Building Pro Soccer Across the US and Indianapolis w/ Peter Wilt (Part 1)
Posted on October 23, 2012 4:35 am
Peter Wilt discusses with the guys concerning the expansion of NASL in North America, and in particular, Indianapolis. What makes Indy the right spot? Will it be viable? What are the plans to build a fan base in Indy? On the Straight Red Card. www.thestraightredcard.com
Tennis is *not* one of the most popular spectator sports in the world? Really?
I’m not sure what planet Peter lives on, but here on Earth tennis certainly is one of the most popular spectator sports.
Well, maybe so but the jogging analogy works. You get the point he was trying to make. Tennis as you know has suffered a drop in fans since the 70s and 80s when everyone talked about tennis. Guys like McEnroe and Borg and Connors etc made the sport more popular than ever in the US. Since then, tennis viewership in tennis has gone down. This may because we haven’t had a top-ranked player since Roddick fell from number one. The years of Sampras and Agassi, and an American playing in almost every major final seems long ago. I say this as a huge tennis fan. My disagreement with Peter revolves around the reality that public tennis courts use to be full of people playing tennis in the 70s, 80s and even 90s. Now, most of those courts are empty and overgrown, with cracks splitting the court surface, or converted into basketball courts. To be real, tennis in the US has been in a slump. Now, in some places in the world, tennis is as popular as ever.
Ummm….i’ll stick with planet earth….check this poll out:
http://1863.pitchinvasion.net/post/19398491502/soccer-cracks-big-four
ESPN Luker poll shows tennis is the 9th most popular spectator sport. i don’t consider 9th to be “one of the most popular”. 1.8% listed tennis as their favorite sport in the poll…a fraction of soccer’s support (8.2%). Please show me a poll that backs your position Justin O.
I thought the comment was a more general statement about participation vs spectator sports anywhere, and not a US-specific comment. In the US context it is less popular now, though there are any number of sports that would have been a better example.
Internationally tennis is probably more popular than ever.
Enjoyed the interview. When will Part 2 be posted?
Tonight!
I thought I posted last night. Anyway I’m a little disappointed since I think Indy would be great for MLS. Natural rival for COL and CHI. It could be another Cascadia Cup except call it the Whitebread Kielbasa Cup (kidding).
I think the plan is, as always, to shoot for MLS eventually. But Indy needs to make that case.
They make a good point… Toronto needs to have the opportunity to succeed. Promotion/Relegation would allow this franchise to learn to excel at D2 and hopefully translate that to D1.
Well, I’ve split my life between both Planet Earth and Planet USA, so I’ve gotten information from both.
Again, I interpreted the comment as a general statement about parallels in any individual’s interest in watching a sport and playing a sport, with the location of the individual not being the point. Esentially, I interpretted your words as meaning something like “There are some sporting activities that, because of their nature, no one would ever watch as a spectator, such as jogging and tennis.” Now, it seems what you meant was someting more like “tennis’s poplarity as a spectator sport in the US has declied to a level well below it’s participation levels.” I don’t really no how true that is, but it certainly seems a plausible assertion.
In any case, not sure why it gets mentioned in the same breath as jogging. You seem to be equating the two. Disregarding the rest of the world, numerous tennis players are household names in the US, and many tennis tournaments get national media coverage in the US, the grand slams getting loads of coverage.
And in the poll you cite it’s top 10. Popular and unpopular are subjective terms clearly, but I don’t see that as bad at all. Certainly it’s in a different category than jogging.
sorry my comment was posted three times. the first two times it didn’t appear. Not sure how to delete, but perhaps the editor could take down two of them. And while popular and unpopular are subjective, “One of the world’s most popular” is not. Tennis is NOT one of the world’s most popular spectator sports EVEN though it is a very popular participant sport throughout the world.
I’ve been mostly overseas in numerous different countries since 1998 and tennis is probably the sport I have seen on TV more than any other except soccer. Even very marginal tournaments with few top 50 players are shown in numerous countries via large international sports networks like (but not limited to) Eurosport, Dubai Sport, and Al Jazeera Sport. It has a presence in every part of the world except probably Sub-Saharan Africa. And even there, the big tournaments are available on TV. (South Africa’s Supersport showed tennis, I think, but I don’t remember exactly how much)
Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, the Williams sisters, Sharapova – these are among the biggest names in global sports.
Yes, we come back to the subjectivity of the terminology (and “world’s most popular sports” is quite subjective). But I have ALWAYS heard tennis included among the world’s most popular spectator sports, and that certainly meshes with my observations. (excluding cases where the people doing the commentating mean American sports when they say “world of sports”, of course.)
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