The following is a three way discussion regarding the future of American soccer.  It is basically a series of emails that we decided to make into a blog post.  There is a lot discussed here so feel free to comment.

Chris: I think a reason that soccer will never be a major sport on the level of football at least….no commercials.  Nobody will every pay enough to put it in prime time with only 20 minutes of commercials at half time.  No prime-time=less eyes=not a major sport.  Unless they can think of a way to get advertisements more involved like little mini commercials on the side during the game or something.  I guess if enough people were interested they’d find a way to do it.

Jason: I agree with you with the Ads but find it absolutely idiotic and retarded that less commercials would turn networks off from showing the sport primetime…the fact that America puts commercials ahead of the sport is embarrassing…just a little side rant.  I’m sure you’d agree with me there.

Chris: Now I’m not saying that less people would watch it because of less ads.  it absolutely would make people want to watch it more and is one of the things i like about watching soccer.  Those games are going to be two hours…every time (except of course for the tournament win or lose games obviously).  But the fact of the matter is that the reason that sports are on in primetime and played on Saturdays and Sundays is because that is when the largest number of people can watch them and thus advertisers will pay more to be on the screen.  But in a sport where the only commercials are 20 minutes in the dead middle of the game, do you really think people are going to pay a boatload of money (think Super Bowl type money-$1 million per minute) for a commercial when they know that people are going to go to the bathroom/get food/etc?  That being said it goes back to my point, if those games are on and enough people want to watch them, advertisers WILL find a way to reach the market.  They will just have to find a way and create it.  This is kind of the problem that online streaming episodes are having–nobody has really found a way to truly tap into the advertising market of them because there are no straight up commercials and people aren’t willing to pay as much for advertisements.

Jason: Yeah I hear what you’re saying….and basically my point was that it’s insane that soccer won’t be on primetime just because of the lack of commercials.  Options around that would be of course tons of sponsors on highlights, sponsored key players of the match, short fill-ins on breaks in action and tons of commercials pregame, halftime, postgame to make up for it.  But yeah I agree, I’d want to use the bathroom during halftime as well.

Jack: I’ve actually got another reason it won’t become a major sport.  Too much subjectivity.  In today’s day an age American fans cannot stand the constant subjectivity from our officials.  We saw way too much of that in this World Cup and lots of horrible calls.  Also, we can’t stand the stalling/flopping/terrible sportsmanship.  But one announcer said something really telling to me during the Ghana match.  This is just how soccer is.  FIFA isn’t going to change it because that is how the rest of the world wants soccer to be; 3 officials and only 3 officials.  It makes sense because in poorer countries they can’t afford to have all this technology and all the other stuff.  The people that are really up in arms over this are mainly the Americans, who quite honestly FIFA doesn’t give a shit about because they are marketing their game to Europe, Asia, South America, Latin America.

But yes, the commercials thing is a real problem.  But I bet it’s one they could fix if they just put their minds to it.  Maybe superimposing advertisements on the field like they do for the SEC games and all that stuff.  I don’t know. Just spitballing.

Chris: Yeah that was my other point.  Cowherd said the same thing this morning.  Football/baseball/basketball represent America.  There’s a shitload of rules, it’s very regimented, and if something goes wrong, we hold people accountable/review it.  Soccer represents a lot of the rest of the world.  Europe, they take their time with everything and nothing is really structured.  Wanna take a 2 hour lunch…go for it.  Wanna stay 20 extra minutes for coffee?  Why not?  We’re gonna add some extra time to this game…how much?  Oh I don’t know, three minutes sounds good…Larry down there on the field is gonna tell yall when that’s up.  Also, the rest/most of the countries where soccer is big are largely poor or at least not wealthy.  What do you need to play soccer?  A ball.  What do you need to play football?  A ball, helmets, pads, cleats, etc.  Same thing for baseball but less for basketball (which is why basketball is largely urban nowadays).

