“Soccer is the sport of the future in America, and it always will be.”
That’s the joke we’ve heard our entire lives here in the United States. Or as Comedian John Oliver put it a couple weeks ago: “I know that in America, soccer is just something you pick your ten-year-old daughter up from.”
Perhaps, The Simpsons nailed it perfectly. This post from Slate profiles an early ’90s episode that conveyed exactly what Americans USED TO think about soccer. I emphasized “used to” because, things have changed since then.
To use the cliche, “numbers don’t lie” and ESPN produced some IMPRESSIVE numbers from the USA versus Portugal match.
The 2-2 draw was the most-viewed soccer match in the United States ever, averaging 18,220,000 viewers. It surpassed the previous high of 17,975,000 viewers for the 1999 Women’s World Cup final on ABC. It’s the highest rated non football telecast in ESPN history. It peaked around 23 million viewers, which are seriously NFL numbers. That’s about the range of your typical Sunday night football game.
Is this just a passing fad, or a sign that things are truly changing? Well, it’s a little bit of both.
I’m not expecting soccer to become the national past time in the next five, ten years or anything like that. However, it is “growing.”
The actual “green shoots” have sprouted now.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, soccer is now the second most-favorite sport among 18 to 24-year-olds.
The 1994 World Cup recorded a still-standing record attendance of 3.59 million despite being the last tournament to include 24 teams, rather than 32.
But of course, soccer is light years, and I mean light years away from the NFL. As is everything else. The 2014 Super Bowl was the most-watched television event in U.S. history with 111.5 million viewers.
1. I’m not saying you will care or should care about Major League Soccer
A poll released in March revealed that MLS is just as popular with the teenage demographic as Major League Baseball. Think about that for a second.
Of course, MLS is only “Major League” in places like Seattle and Columbus. Like the NHL, it’s not a “major sport.” Not even close. It’s niche
The actual major leagues are: the NFL which slaughters everything. Year round, the shield rules uber alles. College football is a solid #2, but it’s a distant second. For one month, college basketball is not only a major sport, but THE major sport. Of course, most of you ignore it the rest of the year. The NBA aired a re-run for the NBA Finals and it still tripled the ratings of the Stanley Cup Final- a hockey series which had the top two markets playing each other!
Baseball is out-dated and declining. It doesn’t translate at all to Twitter. The micro-blogging platform is made for huge events, that we can all assume. Baseball has 30 teams each playing 162 games a year. There’s nothing huge, let alone big, about any single game. There’s just way too many of them to even try to care about any single one. Or as the Wall Street Journal put it:
“Major League Baseball offers 162 games that feel more retro every year in our Twitter -addled world. The NBA ambles along in hot spots like Oklahoma City and Memphis. The NHL’s southern strategy hasn’t worked so well, and Nascar’s bid to break out of the South hasn’t panned out as initially hoped.”
And MLS is somewhere well below all of this.
However, it is moving in the right direction, and it is the one sport that is guaranteed to see an uptick in growth, due to the changing demographics of America. Their core demo of the population is also growing.
Again, maybe you don’t care about MLS, and you’re certainly not alone in your apathy, but you might care and you probably will care down the line. Trust me. It may be way down the line, but you will see it as relevant someday.
2. English Premier League being broadcast to America is the game changer I predicted it would be a year ago
As was written on this very site yesterday: “the truth is there is something utterly foreign to Americans about soccer. For it to truly become an American sport it must capture the American conscious. And words matter.”
I covered the growth of the British Premier League in America for the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. I co-authored an in-depth, extremely researched piece on it. The foreignness is what works against soccer taking off, but it might not be that way forever. Americans don’t tie. They don’t “draw” either. The exoticness of the sport could attract new consumers, but for them to stay it will have to be more American and less foreign.
The BPL is now available to Americans through NBC Sports, and year one was an astounding success. Year two will be even better.
Getting this rights package has now made NBC….the Ewoks? in the sports media universe.
Obviously, ESPN is the Empire and Fox Sports is the upstart rebellion. CBS is….well, they’re totally irrelevant compared to the other three. Sometimes I wonder if they’re even really trying. At least NBC is actually on the map now. And Fox getting the Champions League rights, as well as World Cup rights in 2018 will help them make the gap smaller between Bristol and everyone else.
August 17th 2013 was a huge date, it was the day Fox Sports 1 launched and NBC began its Premier League coverage.
Of course, it’s going to be a very long time, if ever, that anyone comes close to catching up to ESPN. They have a 35 year head start on everyone, and if you actually look at the production values and effort, versus the competitors, they deserve to be where they are.
But the English Premier League starts up again on August 16th, and it gives America something to watch until they can get their crack fix (regular season NFL) again.
Premier League is key towards getting Americans to embrace soccer. It’s the #1 league in the world. It’s also in the “mother country,” and it’s in English. No language barrier there. Just the soccer terminology to pick up. Because “words matter.” After PL, it probably goes like this: Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A, France’s Ligue 1….well, you get why MLS isn’t actually “Major League” now, don’t you?
Now that the EPL is finally available in the U.S. it will keep Americans interested in soccer in between World Cups.
3. Baseball is going the way of boxing and horse racing; now’s the time for soccer to step up
Baseball doesn’t get page views. I’ve been saying this for years. It just doesn’t. Period. Look at the White Sox pathetic attendance at their ballpark, now imagine that as website unique visitors statistics.
Unless it’s optimistic bullshit about the Cubs supposed super prospects, which of course will NEVER come to fruition, as the Cubs have had their next savior in line for the past 70 years, or making fun of the Cubs organization doing desperate things trying to attract attention or money, there is no point in me posting anything more about MLB here.
Since 2009, I’ve realized that my doing Major League Baseball stories is a waste of your time and mine.
Why is this?
One of my friends, an Associated Press Sports Writer, told me in the media room after a college basketball game: “baseball never caught up to modern life”
He’s right. I know baseball still does pretty well, at times, on television. I know lots of news sites bang you over the head with baseball coverage. Fine.
It’s their funeral (from a business model stand point).
4. What we learned from the 2011 Women’s World Cup
This site broke it’s monthly traffic record in July of 2011; due to the Women’s World Cup. We’re on pace to break that record this month (this time it’s a men’s World Cup..hopefully I didn’t just jinx it there by bringing it up…*knock on wood*)
The USWNT run to the title game captivated a nation. And not just because we think Alex Morgan and Hope Solo are hot; although that helped. Then the women’s soccer team won gold in London in 2012. This is when soccer started to take off on the women’s side. Or at least became a very popular sport among female youth.
Okay so maybe Hope Solo acts like a sociopath and makes poor life decisions sometimes. And Alex Morgan seems like a corporation disguised as a human being. Seriously, the next time Morgan says something entertaining or interesting publicly, it will be the first time.
But they still grew the sports better than any two individuals could.
Men’s soccer can learn from this example. The next time I get people to actually click on something I write about Landon Donovan, it will be the first time. Men’s soccer is still behind women’s soccer at this point. There are no male Alex Morgans or Hope Solos.
5. Where we are and where we are going
Things have changed in 2014. There is progress. That is undeniable.
Yes, a lot of Americans will lose interest in soccer once this World Cup is over. However, some of them will stay. But it will be a long time, if ever before soccer is considered one of the most popular sports in America.
Paul M. Banks owns The Sports Bank.net, an affiliate of Fox Sports. He’s also a frequent guest on talk shows across the world. Banks has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including NFL.com, Forbes, Bleacher Report, Deadspin, ESPN, Washington Times, NBC and the History Channel. President Barack Obama follows him on Twitter (@paulmbanks