As a sport to watch. The % of young people playing it beats by a respectable margin the % of young people playing baseball or basketball over here.
Ignorance is no excuse ... you've also been told by more than one person so it must be clear It's been a popular youth outlet for decades and has been proof of soccers popularity since the 80s .... This argument went out of style faster than slacks with shirts tucked in and no belt
The problem in the US is that, in the 1970s and 1980s, soccer rapidly developed a reputation as a children's sport and only a children's sport. For many years, it was seen as a safer sport for kids who were too young to play American football or basketball.
The question is, given it is a popular sport to practice, why it doesnot manage to turn that high percentage of practitioners of soccer into fans that watch clubs on tv/streaming services?
I told you. Because it's only just starting, in the 21st century, to lose the label of being a safer sport for children too young for US sports. Until well after 2000, the average age kids stopped playing soccer in the US was something like 11. Also, the parents had no history of watching soccer. The result was that, as recently as 2005, we had a few players drafted into MLS who had never even seen a professional match before.
By the way, this should tell you something about awareness of professional soccer before recently. I played college soccer from 2000 through 2003. Each year, all the graduating seniors on the team would receive a form letter from MLS, informing them that there were opportunities to play professionally after college and asking them to consider putting their names into the MLS draft. I'm sure every graduating senior on every college team across the country got the same letter. Now, can you imagine the NBA sending a letter mostly saying "we exist" to every graduating senior in college basketball?
You're going to have to show your math here, because I am only counting maybe two million or so without Giovinco, Bradley, and Altidore (who made up over $18 million of that $26m).
And it was a "pussy sport for pinkos". Not like good ol' American football or baseball. I mean, I don't think that particular perception began to fade until maybe the 2010 World Cup. It was beyond "not being popular", it was openly regarded as unamerican.
Chelsea were already Champions League qualifiers BEFORE Abramovich bought them, people seem to conveniently forget that fact.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...rby-players-celebrate-binoculars-gesture.html Leeds out the race for promotion! Seems they care somewhat! Congratulations to Derby County - exciting.
See: The regionally based and continuously disjointed and at odds history of soccer in the US. Also see: The NASL, the poster for popularity and disease in soccer ... the why the soccer bridge was burned in mainstream USA for 25 years. We are just now finally getting to the point where we have more than one generation that is growing up, from birth, with a top tier professional soccer league on a nationally relevant scale here in the US. Bleh, I keep forgetting "total compensation" vs "salary" .... Gio's total comp was 1.5m over his salary and Bradley's was a half million. 5 + 5.6 + 6 (salaries) = 16.6m which is 3x HOU, not 4x You are credited one billion majillion points for this reference Well they won the Fairs Cup and the Cup winner's Cup ... and have made 5 other European finals There's a huge difference in Chelsea's yearly performance from before and after he took over. You seem to conveniently ignore that fact.
I'm not so sure it breaks down like that. A lot of the pro/rel argument seems to be that clubs face a financial penalty because the players had a really bad season. In any environment where soccer is not extremely popular and deeply-rooted, that puts clubs at financial risk. That means that trainers, front office staff, etc. all face economic uncertainty because of a bad season. And a community faces the real possibility of losing their club. It's the pro/rel guy from Europe who's decrying our sporting system for protecting clubs from the market. Also, I'm not so sure the romance of sport and whatever "sporting merit" means to oneself needs to be in opposition to "common business sense." Business sense doesn't HAVE to mean anything other than "find a way to keep this enterprise afloat." I think concerns that MLS is a problematic business model that uses pro soccer as a way to get into the real estate business aren't totally misplaced. I just don't think that's an indictment of closed leagues in general.
Indeed. It's LONG been seen as a good "starter sport" and a fun recreational activity. As a serious spectator sport? In much of the country, not so much. But that's starting to change.
Matthew Harding and family turned Chelsea into a rich club. Ken Bates nearly broke them before being bailed out buy RA.
Oh, hang on - you're saying those three were multiples of Houston's total payroll? I misinterpreted what you were saying. Yes - what I meant was that once those three were on the IR (e.g. most of last season), there was not a lot a difference between the payrolls of the two teams' gameday 18.
Observing your last five posts, based on your own criteria, you need to ban yourself from this thread. Now, if I were moderating, it would only be temporarily for maybe a month or two, so you could ponder whether you think you're capable of contributing to this discussion in a positive way. Of course, if I treated you the same way you've treated me on the MLS forum you moderate, you'd be BANNED FOR LIFE. You don't find that just a tiny bit hypocritical? Have a nice day.
Growing up in rural Nebraska, there was no opportunity to play soccer. At all. Over a decade ago (maybe quite a bit longer, I'm actually not sure--my parents still live there but I moved away over 30 years ago), my hometown of around 4,000 people installed a soccer field and instituted a rec-league program for little kids. At the time, the local paper ran an editorial arguing against starting a club program for older kids. The argument was that while it was nice to have soccer for little kids, there wasn't enough genuine interest in the sport at the older age to justify the city supporting a travel team. The writer (the owner/editor of the local paper) pointed out there were two club options in neighboring towns, each only 10-15 miles away, for the handful of families who really wanted to do that. There was a whiff of condescension in his tone, but also a germ of truth. I'm not sure there was enough interest, talent, or experience to make a travel club team work back home years ago. Well, two or three years ago the High school added boys & girls soccer as school sports. Proper soccer fields have been set at the local park next to the softball & baseball complex. I suspect that quite a few of the kids who grew up playing in the rec league grew to really love the sport, and thanks to the internet and cable tv they were able to watch the pro game as well. Neither boys nor girls are exactly powerhouse teams yet, and I can't vouch for the level of play of HS soccer in small town Nebraska these days, but from what I've read in the hometown paper online both are getting more competitive and nobody seems to think it's all a mistake or a failed experiment. So now kids in my hometown can grow up playing competitive soccer AND watching it on TV. This is in a rural county of under 10,000 people, mind you.