Tevez's offsides goal against Mexico

Jack: Yeah, basically Cowherd and I agree on that.  The stuff that happened in the Mexico/Argentina game and the England game would never happen in USA if we ruled the sport.  But we don’t.  And i think they want soccer to be uniform everywhere, and in those poor countries they can only make it uniform with less rules/less accountability, and the like.

A rather sparse MLS crowd

Chris: But it all comes back to what you just said.  If the MLS ever gets up their talent level and keeps the good guys in the US, people may start going to games.  and if people start going to games they’ll start putting them on TV.  And if they’re on TV people will watch and they will find a way to get money into it.

Jason: The fan base is going in the right direction, now we just need to work on developing talent…that’s basically the gist of it .

Chris: Pretty much.  I worry though that soccer fans are over blowing the fan base and the amount of people that are going to start following soccer.  I think those numbers still have an extremely long way to go.  The fact that the Ghana game was only the 15th most watched sporting event of THIS YEAR really says a lot, considering we still have six months to go.  That’s definitely an improvement for soccer here, but it was still behind the US-Canada hockey game (granted if we would have made it to the World Cup finals, it would have blown that out of the water I think) and hockey already has a bigger following in the US.  I just think most of those people watching were watching for the flag and not the sport, but I could be wrong.

And that again goes back to what you just said, nobody likes to watch lower level talent.  If it was that quality I would probably watch more of it, but I’m not going to be watching a whole lot of EPL at 9 in the morning or 2:30 even.  It’s a very full circle discussion here.

Jason: I think the interest in soccer is slowly increasing.  I personally will become involved in EPL soccer and I was never into it before, so that’s a good example right there

Chris: Yeah but you were a soccer fan already.  Soccer has to do the same thing that hockey has to do:   get the sports fans who are avid NFL/NBA/MLB watchers only (me) to give up watching one of those sports for soccer or at least add it to their repertoire.

Jason: It of course starts with American National team soccer, but I think it really needs to pick up in the college ranks.  Let me ask you this:  if LSU had a men’s soccer team (along with the other SEC schools) and competed in a season similar to the Big 3 sports, would you be inclined to attend a few games and follow them if LSU did their job to promote it and have decent facilities to host it?

And as a follow up, would you continue to keep an eye on our good players when they graduate and move on to the MLS or European leagues?

Chris: Honestly, as I stand right now, I would not.  But that goes more towards the amount of free time I have right now than anything else.  If I were back in undergrad, I guess I would consider going.  Really we would have to have a strong program and be competitive.  I mean think about it.   I would maybe go to five basketball games a year as a pretty die hard LSU fan, and that’s a healthy estimate for me at least.  I seriously doubt I would go to a soccer game unless there were priority points involved or if it was a very significant game.  That again goes to my point that the amount of people were watching the World Cup only because of the significance, not necessarily to watch the game.  But you have to realize that we’re in kind of a bubble in South LA where football and baseball (to a lesser extent) are king and the only other sports that will get any attention whatsoever are those in which the team is dominant (see LSU basketball attendance in 05-06 compared to its sharp decline when our wins went down or Hornets of 07 compared to before and after attendance numbers).  So I guess I would be a yes and a no.  I would certainly watch the games that were on TV if I had nothing else to do, but as far as going out of my way to go to a game, probably not.

I would go along with your second point though.  I would definitely keep track of any players as they moved to other leagues.  For example, while I cited not going to many LSU basketball games, I most certainly watched any Celtics game that was on TV just to watch Big Baby and did check box scores etc to see how he was doing.  Same thing goes for baseball and of course football.  So if some LSU soccer players made it to the MLS or the EPL, it would certainly garner more of my attention, which in turn could lead to going to or watching more LSU games to see the next big star.

Jason: I asked my brother about women’s soccer and he said they get about 700 on average, which would probably mean about 1200-1500 would show for men’s soccer.  Factor that number into all the other colleges that don’t have men’s soccer programs and you’ve got a pretty solid new fanbase.

