In Between Status Updates, America Finally Got Soccer

Something definitely happened in the past four years.

Back in the summer of 2006, I watched some World Cup games. The best way I could describe my watching experience is that it was the best sport to watch while I was doing something else. I definitely didn’t know anything about the teams and made no attempt to keep up with their performances. As I’m writing this, I’m watching a replay of Argentina’s defeat of South Korea on demand. 

Thanks to this World Cup, I’ve been able to read two books already. I’ve done homework during games, and now I can add ButteReports to my list of accomplishable goals during soccer. I care more this time around, but I’m still doing something else to occupy my soccer-watching time.

This is why soccer is finally fulfilling generations of promises that it would enter the mainstream of America.

Let’s go back to my life in 2006 for a minute. I had a desktop computer with a 22 kbps dialup connection. My cell phone was good only for phone calls—and a mere 300 minutes a month at that. I was a slightly ashamed owner of a MySpace profile that I checked about once every other week at best; Facebook was something my sister occasionally mentioned and nothing more.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself because I lived in Montana in a town of about 50 people—and only about eight of those 50 weren’t eligible for the AARP—so I wasn’t exactly in the technological center of the world. Regardless, Facebook was still for college students, texting was still fairly new and you were still free to mock soccer without much opposition.

Nowadays, my phone has a faster internet connection than any computer I owned prior to college, Facebook is the number one news source on the internet and I don’t even have the desire to mock this great sport. I figured the day that happened, I’d feel downright un-American. Nope.

I haven’t brought up USA soccer yet, and I only do here because I want to point out that they don’t deserve the bulk of the credit for America’s sudden love of soccer. Maybe I’m being stubborn—after all, their defeat over Mexico last year in the World Cup qualifiers got the ball rolling on all of this soccer talk—but I can’t give too much credit to a team of above-average footie players. Not when I’m seeing the sports culture of America shift like this. No, something more significant must have taken place.

Baseball aside, the modern American sports fan watches the vision of one man: Roone Arledge. Arledge is best known for being the brainchild behind Monday Night Football, but he also was the man that revolutionized the way the NBA is packaged. That’s two of America’s big three, and to be honest, even baseball and college sports are modeled after Arledge’s vision of what America wanted to watch.

While Arledge was changing the way Americans watched sports in the 60s and 70s, someone suggested he take a stab at soccer. However, Arledge concluded that soccer couldn’t be presented in a way interesting to Americans. His indifference to the sport back then is perhaps the most overlooked factor when we talk about our nations own lack of enthusiasm. Until now, that is.

If Arledge still ran ABC Sports today, I think he’d be at the forefront of broadcasting soccer in the mainstream. For the same reason Aaron Brooks of the Houston Rockets can be considered a rising star in the NBA, soccer can be enjoyed by the casual American fan. The reason: We don’t really watch a lot of the games.

There’s no way I can write more than a few quick notes during a basketball game, otherwise I miss too much. Facebook cruising is absolutely out of the question. But in soccer, I can write, do some quick research, and then go back to watching the game without feeling like one of the two—the game or the computer—has to go. The announcers even serve as notices for when something is about to happen. Look up when they start getting excited, and you’ll almost never miss a goal.

Also, the USA and England can be mediocre because along with being the ADHD generation, we are also the most connected worldwide. Argentina’s team doesn’t even seem that strange because I’ve been watching South American players in the NBA for close to a decade. Flopping is even officially a part of our accepted sport consciousness now. Sure, it’s at its worst in soccer, but if I ran for 90 straight minutes, I’d probably pretend to tear my ACL six times a game too.

It’s crazy to say, but the question of whether soccer will ever be big in America seems dead because “Who’s going to win the World Cup?” keeps drowning it out. Welcome to the new America—we finally get soccer.