Nonstop Fanatico : La Opinion’s Soccer Writer Hopes the World Cup Will Speed the Sport’s Acceptance in the U.S.
Soccer will continue to grow here and it will continue to be popular among the youth and college-age people in Southern California after the World Cup has come and gone. It’s a sport that you can play easily, and you don’t need a lot of money. But it will take time, even after the World Cup, for it to develop here at the professional level.
The big problem with professional sports in the United States is Americans want to make all the sports similar. Soccer is not like football or baseball. You can’t go to a college right now and draft players like you would in football because the college players are not as good as the international players. In most countries 500 to 600 teams feed the professional teams, and the boys go through the ranks until they reach the very best teams. The kids will play 20 years before they make it to the professional teams.
At the college level in the United States, there is a problem with discrimination against Latino players. Colleges and universities would prefer to attract a European player and some don’t like the way Latinos play. It’s a way of thinking that is dangerous and could exclude Latino players.
In the past, there have been efforts in the United States to change soccer. And this is a game that hasn’t really changed in 100 years. That’s important because any referee can go anywhere and referee a game. He doesn’t need to speak the languages because the players will know what he is doing.
It will take time for soccer to take root here. And one of the biggest problems will be the press, because they don’t give it coverage. For example, Mexico played the United States the other day and I only saw two small articles. You had 91,000 fans at the Rose Bowl, and that’s a big deal.
And there is a lot of negative coverage too. For example, with the World Cup there has been a lot of talk about the hooligans of soccer, and that really only involves England. If you look at the teams playing at the Rose Bowl--the Romanians, Colombians and the United States--they’ve never really had problems. But on television they’ve made it seem as if the police really needed to prepare for potential problems with perhaps the Colombian team. And that really is a slight for all Latinos.
Soccer is the No. 1 sport all over the world. Americans need to broaden the identification of soccer beyond just appealing to Latinos.
If they form a new professional league here, they must start out attracting players from all over the world, including Mexico, Central and South America, because that can help attract fans here in the United States. An effort must be made to bring in more European players and Latino players until soccer takes root here. You need better players.
The opportunity the World Cup offers is for the public to see good games, and if the people here get a chance to see good games it could really help promote soccer. But if the games are bad, a game that is 0-0 and boring, it won’t help soccer here.
The team that is really playing well now is Colombia. If they come to the World Cup and they continue to play fast football, it’ll help to promote soccer in the United States.