Here’s the basis of my argument.  The College Sports Council did a study about college soccer in D1 schools for the 2008-2009 year.  Here’s some of the main statistics from their report:

-310 Women’s D1 teams compared to 197 Men’s

-8117 female players compared to 5607 male players

-93.1% D1 programs offer women’s soccer, only 59.2% offer men’s

-384,000 guys and 345,000 girls play high school soccer across the country.  Women are alotted on average 14 scholarships compared to 9.9 for men.  This means that the odds of those guys getting soccer scholarships is around 197:1, while for girls its 79:1

-In the state of Texas, around 27,000 guys play high school soccer.  Only Southern Methodist has a D1 men’s program.

Title IX was made to equalize college sports as far as men and women go.  The problem is, it does not take into account interest in sports, an area that the male sex will always overwhelm the females.  The fact that all of these D1 major universities do not have soccer programs only because of a rule that wants to make male and female sports equal is just illogical.  Until schools are allowed to have men’s soccer teams if they feel it will be beneficial to the school, we will have a major roadblock in the way to becoming a country that truly cares about soccer.

Chris: I see your point but I don’t completely agree with your application.  “Until schools are allowed to have men’s soccer teams if they feel it will be beneficial to the school, we will have a major roadblock in the way to becoming a country that truly cares about soccer.” I think your logic is backwards here.  The thing that is keeping schools from having soccer teams is that the country in large part does not care about soccer.  I think men’s soccer and wrestling were probably the biggest casualties of Title IX but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist anymore.  There are still a large number of schools that still have soccer, they have just had to justify keeping it based on the interest of their students by adding more women’s sports.  If soccer was a more popular sport and LSU knew that it would be a profitable sport, they would find women’s sports to add.

That being said, I will agree that if Title IX didn’t exist, LSU would have men’s soccer and maybe we COULD get that development and nationwide appeal.  For instance, Jack was just talking the other day about his cousin who was a soccer stud but never played in college because it just wasn’t worth it to him.  If LSU had a team then maybe he would have gone there and achieved greatness, who knows.  And I’ve heard many stories like this before as well.  But the point is that there has to be enough interest from the spectators AND the players to overcome Title IX.

Side note, kind of going back to me and Jack’s conversation after looking at the schools that DO have D-I soccer.  Does anyone find it strange that a sport that thrives in poor countries largely because of its simplicity and the ability to play it with very little materials is mostly only popular in affluent regions/schools in the US?

Jason: Yeah that’s actually a really good point.  However, the sport seems to be becoming more bi-racial in the US so maybe that’s a good start to spreading it to more of the country.

Is Jozy Altidore the next big thing?

Chris: Yeah, that is kind of the problem facing baseball right now with how to get more interest from urban areas of the country.  I think I said in another discussion that having Donovan score that big goal against Algeria will provide kids with a soccer hero to admire and aspire to become.  Much like I would pretend I was Dan Marino throwing touchdown passes in my back yard, maybe kids will streak from one end of their yard to the other to tap in the winning goal and maybe, just maybe that could generate the youth movement that would be needed for the country to gain a widespread soccer audience.  As the lack of truly elite African American baseball players is often cited as one reason that baseball has yet to spread to poor urban areas, it is unfortunate that the African American players for the US such as Jozy Altidore were unable to capitalize on their many goal opportunities in big situations and likewise failed to give the young African American children of America someone in soccer that they could feel the same way about as I did about Dan Marino.

Jack: The thing that’s amazing though is that college soccer actually has a minimal effect in my opinion on why soccer isn’t big enough in America.  The real problem is just that people aren’t playing it year round and there isn’t the number of kids playing it here as there are in other countries.  While this may not be completely accurate, I would venture a guess that in the soccer superpower countries they get at least 80-85% of the talent to eventually play soccer.  This is based on the fact that they don’t have other options.  In the United States, the thing that makes us unique also hurts us:  OPTIONS.  That is because when a kid is good at soccer, he is probably pretty good at baseball, basketball and football, and those are sports where the parents are more than likely willing to pay for him to travel and perform at high levels.  This is because there is more of a future in those sports.  In Brazil, if you are good at soccer, congratulations, that’s your one shot to get out of poverty.  So basically in poorer countries or countries where they have a solid national soccer league, the best athletes play soccer, even if they are really good at another sport.  But in the United States, the best athletes play the other sports.  So who does this leave us to play soccer with?  The answer is this, it’s the small number of kids whose parents really like soccer; or the more realistic option, it’s the kids that are good at soccer that aren’t good at any other sports.

