CRUNCH TIME FOR SOCCER. <i> World Cup gives sport its best chance for national prominence</i> : Ultimate Participation Sport Watched by Few : Soccer: With the World Cup looming, O.C. aficionados think the time is ripe to develop a true following for the overlooked sport.
Manny Toledo is 40, he has lived in the United States for 20 years and he is still waiting for soccer, the passion of his native Brazil, to become a successful spectator sport in this country.
“It may take 20, 30, 40 years, but I’m not going to die until I’m 90,” said Toledo, the El Dorado High School soccer coach. “So when I’m 85, I’ll go into a big stadium with my cane and my flag, there will be 60,000 fans, and I’ll be looking around saying, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Many U.S. sports fans may think Ol’ Manny has headed a few too many soccer balls. But soccer activity is at an all-time high around the country, and it’s more visible than ever in Orange County.
The number of youth, high school and college participants continues to grow. Adult recreation leagues, fueled by an increasingly diverse ethnic population, have never been busier--the predominantly Latino Greater Anaheim Soccer League has some 170 teams.
The Los Angeles Salsa, an expansion team in the American Professional Soccer League, recently began its inaugural season at Cal State Fullerton, and the U.S. national team, which will compete in next summer’s World Cup, trains in Mission Viejo.
The World Cup will put soccer on center stage in the United States. Capacity crowds are expected to fill some of the nation’s largest stadiums, including the Rose Bowl, and many overseas visitors will come for the month-long event, transforming this country into a temporary soccer asylum.
But what happens when the World Cup is over, soccer is bounced off the front page, and all the drum-banging, horn-blowing, flag-waving fans go home?
Will soccer ride the coattails of the World Cup and develop into a legitimate professional sport in the United States? Will Manny Toledo’s dream come true? Or will it remain the ultimate participation sport, played by so many but watched by so few?
“I’m completely confident the World Cup will be a tremendous event, but I don’t want it to be like Cirque de Soleil and pack up its tents and be gone,” UCLA coach Sigi Schmid said. “We have to capitalize on it.”
But how?
Soccer has always had trouble finding room on the American sports fan’s palate--you’ve heard all the reasons; it’s too boring, too low-scoring, too, too, foreign --but that hasn’t stopped it from trying.
The sport has the persistence of Hydra, the mythological serpent that would grow two heads in the place where one was cut off. When one professional or semi-pro soccer league dies, it seems two leagues come back in its place.
The latest attempt is the APSL, whose newest entrant, the Salsa, appears to be avoiding the mistakes of its pro predecessors and maximizing its chances for success.
The team is paying reasonable player salaries, in the $30,000 to $60,000 range, instead of doling out millions to aging foreign stars, a problem that helped put the North American Soccer League out of business in the early 1980s. There are a few foreign players, but the Salsa roster is predominantly American, with 14 of the 21 hailing from Southern California.
The Salsa is sticking to a grass-roots marketing campaign, sending players out to clinics and speaking engagements, and is making a big push into the soccer-friendly Latino community.
But the jewel of the franchise is its home field, a 10,000-seat stadium with a flat, natural-turf playing surface large enough to accommodate a regulation soccer field, 115 yards long and 75 yards wide.
The APSL may not be the future of pro soccer. Many believe there are too many weak franchises for the league to survive, and the U.S. Soccer Federation, the national governing body for the sport, expects to have a stronger pro league in place after the World Cup.
But in Fullerton’s Titan Sports Complex, soccer enthusiasts believe they have the prototype future home of pro soccer.
“Without a doubt, Fullerton is the finest soccer facility in the country, and I’ve seen a lot of them,” said Michael Hogue, a soccer promoter, player agent and former general manager of the Los Angeles Heat, which folded in 1990. “If there’s one thing that will give the Salsa a chance to survive, it’s the fact they have a great stadium to play in.”
Added Ray Hales, Corona del Mar High School coach: “If (a pro soccer team) doesn’t succeed here, I’m not sure it would succeed anywhere. This is the perfect market and they’re in the perfect stadium.”
The World Cup ’94 Organizing Committee is expecting some $40 million in profits, the bulk of it in gate receipts, from next summer’s 52-match tournament.
If Hogue had his way, that money would go toward building 10,000-seat stadiums, to be used primarily for soccer, in the other eight World Cup venue areas (New York-New Jersey, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Washington, Orlando, Dallas and Boston).
Then he would launch an outdoor pro league that would run in the fall and winter, in sync with the majority of youth, high school and college teams. Most pro teams have been relegated to the spring or summer, because that’s when stadiums are available.
To Hogue and many current players and coaches, soccer stadiums are the biggest issue in the sport, with an emphasis on soccer , but not biggest .
