The great debate will resume again soon, of course, the big-picture forecasting. Is soccer about to explode, truly explode, in this country? Will the interest and attention this US team brought to this World Cup act as a trigger for making the world’s game a true major-league sport this time around?
We’ll see. I hope it does. I hope MLS and the NASL get a bounce from this. Can it be the way it was 35 years ago? Actually, it can because, actually, it already is. Memory insists Pele and Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia and the rest played in front of a string of 80,000-strong crowds back in the day.
The truth? The highest average attendance in the old NASL was 14,440 in 1980. The most the Cosmos ever attracted to Giants Stadium on average was 32,775 in 1977, which was Pele’s last year, when they occasionally drew football-level crowds to watch futbol games.
Look, this isn’t to disparage those old memories; far from it. Last year the Seattle Sounders in MLS averaged 44,038 per date, fully 33 percent more than the most star-studded Cosmos team ever did. The Red Bulls played to 77 percent capacity in their terrific stadium, a far higher number than the Cosmos ever did in their old spacious digs.
And MLS’ average attendance last year was 18,887, far more than the NASL ever attracted in its most prosperous years. The truth? Forget the ’70s; these are the good old days, and it was in this climate the US assembled this national team that across four games in Brazil seemed to reflect so much of the good we seek in sports.
I’ve heard from some soccer fans, a number of them, who are grateful their sport has attracted the attention it has, but a few of them reprimanded me these past few weeks.
“Not everything we do deserves praise!” one wrote.
“Cover the U.S. team the way you would the Mets or the Yankees, with a critical eye. Don’t be a homer!”
Well, maybe in time. I was one of those kids who fell for soccer back in the day, who watched every Cosmos game on TV, but that interest faded over time and I can’t say I recognize much beyond turnovers, great saves and terrific goals. Even I could see Tim Howard was magnificent in the 2-1 extra-time loss to Belgium that ended the American-centric portion of this Cup.
Will I be more hypercritical four years from now? And will the US become what it’s always threatened to become, a soccer nation?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
But that’s really irrelevant, isn’t it?
The fact is, this World Cup has been a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Perhaps you don’t live and die with every game. Perhaps you only barely cared about the US team. But if you spent any time with this tournament — especially the endgames of these matches, when the world’s biggest names always seem to do their finest work — what you saw was certainly worth your while, and worth your time.
And if this US team wasn’t exactly the equal of the 1980 US hockey team — that squad went 6-0-1, after all; these lads ultimately were 1-2-1 — well, they were a fine story. They always will be, as underdogs, for as long as the world looks at the US as intruders in its tightly knit circle. In truth, they are entitled to feel that way until one of these American teams does shock the world, and not just by grinding out of group play.
So the Americans go home, the World Cup goes on without them, and we have four more years to see if the game can truly get under our skin, get into our hearts, attach itself to our sporting soul. Will it? Can it? In some ways it already did back in the day, and in some ways it already has in these, the good new days.
So isn’t that already a good place to start?