After making a less than favorable impression during his ill-fated tenure as the L.A. Galaxy coach earlier this year, Ruud Gullit has been idly theorizing about the future of soccer in the United States. His considered verdict is that soccer will not be allowed to become popular in the U.S. due to a widespread fear that it would displace the already established major league sports.
He told Mark Lamport-Stokes that while David Beckham “does extremely well to give football [soccer] here a lift,” Gullit doubts that “they” (which Reuters qualifies as “U.S. soccer organizers”) want that to happen. “I think they are afraid of football because it’s so popular everywhere around the world. I think they will just control it so it doesn’t become more popular than their American sports. So it is very hard for him [Beckham]. I have my doubts if they really want to make it popular.”
Gullit also implicitly expressed his regret at having taken the L.A. job. “I don’t know if I would have taken the same decision again, that’s for sure,” he said. “The rules and all the things that they do here are so different from what we do in Europe.” He said the standard of play in Major League Soccer was “reasonable, especially under the circumstances.” But all the travel and the changes in temperature and altitude “made it all extremely hard, especially when you had to go to the East Coast in the summer. It was 32 degrees Celsius, 80 percent humidity and on [artificial] turf. That’s ridiculous and it made it all very hard for the players to perform every week.”