One week after the MLS final, I opened my Sunday paper to find two articles about soccer, but not the soccer of MLS or World Cup or NCAA or FIFA.
In the Metro section of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner was a story about the local “Soccer in the Streets” chapter. On the back page of a section cleverly entitled “Sunday,” sports columnist Joan Ryan had composed a fictional slant on the Soccer Mom phenomenon.
To the Midnight Riders of New England and the Barra Brava of D.C. United, these stories don’t mean a thing. Yet they do indicate the long-ridiculed sport of soccer is indeed slipping into the American consciousness. MLS can trumpet millions of dollars in sponsorship and attendances far better its extremely modest projections; I look at examples closer to home, in the world outside the orbit of Planet Logan and the Alan I. Rothenberg Trophy.
At a drugstore the other day, on a package for anklets — those tiny socks that cover the foot, ankle and not much more — I saw a soccer ball. Advertisers will tell you half of selling is catching the consumer’s eye. Can a soccer ball be so familiar and yet so compelling it can sell socks? Not long, clean soccer hose, but plain old anklets tucked alongside a hundred other items of little cost and negligible importance. No doubt some consultant will soon be crunching the numbers on the cost-effectiveness of soccer-ball packaging.
What does this mean for MLS? Too soon to tell, I’m afraid, for the league is still mainly a local curiosity in MLS cities, and virtually a non-entity elsewhere. On a pro sports radar screen cluttered with spitting ballplayers, NBA jillionaires, and Neon Deion, MLS barely rates a mention, and often a disdainful one at that, no matter if more than 34,000 fans fought their way through a monsoon to watch the final.
What do the ratings mean?
The morning of MLS Cup ’96, Boston Globe TV/radio writer Jack Craig prefaced his paragraph regarding the championship game with “Those who care are arranging their schedules…. ” and ended with, “The event should benefit from low expectations.”
Unfortunately, for MLS, not many viewers around the country arranged their schedules to catch the grand finale. The game drew a 1.4 rating nationally (about 1.33 million households), which in Craig’s perspective surely validated his outlook.
Yet viewer interest in MLS, and soccer, cannot be accurately measured by a ratings box planted on top of a Motorola in Omaha. This assertion is made by ESPN’s Bob Ley, whom U.S. Soccer has drafted as play-by-play announcer for the upcoming home World Cup qualifiers to be televised on ESPN and ESPN2.
Ley spoke at an MLS breakfast briefing hosted by Nike the morning of the championship game.
“We know there are more people watching than that,” Ley said of a lowly 0.4 rating earned by a European Champions’ League telecast last spring. “Everybody in this room watched it. A scientific sampling of America is not going to show you who’s watching soccer.
“But those numbers drive our industry. That’s an unfortunate truth, unless you can somehow prove that 0.4 is really a 1.0.”
One of the most famous outakes in ESPN’s history is anchor Gary Miller, frustrated during the World Cup by his inability to correctly pronounce the name of Italian keeper Gianluca Pagliuca, gritting his teeth and growling, “I hate soccer!”
You can be sure if instead of a goalkeeper, Pagliuca was a champion skier in the mold of Alberto Tomba, Miller would have worked at pronouncing the name until it flowed off his tongue like a Tomba pick-up line. But if a few funny foreign names get fractured, so what?
Don’t expect this to change soon, not when the Wiz draws 12,000 one afternoon and the NFL Chiefs pack Arrowhead Stadium (real capacity: 73,873) the following day. Soccer’s legacy is that of a money-loser, and when MLS sings its own praises for an inaugural year that sank $20 million more than it raised, skepticism will persist.
Soccer fans bombard ESPN with complaints and rage at some of its programming, but the cable network makes money. Soccer doesn’t. Grouse all you want about auto racing and the X-Games, but there are sponsors stacked up for those programs.
Yet, ESPN2 is showing a weekly English Premier League game, and will begin televising English highlights in December. MLS ratings were on a par with those for the NHL and college basketball.
The first MLS season was a good one, and a long time coming after the North American Soccer League coughed its last in 1984. That was the summer of the Los Angeles Olympic Games, of course. The day after I and about 100,000 other folks watched France beat Brazil 2-0 in the Rose Bowl to win the gold medal, me and about 2,300 of my best friends visited Jack Murphy Stadium to watch the San Diego Sockers dismantle the Tampa Bay Rowdies, 5-1. The death knell had sounded.
This thing called MLS
Vast sections of America still have no idea of what is this thing called MLS. To use another media barometer, Sports Illustrated — contemptuous enough of soccer to misprint names easily checked in stories (Paul “Caligari” and “Joctao” Havelange) — greeted the inaugural game with a piece obsessing on the 1-0 scoreline and grumbling darkly about MLS’s single-entity structure.
Four months later, SI burbled excitedly about the league’s success in a four-page love letter, and neglected to mention the sellout crowd of 92,216 that came to watch the Galaxy-Mutiny June 16 match at the Rose Bowl might have had more than a passing interest in the U.S.-Mexico friendly that preceded it. Thanks, we’ll take it.