I’m not saying it’s an inferior sport.  I’m saying that most parents, when their kid is good at baseball, basketball and football, and they are going to be spending a ton of money on the kid and having to make tough financial decisions, are going to tell the kid to go and play the other big 3 sports.  So yeah, in that way, soccer is kind of inferior.

Take Clint Dempsey.  His parents basically made him give up soccer because his sister was a big time tennis star and she could make more money.  The only reason he got to do all he was doing was because of her tragic death.  I mean, that right there just shows how we nearly lost another top 3 United States player.

To continue that line of the argument, Landon Donovan is the greatest US Soccer player we’ve ever produced.  But when they were ranking the top 100 players in the world before the World Cup he was in the 60′s or 70′s overall in the world.  I don’t believe for a second, with the money and sheer amount of people we have, that the best we can do is top 70 in the world.

Jason: To Jack’s point, I definitely agree with you.  Soccer at best will be a 4th or 5th level sport in the US no matter what happens.  That being said, we’ve got the best football in the world, the best basketball in the world and arguably a top 5 baseball in the world.  Why can’t we expand our dominance even further?

Chris: Because I think it goes back to the fans.  Any sport will have its hardcore fans that will make it a niche sport at worst, but it takes pulling the casual sports fan to become a truly elite sport in the United States.  Hockey has probably been the 4th biggest sport in the US for quite some time now and their inability to jump into that elite tier or sports has been largely because of their inability to get the casual sports fans to follow their sport.  In that regard I think hockey and soccer have a lot in common.  So far the only time that there has been a large following for soccer or hockey in the US has been for the Olympics/World Cup.  But for us to “expand our dominance even further” it’s going to have to get the people that like sports but otherwise wouldn’t really watch them to enjoy spending their time watching them.  The fans are what drives sports and without the ability to get large amounts of people that wouldn’t normally watch soccer in their living rooms with a fridge full of beer, soccer will never be an elite sport in the US.  So the question to me then becomes, do Americans have the time, patience, and desire to have a fourth major sport?  Personally, I do not.  Because of that, I truly believe that soccer will have to overtake one of the 3 major sports in order for it truly to become elite in this country.  And honestly, in the long run, I think that it could seriously challenge baseball for a number of reasons that we’ve already mentioned: the matches are ALWAYS two hours long (ADD nation–this is honestly one of my favorite things about soccer, and least favorite about baseball), it takes little to no money to play, and right now it’s kind of cliché “cool” thing to do.

Jason: Soccer will never be elite in the US.  It’s a fact.  The argument is to whether its popularity can increase enough to move to the next level on an international scale.  This, in my opinion, isn’t something that requires us to make it a Top 3 sport.  I mean, look at snowboarding or golf or swimming.

Chris: Wow, I can’t believe I gave soccer more credit than you.  I can honestly tell you that I really believe that baseball is in for a dive in the next few years.  Baseball is a sport that is suffering from low attendance across the board despite ticket prices going up.  It’s an incredibly boring sport to watch and games can last anywhere from 3 hours to 5 hours.  While we don’t have an MLB team here, when I was in Denver I only went to one game and that was mostly due to the ticket cost and the fact that if I went to a game, I didn’t know if I was going to get home at 10 o’clock or midnight and for someone that had to be up at 5 that was a serious consideration, as I’m sure it is for every parent in America.  However, if you want to go to a soccer game at 7, you can be at home and in bed for 10 no problem.  Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on the time thing but I really think it’s a serious consideration for a lot of people.  And as baseball fails to put people in the seats, soccer is slowly gaining more popularity.  If in ten years all the things that we’re saying happen and the MLS becomes a pool of talent, I could seriously see them giving the MLB a run for their money.

