US women soccer players want equal pay to US men's team.

you are talking in circles at this point nobody said us soccer doesn't get any credit for helping the women's national team or girls youth soccer lol.

 

But to be honest the Monster Truck/WWE Mashup World Cup would have sold out every event. Americans love an occasion.

 

Do you understand my argument now?

Between 1971 and 1994 the number of high school boys playing soccer increased by 325%.

If the number of girls playing had increased by the same percentage there would have 2,275.

The rest would presumably have been doing needlework.

Instead there were 166,170 hs girls playing soccer.

Edited to add: I went to the equivalent of high school in England between 1972 and 1979.

The boys played soccer, rugby and basketball (when the weather was bad), the girls played field hockey, lacrosse and netball. There was no choice.

I think the 1999 World Cup finally convinced British educators to give the girls a chance.

 

Way to dodge the facts.

The US World Cup was easily the most successful by a country mile, and it's accomplishments from a fan engagement and financial standpoint hold up well even today.

Nowadays, add in all the SSS, soccer infrastructure, improved mega-stadiums, and TV money, and the 2026 edition will set records that are unlikely to be broken for decades.

 

True, although following the success of the World Cup USSF President Alan Rothenberg expected US businessmen to be chomping at the bit to start a professional league.

When that didn't happen he stepped in himself and found 5 or 6 semi-reluctant investors, which is how we ended up with the much maligned single-entity.

 

As someone who was part of the 72,404 crowd for the Saudi Arabia-Morocco game at that World Cup, probably one of the largest gatherings in soccer history of spectators who didn't really care about either team, I have say that I am skeptical about the "fan engagement" part of your statement. (Yes, I'm sure that there were a lot of fans at that game who were fans of one team or the other, but I'm also sure that they were a small portion of the crowd.)

 

Do we need to measure the decibels of the crowds to compare the amount of cheering between World Cups? Cause South Africa would win in a landslide, even though vuvuzela bee swarms ruined my fan engagement...

If it's a butt in a seat, it counts as engagement. Plenty of people were passionate about plenty of the teams, this seems like creating something to nitpick. 16,000 more per game than Brazil, 22,000 more per game than Russia, and half a million more tickets sold than either tournament (with 12 less games) means that you could play 5 of those Morocco-SA games and still come out with more passionate fans on average and more total passionate fans than any other WC ever...

 

No, just "true". The statistics back up the claims about financial and fan engagement, and the growth of soccer in the USA (through MLS and the hosting of international tournaments like the ICC, Gold Cup, and Copa Centennario) backs up the claim that the soccer infrastructure will be superior to 1994.

Businessmen chomping at the bit was what got us the NASL, who blew its load on the Cosmos attracting Pele and Beckenbauer, and failed in 15 years, a failure that was less than a decade before the '94 WC. In any case, a USSF president misjudging the climate of excitement surrounding the creation of a new professional soccer league has nothing to do with my assertion. The 1994 tournament was successful. The 2026 tournament will have bigger stadiums, more games, a wider TV audience, a greater number of qualifiers (thus increasing the number of countries that will send fans to see their team), and will take place in a country with a more savvy soccer audience that heavily consumes high-level soccer.

If you have evidence that such a tournament should not eclipse the World Cups of the past, let's hear it.

 

I'm not knocking the success of the World Cup or it's long- term legacy.

And Rothenberg knew all about NASL being the commish and all, and that's why MLS became the anti-NASL.

It's just that in the immediate aftermath there wasn't a huge demand from businesses or individuals for a domestic soccer league.

It was Anschutz's involvement that got the league off the ground and saved it a few years later.

It was probably the kids who became most engaged which is why we have a vibrant league today.

 

I am chilled.

 

You should get tested.

 

I think we are talking past each other a bit. Yes, MLS was shaky in the beginning. I can easily imagine that there wasn't a rabid demand for a league in 1994. And I know about the early-days Anschutz difficulties.

 

The seat next to mine was occupied by someone who goes to about one soccer game a decade. Is that the degree of engagement you want?

 

Ah, you're right, nobody who watched a single game in WC 1994 (and no other editions) has ever watched a single game since.

You're using extremely shaky anecdotal evidence, I'm not going to change my opinion based on it.

 

The combined weekly turnout (6 games) for MLS in 1997 was about the same as the attendance for Saudi vs. Morocco.

But it may have engaged people in other ways.

 

And the relevance is...? In 2000 the league averaged ~4,000 fans less than its inaugural season, the lowest in history. Why not use those numbers?

Oh, you want to be fair. So you're going to compare the attendance of a World Cup game in a football stadium to a series of domestic club games in the 2nd year of MLS. I gotcha.

 

The relevance is that you said those 72,000 people became engaged with soccer. Apparently they weren't engaged for long.

 

women haven't been playing it professionally though in the us they had failed league after failed league lol.

the ncaa gave people like mia and foudy someplace to play from ages 18-22...us soccer didn't do that and for the record for the most part still isn't doing that.

 

I didn't say nobody. For one thing, I have watched hundreds of games myself. What I said (or implied; I didn't say it in so many words) was not everybody.

And remember, in my first post, I didn't say that you're wrong. I said that I'm skeptical about one part of your statement.

 

Going to a World Cup soccer game in Florida does not guarantee an appearance at one of 6 MLS games 3 years later.

US highschool players have more than doubled since 1990. US youth participation since 1994 has increased from 2 million to 3.1 million. Dozens of American professional soccer players in the early-mid 2000s have pointed to watching or going to the 1994 World Cup as a key part of their motivation to play professional soccer.

It's simply absurd and baseless to think that World Cups, particularly the most-attended in history, don't have an outsized, positive impact on the sporting culture of the host country. Without the World Cup, it's undeniable that a professional American soccer league would have started years or decades later than MLS. More speculatively, the resulting league would have been weaker without the uptick in visibility and interest in the sport that the WC brings.

Apparently, the only way to be "engaged" is to attend professional domestic soccer games.

 

You didn't say "nobody", but you implied that attendance didn't matter because you know someone who doesn't care about sports who attended. The knock-on effects of WC1994 are undeniable unless you don't think that sporting events leave any lasting impressions whatsoever.

 

I didn't deny that the WC had a positive overall effect and I specifically called out high-schoolers.

Definitely the World Cup was start of the modern era.

But there were few options for watching soccer or even reading up on it back in the late nineties.

The world-wide web was in its infancy and you had to pay to view a Premier League game on TV.

Also the Premier League was a lot more domestic so given that England didn't make the WC you wouldn't have had the chance to see many World Cup heroes.

I think Serie A was on PBS back then, no?

In 2002 the US had a good World Cup run, the Premier League was on TV, everyone had access to the web and you would have had chance to see and hear about many WC heroes.

I mean by 2007 everyone knew who David Beckham was.

 

I agree that the knock-on effects of WC1994 are undeniable. Here is something that I wrote about that World Cup in a book that was published in 2001: "The 1994 World Cup was a magnificent event in the history of soccer in the United States. The organizers hoped that it would be a springboard toward others, and it appears that their hopes were reasonable ones."

However, I believe in being cautious about some aspects of it. While I don't think that the fact that there were non-fans in the stands at that particular game means that attendance doesn't matter at all, I am a skeptic about whether attendance should be taken as a 100 percent indicator of fan involvement.

 

There is plenty of room for debate here, but I've long thought that the start of the modern era in American soccer was the win over Trinidad on Nov. 19, 1989.