Finally, some good Seattle sports news
When I edited Seattle Weekly, I issued a ban on soccer coverage. Why edit a newspaper when you can't, very occasionally, act like a tin-pot dictator and shape it to your perverse desires? I left the paper two years ago but hoped the new editor would realize my no-soccer edict was a lifetime ban. Apparently not. There's a new dictator in town, and the moratorium has been lifted. The editor himself has written a column about soccer in Seattle. The good news: He's not buying the hype that it's the next big thing.
That editor is my former colleague and friend, Mark Fefer, a true soccer aficionado, and he's been writing a great column called "The MF Truth," which should appear more frequently and undoubtedly would if he weren't having to personally count "Best of Seattle" ballots voting Pagliacci Pizza as best in town for the umpteenth year. Mark is a soccer nut, but I love him anyway. However, he sees the so-called soccer boom in Seattle with a properly jaundiced eye, or, as he writes, "soccer seems to experience an exciting new surge in popularity about as often as Tacoma has a renaissance." Which means every couple of years someone predicts the sport will finally break out and gain new popularity in the old USA.
To me, this is like Romans rooting for the barbarians: Why would we welcome such an invasion? One of America's charms is its stubborn resistance to such globalism: foreign football, the metric system, Esperanto. But Seattle is the kind of "world city" that revels in covering itself in the trappings of foreign sophistication, and now the apparent proliferation of soccer on barroom TVs and the fact that we have a major league soccer franchise is giving fans hope that this "renaissance" will finally do be the one.
You'd think Fefer would be on the bandwagon, but he's strictly a "show-me" guy when it comes to soccer making its big breakthrough. One of the big problems? American professional soccer just isn't up to snuff:
[T]he quality of play in MLS is just too weak. When an MLS highlight reel occasionally turned up during broadcasts of Euro 2008, it was like seeing a WNBA game suddenly break out during halftime at the NBA finals (sorry, ladies). I love soccer, and even I find MLS games boring. The best players in the game simply don't play here–until they're washed up, like Beckham.
The magic of the 1970s Sounders was unique to that time–a time before the Mariners and Seahawks–and is no more going to be recaptured than Fremont is going to become "quirky" again. Sure, soccer promoters can pack Qwest Field for exhibition games by bringing the circus to town, in the form of Manchester United or the Mexican and Brazilian national teams. But the soccer "boom" in America, which was already supposed to have arrived at least a dozen times over the past 20 years, isn't coming on any faster now than the metric system.
I previously have tried to sort out just why soccer hasn't caught on in America, and there are some interesting academic theories about it. But I must say I am thrilled to know that at least one local soccer maven thinks that the bulwark against foreign football still stands strong. Me, I think Seattle is brimming with "world citizens" who would rather have a second-rate Euro-thrill than a genuine American one, but I would be happy to be proved wrong.
Comments:
Posted Sun, Jul 6, 3 p.m. inappropriate
Soccer's slow, steady growth: In a lot of ways, you don't want to respond to this type of article, because as a soccer fan, you WANT to keep the expectations low. I could tell you exactly how many season tickets the team has sold already (unless you're on the inside, it's almost certainly more than you think), but you WANT it to be a surprise when it comes, because that makes it all the harder to write the "yeah but" articles.
But really, that misses the point anyway. If you're looking for the best athletes on earth, you WILL be disappointed. But the thing here is, MLS ain't going for equalling the NFL. That was a stupid idea that they learned their lesson on 25 years ago.
You won't be looking for that, because if you go, and if you give it a fair shot, it will be YOUR TEAM. It's easy to crack on MLS when you don't have a dog in the fight, but a real fan accepts that winning ugly is still winning (I should know, I went to college in San Antonio).
And MLS has used the philosophy of providing reasonable professional soccer in an environment where fans can get passionate about it, to stick around for 13 years now, and it's never been healthier. That's already longer than the point from which Pele signed to the collapse of the NASL (8 years) or the time in-between the NASL and MLS (12 years). Unless you're a very old man, there has been a fully professional soccer league in this country for more of your life than not--and it's going to stay that way for the rest of your life, and longer.
MLS took from 1996 to about 2002 to assure it's own survival. It took the next couple years to grow enough to the point where MLS teams can now re-invest in the product, but they have now crossed that bridge. MLS has now taken it a level further into the grass roots than the NASL ever went by developing its own youth talent. (Something that has to be done, because American kids were never going to get good enough using the usual High School-->College-->Pros for that).
It's also building its own stadiums across the country, roughly $1 Billion in public+private investment. The dividends are beginning to come in.
