Soccer Vs Football - Only Room for One

With the arrival of David Beckham in Hollywood, American soccer again makes a play for its home audience. Much like the spectacle of Germany's Franz Beckenbauer, Italy's Giorgio Chinaglia and Brazil's Pele wearing the uniform of the otherwise invisible New York Cosmos decades ago, today's Los Angeles Galaxy seeks to sweeten its bottom line and heighten the profile of professional soccer in the United States with the addition of not only a legitimate soccer star with top-flight international experience, but (with his wife, Victoria, the once and future Spice Girl), a legitimate international celebrity. Shrewd marketing, but doomed to failure.

Not failure in the sense that the league will not survive. The MLS has defied expectations thus far, carving out a stubborn niche in this land of immigrants. But failure if there is any thought of becoming something on the scale of European football, with the energetic following those professional clubs receive. There is one fundamental reason for this: no room.

The professional soccer season runs from late August through late May, during which period the rest of the world is ablaze four or five days a week with soccer action. Major European teams play in their domestic leagues on Saturday and Sunday, and during the week travel to play games in the UEFA Cup competition, the Champions League competition, and depending on the year, either a major continent-wide championship like the current EURO 2008 series or the World Cup. Many countries also have a intramural competition among all levels of its soccer teams that is contested during this 10-month period.. For the soccer fan, this means that your interest in your hometown club and your national team is constantly stoked and every game has some kind of importance.

By contrast, in the U.S., there is a similar frenzy, but for most of the time, it is directed toward the National Football League. Though American football is played by a fraction of the athletes who compete in professional soccer around the world, that fraction plays its unique game in the richest country in the world. The NFL, in partnership with the major television networks and advertisers, have established a franchise that dominates the sports landscape during the exact months of soccer's peak interest, and has even grown to be widely considered the national pastime, supplanting Major League Baseball, which occupies the last portion of the international soccer schedule. And in between those time periods, the rapidly ascending National Basketball Association reigns, with teams from coast to coast. While soccer struggled to reach its core audience, the NBA shot past it, and is now solidly entrenched on the American sports landscape. Given these obstacles, it is hard to see soccer ever gaining more than the marginal prominence it now enjoys in the U.S. And it is a shame, because the ingredients for success are all here.

First, the natural soccer constituency is now, and always will be, right here. We are an immigrant nation, and a sizable percentage of our population grew up with soccer, and not suburban fields-and-everybody-gets-a-trophy either, but top-flight international competition with a history hundreds of legendary years in the making.

Second, soccer is nonstop action, just what Americans crave. There is contact, and drama, speed and skill. It would be child's play for the American advertising industry to promote and sustain a soccer fan base with a product like that.

Third, soccer is personality-driven, again a natural for the American public. The meteoric rise in personality programming and gossip "news" is a clear indication of the American taste, and the small rosters of soccer teams and the wealth of soccer personalities, an industry in themselves around the world, would feed nicely into the American "buzz" machine.

Yes, it would all work perfectly and successfully, probably even give America a much-needed primer on the international scene, since a successful American program would draw the best international players, leading eventually to America's entry into the major tournaments previously mentioned. Except that the USA developed its own sports universe, which grew in prominence and power as America itself grew and became wealthy, and that independence is now permanent.

So soccer must take its place, and given the breadth of interests and the sheer magnitude of the American population, it can be a viable, ongoing place, among the secondary sports in this nation. It will always be the Beautiful Game. It just won't be the Game of the Week.