Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)
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With the emergence of Real Salt Lake - spelled ReAl on the logo as a pronunciation aid - it seemed the professional game was coming full circle. The days of clubs unashamedly named Eintracht and Hispano had eventually given way to more self-conscious entries purporting to be Americans or Nationals, with the professional renaissance of 1967 attempting to drive the sport further into the mainstream. Now things had swung in the other direction, but in an odd sort of way. 'ReAl Salt Lake' had no connections to royalty or any Spanish heritage (Utah's Spanish-speaking population is well below the national average). Its name was just as much a fabrication as the two Zs of the city's minorleague entry, the Utah Blitzz.
Foreignness, it seems, is now hip. For 2005, the Burn ditched MLS's silliest remaining nickname and rebranded itself simply FC Dallas, replacing its fire-breathing horse with a Texas steer. An imminent move to a $65 million, soccer-specific facility in the suburbs - lamentably christened Pizza Hut Park - convinced Lamar Hunt, the team's new investor-operator, that it was the ideal time to unveil a team name that is more synonymous with the sport', even if one wire service report still saw the need to mention that 'FC is short for Football Club'.
Of course, expansion is no indication of prosperity, and the league cannot necessarily bank on the unwavering support of its two most committed patrons, Anschutz and Hunt. When taxpayers in Kansas City voted in a referendum against paying for improvements to Arrowhead Stadium, Hunt put the Wizards up for sale, diplomatically claiming that he 'did not fully recognise [soccer-specific facilities) as a primary need when the league started'. By then Anschutz had divested himself of the Rapids (sold to a billionaire property developer with NBA, NFL and NHL interests), and announced DC United and San Jose were available as well. Just about every other big city in the country, as well as some in Canada, has been spoken of as a potential MLS market, meaning the possibility of an NASL-style franchise merry-go-round - something the league has commendably avoided thus far - still exists. So does another purge of less promising teams.
The rechristened Dallas reached the Open Cup final, where they lost away to the Galaxy, but played host to the 2005 MLS Cup, and Pizza Hut Park filled to its modest 21,000 capacity for a match between teams with contrasting regular-season form. New England, managed by ex-Liverpool defender Steve Nicol, had accrued the most points in its history, while Los Angeles, limping into the play-offs with the fewest of the eight qualifying teams, had spent much of the summer contemplating the future of Steve Sampson.
Yet on the back of a few play-off victories - including an upset of San Jose, who had finished 19 points in front of them in the Western Conference - and a narrow extra-time win over the Revolution in the final, the Galaxy claimed an improbable double, boosted by the arrival of Donovan from Leverkusen (he made it a condition of his return that MLS assign him to Los Angeles). The Most Valuable Player award went to St Louis-born Taylor Twellman of the Revolution, whose 17 goals made him the league's leading scorer. He, too, had spent a joyless time in the Bundesliga - in two seasons he never appeared in Munich 1860's first team - and cited the September 11 terrorist attacks as a determining factor in his return home ('I suggested the players wear black armbands ... the coach said I must be nuts').
'If we didn't have a professional league in the United States, I don't know where we'd be today,' remarked Bruce Arena as the league completed its tenth season. But the grim years following the collapse of the NASL offer a pretty good clue. Aspiring to create 'the fifth major league sport in America' is still regarded by many as a pipe dream, if not an outright impossibility. Yet depending on how 'major league' is defined, this may already have happened. Surviving for a decade is in itself some kind of success. The number of teams is growing, as is the number of top-quality American players and maybe even fans who will sit through a 0-0 draw of their own free will. A survey conducted by USA Today in early 2004 indicated that less than five per cent of the country was 'very interested' in MLS (more than 74 per cent said they were 'not at all interested'), but five per cent amounts to about 15 million people, close to the population of the Netherlands.