“As much as we’d like to believe, we’re not ready for the Rose Bowl, L.A. Coliseum or Stanford Stadium,” said Salsa general manager Rick Davis, former U.S. national team captain and New York Cosmos player. “They’re fine for the World Cup, but for a regular pro league, there’s a very large void for stadiums that will create atmosphere and the opportunity for quality games.”
Most pro soccer teams have either been swallowed up by cavernous stadiums or squeezed into small playing fields that crimp their style.
With the exception of the Pele-led New York Cosmos, who often filled 77,000-seat Giants Stadium in the late 1970s, most NASL crowds, such as those of the Los Angeles Aztecs in the Coliseum or the California Surf in Anaheim Stadium, were dwarfed by their surroundings.
Enormous stadium rental fees quickly drained operating budgets, and all those empty seats didn’t create much of an atmosphere.
Many of the post-NASL teams, hoping to contain costs, rented high school and municipal stadiums, but most were only big enough to hold football fields, which are long enough but too narrow for soccer. And most playing surfaces were choppy and beat up because of overuse.
“When you have 20,000 fans in the Coliseum, it seems like no one is there,” said Joe-Max Moore, former Mission Viejo High School and UCLA standout and a midfielder on the U.S. national team.
“But it’s also impossible to play good soccer on a football field that’s 60 yards wide. There’s a lot of turnovers, you get the ball and you don’t have time to create something. That’s what’s missing in American soccer--skills and creativeness.”
Added Schmid: “It would be like making the Lakers play at Sacramento and their court was 25% smaller--you wouldn’t have a lot of scoring and everyone would be in everyone’s face. We always go one way or another--into a big stadium, wrong answer; onto a small field, bad game.”
Neither option promoted a positive image for the sport.
“About 90% of the stadiums you go into in this country have football goal posts hanging over the soccer goal. It’s sort of the epitome of soccer in the U.S.--in the shadow of football,” Hogue said. “Every sideline has yard-markers, scoreboards go by quarters, clocks only go to 15 minutes. I paid massive rent at El Camino College and had to reset the clock three times a (45-minute) half.
“I began to realize that fans and the media didn’t perceive us as professional. People felt two months ago they were watching a high school football game in this stadium, now they’re watching soccer. How professional can you be in a high school stadium?
“But if you put 8,000 people in a 70,000-seat stadium, it feels like a tomb.”
Put those 8,000 fans in a 10,000-seat stadium, though, and, bingo , you have some atmosphere.
“Soccer is an emotional sport, and the atmosphere is created by the game and the crowd,” Hales said. “It can be very intense, and that’s what makes you come back for more.”
Jim Trecker, senior vice president and press officer of World Cup U.S.A., said using World Cup revenue for the construction of stadiums has been discussed in many soccer quarters, but no decisions have been made on how profits will be allocated.
The group could also fund renovation projects of existing, small to mid-size stadiums to make them more suitable for soccer.
“Stadiums are a key thing but it’s an incredibly complex and expensive issue,” Trecker said. “To get stadiums built requires enormous amounts of capital, more than this World Cup can give.”
It also requires an enormous amount of cooperation between city officials, business leaders and those in the soccer community. That’s why Hogue believes soccer must strike now.
“You have mayors, governors and politicians on committees because of the World Cup,” Hogue said. “Now’s the time to do it, because those organizations will break up and the black hole will be too big.
“The World Cup is right around the corner, and it’s going to come and go. That’s why I think Cup cities should start taking a hard look at where the money is going to go. . . . Because until we get stadiums, we’ll never get a pro league.”
Soccer has experienced phenomenal growth in the United States. There are more than 2.2 million kids playing in the three major national youth leagues today; there were 1.1 million 10 years ago.
There are 978 NCAA men’s and women’s teams, compared to 626 in 1982-83, and 615 boys’ and girls’ high school teams in the CIF Southern Section, compared to 393 in 1982-83.
Orange County has witnessed a 21% growth in participation since 1988, and adult recreational leagues are popping up everywhere.
When Cal State Fullerton coach Al Mistri played at Cal Poly Pomona in 1967, he said his team had to travel to Mexico to purchase equipment. Today, there are some 500 soccer specialty stores nationwide, including about 30 in Southern California.
But why hasn’t all this progress translated into success on a spectator level?
There are various theories: American fans don’t like ties and low-scoring games. They’re not used to sports in which players can’t use their hands. Soccer, with its continuous-play, 45-minute halves, is not conducive to television because there are no breaks for commercials.
FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, has taken measures to improve the sport’s appeal. It has relaxed the offsides rule, which should promote more scoring chances.
Unlike previous World Cups, pool-play points won’t be awarded for ties, which should eliminate defense-dominated early-round games. ABC and ESPN are expected to provide continual World Cup coverage while sponsors’ ads appear in on-screen windows.
