Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)

by David Wangerin

  While only hardened sceptics could perceive Project 2010 as a flight of fancy, if anything is certain about the future of soccer in America it is that no watershed moment will suddenly thrust it onto the sporting consciousness of the nation. Even winning the World Cup would not transform MLS into a money-making juggernaut. Too much of the country continues to regard soccer as foreign, effeminate or just plain dull, and too many in the media berate the game because they fear it. Much of this is attributable to familiarity and tradition - something built up over more than a century, from Tom Cahill to the Carolina Courage - and not to any innate shortcoming of some un-American activity.

  For all that, one thing is certain: there has never been a better time for soccer in a football world. The game is as successful and well-run as it has ever been, and far from the domain ofthe eccentric, the marginalised and the un-American it used to be. Most of the country may still struggle with it, but there is now a fair proportion that doesn't. To soccer fans who spent many decades searching for hopeful signs among crushing defeats, that may be the biggest moral victory yet.

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