The league still faces a long, uphill road, but most of its steps seem to have been in the right direction, and rarely has it cast its gaze too high into the heavens. No doubt it has learned from the NASL not to make Phil Woosnam-style pronouncements about overtaking the NFL or turning the US into the centre of the football world. Rival leagues may not currently be in the rudest of health - a players' strike cancelled the entire 2004-05 pro ice hockey season - but all are such integral parts of the sporting landscape it is hard to imagine any of them losing their grip. Thus, while disappointing ratings prompted ABC-TV to end its 36-year association with the NFL's Monday Night Football in 2005, ESPN quickly stepped in with $8.8 billion for an eight-season helping of its own. It is likely to be a very long time before M LS is offered that kind of money - or appears on network TV during peak viewing hours.
Generating a large TV audience remains the league's biggest challenge. It's one compounded by the attitude of US broadcasters, whose indifference and ineptitude quickly becomes apparent to anyone switching over to Spanish-language coverage of the Mexican League. Almost 40 years after CBS first brought it into the country's living rooms, television still hasn't figured the sport out. Soccer continues to be presented as if it were gridiron, despite the fact that its near-continuous play does not lend itself to the interruptions of the padded game (pre-recorded interviews, recaps of earlier highlights, diagrams of 'plays' on screen), nor to such frivolous baggage as the 'field reporter', whose generally desperate attempts to contribute something useful from the touchlines serve mainly to disrupt the flow of play. Commentary remains woefully rudimentary, even amateurish. Though many 'play-by-play' men have become adept at shouting very loudly into the microphone during goalscoring opportunities - presumably in an effort to convey 'passion' for the game, like their Spanish-speaking counterparts - they often fail in the more essential tasks of correctly identifying players, the reason for a foul or even the direction a free-kick has been given. The reason soccer ratings remain pitifully low may not be entirely down to the sport itself.
MLS has pursued the construction and ownership of soccer-specific stadiums as its holy grail, and over the next few seasons the majority of teams are likely to find themselves in homes of their own. This may be the most honest evidence of a long-term commitment to the sport, and it's certainly one of the most positive developments American soccer has known. But whether owning one's own turf makes a significant difference to the bottom line is yet to be seen. Six years on from the first match in Columbus Crew Stadium, the league is still losing an awful lot of money and there is no empirical evidence that fabulous riches await the billionaire willing to underwrite the construction of a modest stadium or two.
The best hope for MLS may be in developing itself as a niche professional league, one that grows without attempting to compete with its more celebrated rivals. Markovits and Hellerman suggest in Offside that precedent has been set by other recent developments in American consumerism:
Certain aspects of American culture have become uniform across this vast continent as never before. Yet, an equally impressive array of identity-forming experiences have undergone processes of fragmentation and segmentation that are new ... Bagels, cafe latte and microbrewed beers have not replaced doughnuts, Maxwell House instant coffee, and Budweiser beer in contemporary America; rather, these products and their cultures have found a relatively comfortable way of coexisting in America's consumption space. However, this space either got larger or much more diverse - or most likely both - in the course of the last two decades of the twentieth century. The world of sports mirrors both these processes.
Some have argued that the league's modest existence could even be turned into a selling point, that the huge amounts of money and avarice swirling around big-time American sport have alienated large numbers of fans. The biggest stars of MLS are more approachable than those in other sports and f
igure much more rarely in arrests, 'substance abuse' and other foibles. But the idea that hordes of disillusioned baseball fans would warm to soccer primarily out of despair seems no less fanciful than thousands of jaded British football fans suddenly discovering basketball. Others maintain that until MLS begins to compete on a global scale for top international talent, well-behaved or otherwise, interest will remain scant. This, though, is an attitude not far removed from the one that brought the New York Cosmos to prominence 30 years ago, one that certainly helped to popularise the game but also sowed the seeds of the NASL's extinction.