Neither extreme truly reflects where the sport stands in this country. But it’s about time American soccer fans got a break. They’ve responded to MLS enthusiastically, and in some cases, rabidly.
Peter Berlin, sports editor of the International Herald Tribune, wrote a column raving about the atmosphere of a D.C. United-MetroStars playoff match at RFK Stadium, likening it to a major European or English game. (Luckily, he didn’t arrive in time to see the Rapids in Mile High.)
Early in the season, MetroStars’ followers chanted at Alexi Lalas, “The old red-hair just ain’t what he used to be.” Dallas fans displayed a poster proclaiming “In Dodd We Trust.” Crew hard hats sell well in Columbus, a city where a columnist decried the U.S. national team’s “theft” of striker Brian McBride for U.S. Cup duty. Thousands of D.C. United fans greeted their team at Washington National Airport when they returned with the Alan I. Rothenberg Trophy.
Still, the league draws snide remarks on SportsCenter. The summary of a Clash playoff game in the San Jose Mercury News referred to the team as “Sharks,” the NHL team. Fans calling radio-talk shows are often cut off, sometimes rudely, unless they’re lucky enough to live near one of the few stations that broadcast a regular soccer program.
“It’s all too easy to take shots at the sport, and I see it first-hand all the time because it’s an easy or cheap laugh,” says Ley, one of the league’s few friends in Bristol, Conn. “I think there are a lot of members of the media who need to expand their thinking, and it’s all too easy to be comfortable.”
Sports fans have responded
Logan asserts the sport does currently have appeal to a small segment of traditional American sports fans, those disgruntled and disgusted with rocketing ticket prices, arrogant ownership groups and the seemingly endless parade of jocks into jails.
One such recent convert is Tony Medillo of Reston, Va. He’s Anglo and built like a high school catcher who’s caught far more burgers than fastballs since graduation. He watched one 1994 World Cup match at RFK Stadium and caught the fever.
“Baseball’s completely screwed up and basketball is headed the same way,” said Medillo, who played baseball in high school. “I can’t believe people forget so quickly. It’s only been two years since they completely ruined the season.”
Medillo bought season tickets for D.C. United and says he missed only four games. He didn’t miss the final.
Perceptions of soccer have certainly changed in the corporate world, and MLS has signed an impressive list of sponsors in addition to outfitters Nike, adidas, Puma, and Reebok. Pepsi has joined Fujifilm, MasterCard, AT&T, Budweiser, BIC, and Honda, among others.
“A few years ago, when we were trying to sell the World Cup, we couldn’t even get our phone calls returned,” says D.C. United general manager Kevin Payne, at the time working full-time for Soccer USA Partners.
“Numbers don’t lie,” Ley said. “Not just the opening weekend, but there were several weekends during the season when the Dodgers, who were in a pennant race …. the Galaxy outdrew them.
“Things like that are going to open eyes.”
The soccer Mets outdrew the baseball Mets by about 3,000 fans per game. But try to find more than an occasional reference to the MetroStars in the New York Times, or on a Big Apple newscast.
Says Logan, “I’m a realist, in that when it is in a decision-maker’s enlightened self-interest to cover [a sport], he or she will cover [it]. When not covering will make that person look like an uninformed idiot in front of his or her colleagues, that’s when, all of a sudden, attitudes change.”
On this subject, I heartily agree with the Commish. I saw it repeatedly during the World Cup, as hordes of the smugly righteous descended upon training sites and stadiums, desperate to somehow conjure up a column, or feature, or segment on this wonderful festival they’d been either slanging or ignoring up until the first kick.
Many of them eventually gave grudging acknowledgment that this World Cup wasn’t such a bad thing, then quickly raced to the conclusion this country could never support a pro league because, because, because, blah, blah, blah. Such a spin justified dismissing soccer at a time the entire country was loving it.
This might be the most bitter battle for MLS. Putting grass in Giants Stadium, widening the fields in San Jose and Columbus, wrenching a lucrative TV rights deal in a few years, pushing up the attendance figures … all those monumental tasks might come easier than breaking through the hostility that still envelops the sport.
For MLS is the bashers’ last stand. They said the World Cup would be a flop, that attendances would be terrible, that the U.S. team would crumble. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They’ve retreated as each of their stereotypes has collapsed.
Now, they are backed up against the gate and soccer fans are climbing the walls. Qualifiers and friendlies come and go, but MLS is in their faces for most of the year. Their only hope is MLS fails miserably, so they can eradicate this foreign infection once and for all.
And it could certainly happen. Logan hopes for a modest attendance increase of 15 percent for next season, a goal not easily attained without the novelty of a new league and with dire problems in Tampa and Denver.
Logan has already taken some drastic steps by putting the boot to Tampa GM Farrukh Quraishi and moving the league offices to New York. Expansion has been deferred because renovations to Soldier Field in Chicago will tie up that facility for at least the next three years, and the league believes it can still secure a more lucrative TV contract when the current deal expires in 1998 even without the huge Chicago market.
“What we’re looking for is slow, steady growth, and permanence,” said Logan.
It may not be sexy, but it’s the only way to go.
by Soccer America Senior Editor Ridge Mahoney