In the image to the left is at the MLS championship game. The size of this stadium is pathetic; in football the stadiums are huge and are almost always full. The attendance to this game was 22,427 people where as the Super Bowl has 68,206 people and the World Series had 42, 479 people. This means that baseball has almost double the attendance at the championship game and football has over tripled the people that go to the games, and this is just the people that are there let alone the people that are watching it.
Soccer: The game America doesn't watch
This month, all the world is going crazy over soccer because of the 24-nation World Cup soccer tournament in Mexico City.
All the world, that is, except the U.S.
An estimated 10 billion international television viewers are watching the games that, on June 29, decide the champion for the next four years.
But in the U.S., TV ratings have been dismal--despite a 400 percent increase in youths playing the game since the mid-'70s. The game, with few exceptions, simply hasn't caught on with U.S. sports fans. Some indicators:
Only a handful of newspapers provide regular coverage, usually buried inside the sports pages.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association's soccer championship game attracted only 5,000 fans to Seattle's Kingdome last year; college basketball finals drew 40,000 there in 1984.
Last March, the 17-year-old professional North American Soccer League officially folded.
Back in the '60s and '70s, the league's leaders, like soccer advocates today, had pinned their hopes on two elements: The growth in youth participation (now, over 5 million people ages 6 through 21 play in organized leagues) and soccer's popularity elsewhere in the world. In 1975, a multimillion-dollar spending spree brought Pele and other stars to the U.S., but public attention eventually faded, and club losses averaged over $1 million each annually starting in the late '70s.
Soccer enthusiasts blamed American indifference toward pro soccer on several factors: The game's low scores, lack of roots here, no American superstars and the country's dismal record in international play. Indeed, no U.S. team has made it into the World Cup finals since 1950. In the current competition, the U.S. was eliminated by Costa Rica in regional matches in 1985.
Now, the low TV viewership for the World Cup--ESPN's cable broadcasts of the finals are not as popular as pro bowling--has underscored soccer's longstanding problems in America. More than 20 years after the first national youth soccer league was founded, there still is no large U.S. audience. The 8 million soccer players of all ages simply haven't converted into professional soccer fans--that is, paying customers.
Soccer's boosters argue that large-scale participation didn't begin until the mid-1970s, when a million youths joined soccer leagues. Many still haven't finished college. Also, most of today's players see the game primarily as a recreational --not as a spectator--sport.
There is, though, at least one group of Americans that both plays the game and watches it, too: Hispanics. In part, that's because they were raised doing both, and they have Latin American teams with which they identify. In fact, the only bright sign in U.S. World Cup TV coverage so far is the Spanish International Network's broadcasts. In Los Angeles, SIN's airing of the opening game had the second-highest rating of all TV shows aired in its afternoon time period.
Soccer advocates hope that similar fan interest soon will be shown by those native-born Americans who have been playing the game since the mid-1970s.
"I see 40,000 to 50,000 fans going to games in major cities within 10 years,' predicts Keith Walker, national administrator of the United States Soccer Federation, the sport's governing body. Other officials see growth but think 10,000 is a more realistic attendance figure.
Among hopeful signs:
The biggest drawing event of the 1984 Olympics was the soccer final between Brazil and France, when 102,000 fans--mostly native-born Americans-- jammed the Rose Bowl to watch.
The number of colleges with men's soccer teams has grown to 549, up from 421 a decade ago--more than the 504 football teams currently fielded by NCAA colleges. A few universities draw up to 9,000 to their soccer games.
Although most of the 12 teams in the professional Major Indoor Soccer League are losing money, the fast-paced, high-scoring game has crowds up to 20,000. In Cleveland, the team outdraws the local pro basketball team at home.
These are good omens for Peter Bridgwater, a former NASL official and head of the seven-team, semiprofessional Western Alliance League. He sees the fledgling league, which averages 2,000 fans a game, as a training ground for future World Cup players and the seedbed of a national pro league. He's hopeful but realistic about the future:
"We're not going to be really major league for a long, long time--if ever.'
Photo: In Mexico, crowds of about 100,000 are jamming Azteca Stadium for World Cup finals
Photo: In America, 5 million kids play in soccer leagues
I think that this is a very accurate essay. There is no real reason why we do not watch professional soccer. In the eighth paragraph the author is talking about the reasons our nation isn't involved with proffesional soccer. The first reason he said was the low scores, but there are some football games that have low scores; and what about baseball there are many games that teams don't score any runs, it seems that this is an awful excuse. The second reason is the lack of roots in the country. It doesn't matter where the sport started, baseball wasn't started in the United States and it is one of the most popular sports that is watch. Also look at lacrosse, this sport was created by indians and they hardly show a game on TV. Last he talks about the weak play of the United States in the world cup, just because they do bad doesn't mean you stop watching them. The Red Sox went from 1918 to 2004 until they had won a world series and there were fans that never stopped believing in them.
In the next paragraph the author tells us that professional bowling is watched more than soccer. I believe this is pathetic, who watches professional bowling that is incredibly boring. This is so lame I never thought that professional soccer was that boring to watch.
Althought this article was published in 1986 there have been very few changes. Now soccer might be watched more than bowling but I don't believe so, bowling is on ESPN every sunday afternoon and soccer is on maybe once a week, and there are 13 teams in the MLS(Major League Soccer) and then there are also all the games in Europe.
