World Cup May Come to Our Little Corner
Soccer has been a bust in the United States. Kids play it, but adults don’t. Leagues need someone or something to expose their sport to a wider audience. But television won’t. Fans attend the games, but we can’t jam enough of them into a stadium even to put together a decent riot.
Hundreds of thousands of Europeans and South Americans get together regularly to watch a good soccer game and enjoy a good riot. North Americans, though, continue to lag behind.
Shame.
Another pro soccer league nearly bit the dust the other day. Just under a last-minute deadline, the 11 Major Indoor Soccer League teams saved their bacon by slicing salaries across the board. We can sleep tonight, because the L.A. Lazers and the Wichita Wings have been spared.
The old North American Soccer League was not so lucky. A lot of people wonder why that promising organization died. Well, we do not know why. But, we do know when. It died when Pele got too old to play.
Of all the disappointments soccer has suffered in America, the greatest had to be the one at the 1984 Summer Olympics at Los Angeles. That one hurt, because that one could have pushed soccer over the top. That one could have exposed soccer from coast to coast.
See, the fans came through for that one. More than 1.4 million of them spun the turnstiles at Olympic soccer events that year. At the championship final at the Rose Bowl, 101,799 ticket-holders turned out. UCLA might not draw that many there if the Bruin cheerleaders and Larry Brown were going to mud-wrestle.
Did America thrill to Olympic soccer on television, though?
No, it did not.
“For 32 matches, not one match was given TV transmission (in the U.S.),” Walter Gagg remembers.
Gagg, who is Swiss, was back in town Friday for a special reason. He is the head of the technical department for the Federation Internationale de Football Assn. (FIFA), and he is part of a 5-man commission that has been traveling nonstop over the last couple of weeks to check out possible sites for the 1994 World Cup.
You could make a pretty good case that the World Cup is the greatest sporting event in, well, the world. Just because you or someone you know prefers the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the America’s Cup or the CBS-TV Refrigerator Pull is no reason to deny the appeal of an event that, in 1986, was watched worldwide by 12.8 billion television viewers, including 600 million for the championship game between Argentina and West Germany.
A personal note here: We were at Wimbledon that year, waiting for the title match between Boris Becker and Ivan Lendl, and we still think Becker was more interested in watching West Germany on television that day than he was in playing Lendl.
That’s how big the World Cup is. But, do you care? Come on, now. Do you? We hope so, because the United States has the inside track, as far as we can see, to be host of the Cup. It is between Brazil, which is having serious economic problems, and Morocco, which has a serious stadium shortage, and us. And, if we do not get it now, it might not come this way again.
Gagg and his commission were in this vicinity Friday to look over the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum. From there, they went to Miami, to see Joe Robbie Stadium, and already FIFA representatives have visited Soldier Field in Chicago, the new Blaine Sports Complex near Minneapolis, the Silver Bowl Stadium of Las Vegas, college football arenas in Corvallis, Ore., and Seattle, RFK Stadium in Washington, JFK Stadium and Franklin Field in Philadelphia, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Fla., and Tampa Stadium.
“We know the United States is not a country. It’s a continent,” said Gagg, exaggerating slightly.
We are big enough, sure. We have the places. The question is: Do we have the faces? Do we have people to put in the seats, people who will support this World Cup? Will these arenas, over the course of a monthlong, 52-game competition, draw crowds? Mexico did it. Can we?
Gagg thinks yes.
“We know that you have more than 5 million youth who play soccer,” he said Friday, after a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel. “You have more soccer players than most of the member nations of FIFA, because your country is so big. You also have about 4 million Mexican people in this part of the country, as well as in Florida, Dallas, Kansas City, even Chicago. Soccer is a sport which is not well known now in this country, but it is definitely known to these people.”
Brazil has something we lack, besides Brazilians. Brazil has stadiums built exclusively for soccer. A lot of them have spectator capacities larger than 100,000, Gagg said. And, to conform to the proper field width for soccer--68 meters--some U.S. football arenas might have to knock down walls and rip out seats.
“See, we know that in the United States, soccer is not sport No. 1, and not sport No. 2. It is more like sport No. 9 or 10. We have to accept that. But now, our sport’s time may be coming.”
The host area for the World Cup semifinals and finals should have two king-sized arenas, and Los Angeles does. Miami officials already are bragging that FIFA people like them better, but we will see about that. On the Fourth of July, more importantly, we will see if the United States gets the Cup.
The best thing about that? The host team automatically qualifies for the first round. No U.S. team has been able to do that since 1950.
Maybe the United States not only will be host of the World Cup, but will win the World Cup.
If we are going to do this thing, we might as well do it right.
