Twenty-eight years ago I moved to Chicago a month or two before the 1986 World Cup started. A report I wrote then underlines how far soccer has come in the land of the gridiron and the baseball diamond in the intervening nearly three decades.
“Just my luck,” I wrote. “While the rest of the football-mad globe is getting punch-drunk on a ball-by-ball account of the trail to glory, Windy City is more concerned with the size of Bears quarterback Jim McMahon’s close-season midriff.”
Admittedly, I reported, national network NBC was broadcasting seven of the 52 scheduled games, while those with cable TV could get a further 15. “NBC viewers, however, could be forgiven for thinking that the entire extravaganza was staged to provide a spectacular backdrop for Budweiser beer advertisements.” I ended up watching several of the games from Mexico on the Spanish International network, which broadcast all matches, in Spanish, for the benefit of the city’s 600,000-strong Hispanic community.
Were I still resident in Chicago today, I would have the option of cramming into the fan park at Butler Field along with thousands of USA supporters, to cheer on Clint Dempsey & Co in their efforts to upset Belgium in Salvador. Or I could tune in on ESPN along with perhaps 20 million other viewers.
For all this, I am for now treating with scepticism any notion that Brazil 2014 might come to be seen as the moment soccer finally came of age in the US.
Sure, pictures of President Barack Obama catching the games while attending to pressing matters of state may help to further broaden the sport’s appeal. Coach Jurgen Klinsmann’s much-publicised handwritten note to US employers asking them to excuse employees from work on the day of the Germany game was a smart move that struck the right tone. And US fans did snap up an impressive quantity of Brazil 2014 tickets.
But witty, knowledgeable, self-deprecating US fans have been a feature of World Cups for some time now. I encountered hundreds of them in and around Gelsenkirchen railway station in June 2006, ahead of a World Cup match against the Czech Republic.
There was an Uncle Sam, a man in a yellow rattlesnake cape bearing the legend, ‘Don’t tread on me’, and a troop of six Elvises. Then-coach Bruce Arena’s Army, I wrote, “is preppy, liberal, college-educated America. They may do wonders for their country’s shop-soiled image while they are over here.”
These college types constitute one of the US markets where, it seems to me, soccer is already thoroughly entrenched. Another is the Hispanic population. Another is the fan-base of the women’s game, where Team USA is, in a word, Brazil.
For a new explosion of popularity to be touched off, the sport would need to capture the imagination of the proverbial man in Peoria, Mr Middle America, the sort of guy who would as soon miss a Super Bowl broadcast as chuck a veggie burger on the grill.
How might Peoria man have reacted to the US team’s progress in Brazil, assuming he had been persuaded to tune in by the hullabaloo stirred up by the win over Ghana with which the campaign started?
That match had an unbeatable narrative: the first-minute goal; the defiant, but increasingly desperate defence; the equaliser; the somewhat surprising, never-say-die winner, notched in unforgettable style by John Brooks, “the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln”, as his Wikipedia page was soon proclaiming.
Since then, we have had a Portugal match in which the US suffered the disappointment of a last-gasp equaliser. And a Germany match in which the US lost and carried a threat only in the last 30 seconds.
Don’t get me wrong: these were seriously well-drilled, canny, obdurate displays against top-drawer opposition by what is undoubtedly the best US men’s side I have watched. It’s just that I don’t think its qualities are very likely to jump out and capture many of the casual viewers currently inflating the team’s TV ratings on the off chance they will be entertained.
And I would think more of the same is in store against Belgium, a side which has played well below its potential in Brazil while winning all of its matches and which is packed with Premier League stars.
Klinsmann’s squad is tough enough and well-organised enough to encourage thoughts that they are capable of an upset, but for one thing: it is hard to imagine them scoring against a defence marshalled by Vincent Kompany, one of the world’s best defenders. And if they don’t win, I doubt that many of those giving soccer a try in barbecue season will stick with them for lower-profile encounters.
All in all, I think it is much more likely, that Brazil 2014 will go down as another step in soccer’s gradual ascent of the US sports hierarchy than as some ‘Big Bang’ epochal moment that makes manifest its mainstream appeal.
Then again, these small steps add up: in 1986, the US had proved no match in qualifying for a footballing minnow called Costa Rica; Chicago’s only direct link with a tournament won eventually by Diego Maradona’s Argentina, was Gerry Gray, a midfielder in the Canadian team, who played his club football for the Chicago Sting.
How times have changed.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.