“There will be a high level of excitement during the World Cup, and that will permeate down to our pro league,” Toledo said. “The seed will be planted on young and adult minds, and it will be like a ripple effect. They’ll see what a beautiful game it is, and we’ll have more people turned on to the game.”
Toledo’s is an optimistic viewpoint, but many don’t think soccer will become popular until its matches are perceived as “events,” not necessarily on the World Cup or Olympic level, but where they’re seen as having some significance.
“As we grow up, and this is where I fault the high schools, the football game, the basketball game, is an event, but soccer has to be played at 3 p.m. because you (can only afford) so many night events a year,” Schmid said. “Well, soccer could be the ‘event’ if administrators decided it. We have to make it an in thing to do. There’s alternative music, maybe soccer can be the alternative sport.”
To be that on the pro level, many believe it will need some alternative stadiums, where high-level soccer can be played on regulation-sized fields in cozy surroundings; so that the relatively small crowds it attracts will seem large and create the kind of atmosphere fans might want to return to.
“The American psychology of sports seems to go with a packed atmosphere,” Trecker said.
You’d think with so many children playing it would be easy to attract fans, but with the exception of a few professional indoor teams during the 1980s, pro and college soccer has not fared well at the gate. Why don’t more kids come to games?
“Because they have parents,” said Mike Fox, a former Fullerton standout who now plays for the Salsa. “Kids don’t buy tickets. John plays soccer but his dad is an ex-baseball player, so he’ll go to an Angel game.”
Wait a minute. Wasn’t this supposed to be soccer’s boom period? Remember all those claims in the 1970s--when the NASL was at its peak and the youth leagues were growing--that soccer would be the sport of the ‘80s and ‘90s?
Well, while pro basketball, football and baseball boomed during the Reagan years, soccer went into a recession. Now, those who made such lofty predictions admit they were off-base.
Schmid is beginning to see some progress. For the first time, he said, he’s beginning to recruit players whose parents actually played soccer. And Mistri, the Fullerton coach, said average attendance for his games has increased from 250 in 1984 to 1,006 in 1992.
As much as soccer enthusiasts would love to see Toledo’s prophecy come true, filling U.S. soccer stadiums regularly with crowds of 60,000 and up is no longer their goal.
They know the whole country won’t shut down when the United States plays a World Cup match, as nations in Europe, South America and Central America do.
Soccer is no longer out to convert the U.S. masses, make believers and followers of the soccer heathens.
It just wants to develop a niche.
“In the 1970s, everyone thought we’d be bigger than the NFL, but that’s no longer the philosophy in the soccer community,” Trecker said.
“All we’d like to do is take our place alongside other sports. It’s a big country. There’s plenty of room for us.”
Youth Soccer on the Rise
Youth soccer participation in Orange County has been growing during the past five years. Youth league spring enrollment for 1993 shows a 21% increase from 1988. The growth nationwide has been similar, increasing 29% between 1988 and 1992.
Nationwide (In millions) 1988: 1.7 1989: 1.8 1990: 2.0 1991: 2.1 1992: 2.0 Orange County 1988: 28,900 1989: 30,250 1990: 32,375 1991: 31,940 1992: 32,935 1993: 35,000 *
Demographic Picture
The 1993 group of local players is heavily male and concentrated in the younger ages. Two-thirds are boys and more than half are 9 years old or younger.
4-5: 8% 6-7: 26% 8-9: 23% 10-11: 22% 12-13: 14% 14-15: 5% 16-18: 2% Male: 23,000 / 66% Female: 12,000 / 34% *
Regional Arrangements
The largest concentration of youth soccer players is in the South County and Irvine/Tustin area. Those locations account for more than half the players in the county.
South County Growth
The combined increase in participation in the cities of Dana Point, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo and San Juan Capistrano has been the largest in the county--nearly a third in five years. 1988: 9,100 1989: 10,125 1990: 11,220 1991: 11,755 1992: 12,190 1993: 12,000 * Region: No. players Dana Point, Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, San Juan Capistrano: 12,000 Irvine, Tustin: 7,700 Anaheim, Buena Park, Cerritos, Cypress: 7,200 Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana: 6,000 All other cities: 2,100 *
Scholastic Participation
The growth of soccer at the youth level has resulted in a similar trend in high schools and colleges.
Number of teams participating:
CIF-Southern Section NCAA (all divisions) MALE FEMALE MALE FEMALE 1982-83 275 118 523 103 1987-88 306 216 545 259 1992-93 341 274 591 387 Sources: American Youth Soccer Organization; U.S. Youth Soccer Assn.; Soccer Industry Council of America; California Interscholastic Federation--Southern Section; National Collegiate Athletic Assn.,
Researched by APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times