Of course, soccer in America has moved on considerably since then, and perhaps nowhere have the past 30 years brought about greater change than with the national team. The US qualified for the 2006 World Cup with two games to spare, having lost only one of their 16 matches (away to Mexico, of course) and won every meaningful contest at home. They scored in every game, claimed victory by two or more goals eight times, and never showed any sign of losing their way. Only with qualification assured were Bruce Arena's team required to enter the Monster's Cave - they lost, 3-0, but with a weakened team. 'You'll look back on it and say it's real easy and it's a breeze,' Arena reflected. But it's not a breeze. It's very difficult.'
Not nearly as difficult, though, as it once had been. Even a fourth-place finish in the final group of six now earned a play-off berth with an Asian representative, and few doubted that the most half-hearted American performance was capable of that. The question was never really whether the US would make it to Germany for 2006, it was what they would do once they got there. Never, in six decades of qualifying, had presumption reached such giddy levels.
Of the slew of hopeful newcomers, one in particular made a breathtaking impact. Dallas's Eddie Johnson scored five times in his first three internationals, including a 17-minute hat-trick against Panama, enthusiastically celebrated by US fans as a world record. Far from the suburban stereotype, Johnson grew up in an inner-city neighbourhood in Florida, where friends introduced him to the sport, and headed the list of goalscorers at the 2003 World Youth Cup, the first American to do so. Benfica soon weighed in with a $5 million offer, one bravely turned down by an MLS still looking for stars.
While in recent years African-Americans have become a common sight in the national team (though less so behind the scenes), inner-city and working-class minorities still find it hard to break into the largely middle-class, suburban world of American soccer. In particular, Latino players who have ascended from MLS or anywhere else to national team stardom are thin on the ground. The league has made some progress - Mexican-American Herculez Gomez was one of the brightest stars of the Galaxy's 2005 championship-winning team - but, as Hector Tobar asserted in the Los Angeles Times, the issues run deeper than the professional game:
Some [Latino] youngsters are willing, even, to turn their back on that Holy Grail of American youth soccer, the college scholarship. In a sense, two cultures are competing for these young men. One sees sports as a path to college and assimilation into the American dream. The other believes that soccer can be an end in itself... More and more Latino youngsters are choosing overseas soccer, rejecting not only college but the United States' own burgeoning soccer system. This speaks volumes about what critics say is a gaping ethnic divide in the sport here. Hundreds of the best players in the United States are funneled each year into the 'Olympic Development Program' ... The players nurtured by this system are, almost exclusively, products of suburban leagues.
While it is tempting to think that Latino interest in the domestic game might blossom with (for example) a Mexican-American rising to prominence with the US national team, the situation with African-Americans is rather different, especially in less privileged areas, where few are likely to have heard of Eddie Johnson, or even to have watched much soccer (Johnson himself had never heard of the World Cup until after he took up the sport). Basketball remains the inner-city obsession, which fuels young dreams as football does in other parts of the world. Though soccer has made efforts in this direction - a not-for-profit initiative called 'Soccer In the Streets' claims to have 'positively changed the lives of over 100,000 urban kids in 75 cities' since its founding in 1989 - alongside the millions of youngsters determined to become the next Michael Jordan its impact is small.
There is certainly nothing wrong with putting together programmes for the uninitiated or vulnerable, yet organisation as a whole is probably something soccer in America has too much of for its own good, a curse disguised as a blessing. Americans kids do not learn the game from their peers as they might with other sports - impromptu kickabouts are almost as rare as makeshift games of pelota. Soccer has no equivalent to the cultural language of basketball: shirts and skins duking it out in the schoolyard, the familiar off-shoots of 'Horse' and 'Around the World', the youngster diligently perfecting his or her jump-shot in the family drive. It is, invariably, arranged - regulated, administered, governed, measured, documented and otherwise controlled by adults, an activity requiring flashy boots, laundered uniforms, shiny balls, goals with nets and licensed referees and coaches. Some believe this doesn't matter, and in terms of national team progress and the development of elite players, that may be true. But if playing for the sheer joy of the game, rather than the rewards it produces, is an important attribute of a soccer nation, then the assertion that 'there is no soccer in the United States' may not be altogether unfair.