Jason: I’ve thought about it and come up with a plan to improve US Soccer to the point where we’re expected to compete with the best in every MNT (Men’s National Team) event.

• Replace Bradley and the upper management with European soccer minds: Don’t get me wrong, I like Bob Bradley and what he’s done for the team.  However, he’s had his 4 years to put his stamp on this team and has failed to do so.  In the Ghana game, starting Clark and Findley, leaving gaps in the central defense and relying almost strictly on a long ball attack were all coaching gaffes that wound up contributing to our defeat.  When you’re working with a team with less big game experience and less technically sound players, the last thing you need is to also deal with coaching deficiencies.  This is why we need to start fresh with people who know how to compete on the big stage and have been there before.  Our coaching has to be near perfect right now to even have a chance of advancing far into the tournaments.  Jurgen Klinsmann is a guy that comes to mind that could really help our team.
• Find the Spark: As Chris kind of alluded to earlier, we were lacking that one guy who the team revolves around and would want the ball in pressure situations.  Now, I like Donovan a lot and think he’s one of the best players to come out of the US, but he’s just not that guy.  He disappears way too much and has not been the pure creator on offense that we need.  Jozy Altidore definitely showed signs of this during the World Cup, but the guy really needs to learn how to finish his attacks and make quality shots on goal.  It is up to coaching at both the higher and lower levels to mold players to have this kind of demeanor.  Which leads me to…..
• Better Evaluation/Development of Players: This is probably the most important issue.  We might have had a team with great players who have the potential of winning big matches, but it is pretty obvious that they were not as technically sound as they needed to be to do so.  Now I’ll concede the fact that with the dominance of the Big 3 sports in America, we might not be able to get the best athletes in the country.  However, we can do a better job at the younger level bringing up talent and removing them of bad technical habits at a young age.  I’m basically concerned with the U17 and U20 NT.  It is extremely important to get our best coaches, talent evaluators and support behind these two teams.  This is the future of American soccer.  If we can get a solid core group of young players on these teams that can compete at their respective World Cups then we’ll be able to better bridge the youth-adult soccer gap and get these guys WC ready by the time they make the real MNT.
• More Activity Overseas: Let’s face it:  trying to fix MLS right now is not really our main concern.  In order to get people to become interested in American soccer we need to first reel them in through our National teams.  In the meantime, how about we let our best talent (those U20 and MNT guys) develop overseas in European leagues so that they gain the necessary experience against higher competition.  Instead of hoping that these players start off in a diluted MLS, shouldn’t we be ecstatic every time one of our guys get a chance to play in a REAL league?  I know college is another issue we were talking about  but while I think it is important for fan support, I feel that these 18-21 year old soccer stars should be also trying to develop their skills overseas instead of sticking around to play college ball in the US.  The point is, our goal right now should be to develop our best players so that they compete with the rest of the world when it comes to Olympic/World Cup time.  We shine in the World Cup and the MLS and fan support will follow.

Jack: On the “will soccer become big?” thing:   I think that I was too negative in my ideas on it.  I think that if 16 years ago (pre-strike), if you had asked people if baseball would become clearly the third tier professional sport and would often be played in front of largely empty stadiums, they would have thought you were crazy.  This thought has happened for a lot of reasons: skyrocketing ticket prices, games being too long (the USC-UCLA national championship game last night went 4 hours – nobody who doesn’t have a rooting interest will watch that, it’s just too long), and now just big disparities between the have’s and the have not’s.  Soccer doesn’t really have those problems yet.  In Europe, their ticket prices are extravagant but that won’t stop you from watching the games on TV, and that’s because their games last 2 hours, and that’s it.  Also, as we saw with the World Cup, in soccer there is a feel that anybody can win anytime, and it’s weird to think that a “draw” for a team can be a win, but it’s actually kind of cool.

So do I think soccer will be big. Able to compete with football? Probably not.  But I do think that it can at least start to be competitive for America’s youth and maybe some more fringe markets in the more near future.