MLS has gotten to the point where it is clearly a better league than 3 years ago, and will clearly be better again 3 years from now, just on the revenue it already takes in. And Seattle has already sold enough tickets to make the league stronger when we enter.
Globalization is a tricky beast. It doesn't replace your local culture (the Irish love soccer, but they also love their Gaelic Games), it adds to it. The other thing it does is keep working on you for generations until you compromise with it. Culture changes, including American culture--it just doesn't change very quick.
Posted Mon, Jul 7, 6:49 a.m. inappropriate
Validation: Thanks for the validation that soccer is indeed a sport worth discussing in our country.
All aspects of the 'beautiful' game deserve scrutiny and critique.
Glad to see you've come around to seeing that soccer is news-worthy, talk-worthy, and debate-worthy.
Oh, that wasn't your intent?
Too late now...
Posted Mon, Jul 7, 9:52 a.m. inappropriate
So they're not the world's best players...: Many European basketball leagues are hugely popular, though the teams are several notches below the NBA. Here in the U.S. we love college basketball and football, but obviously the talent level is far beneath the professionals.
And the Mariners don't measure up to Major League Baseball standards, but many Seattle folks love them anyway.
The point? It's possible to enjoy sport for the love of the game, without having to look down on it just because there are people somewhere in the world playing it at a higher level.
Posted Mon, Jul 7, 12:01 p.m. inappropriate
Sustainable Soccer: Soccer is in competition with other pro sports. The competition in the media is the hardest nut to crack: exhibit A is Knute's past ban on soccer coverage; exhibit B is the voluminous coverage of recent dismal Husky football, Mariner baseball, and Sonics basketball teams. If the quality of sports product determined media coverage, these teams long ago would have been swept into the dust-bin of sports history.
Professional sports teams must each develop a community with a heritage that justifies loyalty and media coverage. Winning and exciting play justify the enthusiasm of the community, but so does membership in an enterprise that is fighting in an arena that elevates the community's status. Whether the Mariners win or lose, they play the World Champion Red Sox on occasion; the Huskies play Number 1 (or 2) USC each season, and the Oklahoma Sonic Sooners will play the World Champion Celtics. When the Sonic Sonics left town, our membership in the NBA diminished because our representatives in that league disappeared. My local allegiance -- whether strong or weak -- died right then.
The current Sounders have an exciting product, a community and a heritage, but as a minor league franchise cannot elevate the status of the community by defeating Rochester or El Paso. Transferring that community to the MLS next season will change all that.
Back in the 70's the Time Warner financing by Steve Ross of the NASL New York Cosmos gave professional soccer its initial shot in the media arm, but the league was itself unsustainable. As a result, current MSL owners (mostly billionaires) have grown the MSL slowly with an eye toward long-term sustainable success. It's been a grind, but it's working. Local fan bases and communities have been developed, and progress in the media has been substantial, particularly because soccer now has a toe-hold in television. Cable and satellite TV both broadcast world-class soccer English Premiere League soccer and the MLS everywhere. Now, the quality and excitement of soccer can be seen by all and evaluated on its own merits rather than excluded from consideration by media gatekeepers (Knute was once one of these).
Several other factors will continue to fuel soccer's slow, inexorable climb in the U.S. First, is the continuing growth of the Hispanic population. Futbol is that community's number one sport. Many, if not most, MLS stars are Hispanic. Yet, simultaneously, different soccer traditions from other countries, and home-grown U.S. talent are represented on the typical MSL team. In this respect, the MLS is both a national and international melting pot, a lot like the NBA.
Second, technology brings the skill and power of the game to the average fan, so that hightlights now can be shown easily on SportsCenter, the News at Eleven or YouTube.
Third, soccer's facility infrastructure is vastly improved. The economics of game attendance make a stadium of about 25,000 the right size for an average professional soccer game. The MLS Sounders will be opening about that number of seats at Qwest field, while cordoning off most of the upper-level nose-bleed seats. The MLS plays more games than the NFL (30 vs 16 in the regular season), but fewer than baseball (162) and basketball (81). However, an MLS soccer season is also populated with a dozen or so "friendly" games against international competition teams, allowing each team to customize its soccer experience for its fan base.
Summing up, ten years ago a ban on soccer coverage was a simple triage of priorities. Today, such a ban is likely to lose a media outlet eyeballs and readers, except maybe at Crosscut, where coverage of soccer takes a rightful backseat to the competitive financial blunders and violent political train-wrecks of that make up the regular season for the professional sport of transportation policy...