. player to grow and draw enough fans to pay our bills, we`re successful. If the level isn`t as good as the rest of the world, so what? It`s our level.”
That attitude prevails in the APSL, essentially a semipro league with 22 franchises (none is between the East Coast and the Rockies) and a 20-game schedule. It has a team salary cap of $75,000 and allows only two foreigners per team.
The NASL went just the other way. It spent millions on foreign stars such as Pele and Franz Beckenbauer. It required at first only that there be at least two Americans among the 11 players on the field at all a times, a minimum that had increased to five at the time of the league`s demise. Its contract with ABC-TV proved a mixed blessing, providing revenue while revealing empty stadiums and a level of play that made coveted TV exposure seem like the emperor`s new clothes.
”The league had a 10-year plan, and paid no attention to it,” Trecker said. ”You know how soccer people are; their zealousness saw only the positive.
”We went through a period of misguided expansion and a period where we developed no big-name Americans to be role models. A generation of
professional Americans was skipped because of the reliance on foreigners.”
Ironically, though, the NASL left a significant American legacy because of its deep involvement with the startup of youth soccer programs. From those programs, and later from college soccer, came nearly all the 22 players on Team USA`s World Cup roster.
They are likely to be the nucleus of the 1994 team as well, giving them the time to become relatively well-known role models. Ironically again, though, after the World Cup the best of them are likely to sign pro contracts with European teams, which offer better salaries and a better level of play than the APSL. It is something of a Catch-22.
”If I would have to say, `I play for the New Jersey Eagles (of the APSL),` big teams would say, `Who`s that?` ” said U.S. forward Peter Vermees, who did play with the Eagles but since has been with teams in Hungary and the Netherlands.
”We can`t come anywhere near offering Vermees what the Dutch league can,” Toye said. ”For a period, we will be like Denmark, with a poorly attended national league at home and the best players abroad.”
Toye hopes the USSF can use its financial gains from the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, which could exceed $20 million, to work out a joint contractual agreement with the APSL that will keep some national team stars in the U.S.
The USSF does have a plan, released in 1988, that takes the game into the next century. It is based on ”1) the development of a highly competitive national team in the near future; 2) a multilayered development system to enable the national team to be competitive through the `90s; and 3) the development of a sophisticated professional league structure encompassing three divisions.”
Whether the USSF can implement that plan is obviously questionable. Even more problematic is its role in World Cup `94, particularly after the fiasco when its deal for U.S. TV rights was rejected by the Federation of
International Football Associations (FIFA).
LeTellier, who was soccer commissioner at the 1984 Olympics, insists he has had ”very few problems of any sort with the federation.” It is expected, however, that FIFA will take a more active role in World Cup `94 once this year`s event is over, even if that role is to ensure LeTellier and his associates on the World Cup `94 Organizing Committee complete control.
Given the United States` track record at staging big events and the American public`s interest in attending such events, of any type, there seems little doubt the 52-match World Cup itself will be a success. The question, of course, is the aftermath-immediately, in the year 2000, and beyond.
”The most important years for U.S. soccer are between now and the 1994 World Cup,” Toye said. ”Unless a structure is in place, World Cup could come and go and leave nothing but nice memories.”
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MONDAY: Moving beyond the grass-roots level.
