Introduction.

Welcome to what is undoubtedly not the first and surely not the last blog to tackle the subject of soccer fandom in America. Let's not kid ourselves - it's hard to be a soccer fan in America. I happened to go to a high school that had a pretty good team (Group IV state champions, 1998!), and I - not being particularly athletic - was the cameraman. When your entire job is to keep a tiny white ball pinned in a small, black-and-white viewfinder at all times, you have to develop a good sense for the flow of the game, and I like to think that having to do so helped me appreciate the game all the more. As a result, I'm one of, oh, let's say twelve soccer fans in this country.

Okay, that's clearly a joke. But soccer has been and remains unpopular, despite various attempts to change that, including:

* The NASL
* The 1994 World Cup
* The MLS
* The men's national team no longer sucking

So before we go any further, let's get a couple things out of the way. First off, let's take a look at my top five reasons why soccer has not caught on in this country.

5. Americans like their own sports.
I think that a lot of the problem for soccer really comes straight out of American snobbery. Soccer? Don't the English play that? The three major American sports were all invented here, and even though baseball can be traced to cricket and football to rugby, the similarities by this time are minimal due to the adjustments we made to them 100 years ago. If there were a variant on soccer that was invented in America in 1910, I bet there'd be a big pro league for it. But why would you need to change soccer? It's great as it is. Still, that's part of the problem.

4. There isn't enough room for the niche to grow.
Even if we assume that soccer can boom in this country, that people will have the tolerance for it, there just isn't that much space. I myself would love to follow more than one overseas premier league, but 99% of my attention in that department is going to go to England because I already follow all four major North American sports, plus college football and basketball, and some amount of golf to boot. That's a lot to keep straight. Other niche sports that have managed to boom have done so usually by tapping a segment of the audience that had been left mostly alone. (In particular, the lack of many pro sports teams in the rural South had long left college football one of the few sports anyone there paid attention to; NASCAR was able to come in and exploit that hole.) Where is soccer going to fit? It's not different enough as a phenomenon (like NASCAR is) to appeal to some group that isn't already watching tons of sports -and therefore doesn't necessarily have the energy to add more.

3. The lack of a major pro league.
Yeah, yeah. I don't care what the M in MLS stands for, and I don't care if they're doing well enough to expand; it's not a major pro league in this country. A lot of that can be blamed on the following fact: the MLS does not contain the best players in the world at its sport. All four other North American major pro leagues can say this, but the MLS cannot and likely never will be able to. Even the NASL, which received tremendous help from international stars, could never say it - by the time Pele started with the New York Cosmos, he was nearly 35; Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff were 32. All were still very good players, but certainly pushing "over-the-hill" in soccer terms. David Beckham has talked of finishing his career in the MLS, but it's doubtful he'd come over until he was at least 33 or 34, and could well provide the English equivalent of Willie Mays stumbling around on the 1973 Mets. At least Beckham's general fame might help, but I doubt it would be enough.

2. A lack of major moments.
I might argue that hockey, currently the "fourth major pro league" in this country even though no one missed it last year, didn't really take off in America until the Miracle on Ice in 1980. Soccer doesn't have anything like this, at least not yet - the biggest win in American soccer history is still the 1-0 defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup, a game so little-known that few people in this country even took note of it at the time, let alone half a century later, despite the fact that it may well be the biggest upset in the history of the international game. Even an advancement to the round of eight in 2002 couldn't hold American attention spans; I doubt highly if anything short of a finals appearance, if not an outright win (ha!), could truly capture the American interest even for its own national team.

1. People just think it's boring.
If you asked me whether I'd rather watch a 1-0 baseball game, a 3-0 football game, a 1-0 hockey game, or a 1-0 soccer game, I'd take the soccer game every time unless the baseball game involved the Cubs winning or something rare like a no-hitter or perfect game. Now, I'm a soccer fan, so perhaps this is unfair, but it's no more unfair than the general perception by American sports fans that soccer isn't interesting. I would wager that most people you asked would confirm that, and yet many of them probably would not have watched more than one game, if even that much. Soccer's rep comes from its low scores, and people's apparent refusal to believe that a low-scoring contest can be exciting. (Many Americans don't even seem to like watching pitchers' duels anymore.) Of course, 99 out of 100 soccer games are pretty much "low-scoring," and plenty of baseball games finish 7-6 and that sort of thing. (And certainly 3-0 is a pretty rare football score.) But people need to understand that a 1-0 game isn't boring (well, it can be - but it isn't just boring by default). There's a lot that goes on in a soccer game and it isn't all balls going in the net. Still, this consensus probably won't change any time soon.

So there you have it. Five reasons why people in this country haven't gotten into soccer, and why a lot of them never will. And five things that people reading this shouldn't see in themselves. Yeah, it's hard to follow soccer in this country - the US is playing a World Cup qualifier against Mexico today, in the US (Columbus), and it's airing on tape delay at 1:30 in the morning. I'll be up for it, though, and that'll be the first game report you'll see here. Why? Because as hard as it is to follow soccer, I think it's worth it. Hopefully more people will start to feel that way - because when that happens, it'll get easier.