Yet ifAmerica's embrace of soccer is still half-hearted, there is no doubt that soccer has become a lot more American. Seventeen years after the NASL was threatened with expulsion from the international governing body for (among other things) daring to permit a third substitution, FIFA moved to three for the World Cup. Fourteen years after the National Professional Soccer League announced a new points system to encourage attacking football, the Football League introduced an extra point for a win for much the same reason, and FIFA followed suit for USA 94. And the American proclivity for 'sudden death' tiebreakers - stretching as far back as 1955 with the NFL and the 1967 NPSL final in soccer - preceded the international 'golden goal' by almost half a century.
The same can be said of the influence of American sports marketing, something which the Tampa Bay Rowdies and their ilk took to new levels in the late 1970s. Though happily there have been no further incarnations of Fannies, today hardly any top British professional clubs do not employ, or at least consult, 'creative' people who speak in terms of 'match-day experiences' and 'wow factors'. Britain's 'product', for better or worse, is far less alien to the US sports fan than it was a generation or two ago, and much of what the British once sniffily dismissed as 'American-style razzmatazz' has become standard practice: surnames across the backs of shirts, celebratory anthems after home goals, cheer-leading public address announcers, even giant video screens. Sadly, less gaudy manifestations of American promotional fervour - group ticket discounts, for example - do not seem to have been seized on with nearly the same enthusiasm. And it is certainly worth remembering that no NASL jersey, however lurid, was ever defaced with the name of a corporate sponsor.
It is with the women's game that America may have left its greatest impression, helping to elevate the World Cup to a competition of genuine significance, while according national team stars levels of respect and adulation only men had received elsewhere. The chance for a woman to pursue a career as a professional footballer in the United States was even cursorily addressed by the British film director Gurinder Chadha, who portrayed the WUSA in aspirational terms for her 2002 comedy Bend It Like Beckham, which found its way into American cinemas the following year.
Such dreams seem to have died with the WUSA's passing, and the women's game as a whole has suffered since the gold-medal run in Athens. Only a handful of US internationals were staged in 2005 - all to meagre crowds - and without the chance to play professionally in the US, many players have been left to think twice about holding on for the 2007 World Cup. Yet the effects of Title IX have been incredibly farreach
ing. The women's World Cup has been transformed into something approaching an international media event, while America's interest in its own team has set a worldwide precedent. The day of female footballers in other countries being celebrated with the same fervour as their male equivalents may still be some way off, but it surely won't be long before fans of the men's game at least begin to recognise their names.
The US men may not have won a World Cup, but some telling milestones are within sight. No American has yet been carried from the domestic coaching ranks into a prominent managerial position overseas, but steps have been taken in that direction. Just as his time at Bournemouth and Crewe helped pave the way for American players in Europe 20 years ago, Brent Goulet's appointment in 2005 as manager of Elversberg in Germany's third division has seta helpful precedent.
Shortly before the 1998 World Cup, the USSF unveiled its blueprint for international success: 'Project 2010', a strategy aimed at providing the most realistic chance of winning the World Cup by that year. Heavily subsidised by Nike, the $50 million programme was strangely redolent of the single-mindedness of communist regimes in their quest for Olympic medals. But in a country where nothing less than being 'champions of the world'-however large or small that 'world' may be - defines success, the development was hardly surprising. Narrowly losing a World Cup quarter-final to Germany does not translate well into American sporting parlance, as Bruce Arena has pointed out:
I would think a majority of people in the United States probably think we failed at the last World Cup because we're all about winning. That's all they understand ... We win in all the other sports. We are the world champions at American football because nobody else plays it and our NBA champions are the world champions at basketball. That's the way it is in the United States - you have to be a world champion.