A few weeks ago Landon Donovan was doing a live telephone interview with ESPN when the excited presenter gushed that David Beckham was quoted as saying he would like to play in the United States.
Donovan, the best player in Major League Soccer (MLS), responded with the sort of tired ‘really?†that suggested he, unlike the journalist, knew this did not mean that the England captain was ready to leave Real Madrid to link up with the former Chelsea striker John Spencer at the Colorado Rapids.
Contrary to popular belief, the US is a country where the people involved in the game have a sophisticated enough appreciation of it to know exactly where they stand on the bigger stage.
They are under no illusions about the quality of their own domestic league (steadily improving midway through its ninth season), are justifiably proud of the national team (currently seventh, a place ahead of England, in the Fifa rankings) and fully appreciate that the arrival of some of Europe’s leading clubs for the Champions World tournament this week is all about them cashing in on the game’s increasing popularity in the US.
On Tuesday, four days before Celtic and Chelsea kick off proceedings in Seattle this weekend, five of the 11 matches were reportedly sold out.
Although some fans will be unaware they are paying top dollar for tepid pre-season fare and may even, as widely reported in Britain last year, cheer passionately and ignorantly at the awarding of throw-ins and corner-kicks, the vast majority will be fully cognisant of what to expect.
Apart from the huge numbers of expatriates who should turn up at all venues, there is an average American soccer diehard out there who is far more knowledgeable than given credit for.
With organised leagues catering for children as young as four, these fans have probably played at least as much football growing up as their British counterparts have. On any given Saturday from August to May they get to take in televised club matches from Britain, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.
This extraordinarily rich and diverse diet of satellite football may be one reason why these people do not support MLS clubs — where average attendances last season nudged 16 000 — in greater numbers.
There is another. The famously rude health of the game at grassroots level — almost eight million Americans between six and 16 play competitively — means that the very demographic the professional league needs to attract is often too busy playing matches at weekends for its parents to think about travelling to support a local team. The women’s professional league went bust last year precisely because of that problem.
Satellite and Internet technology ensures that, unlike back in the Seventies when Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, George Best, Johan Cruyff and a whole host of others of lesser wattage came here in the twilight of their careers to make easy money in the North American Soccer League, the youngsters today are a little more informed than their predecessors.
Despite all the hype surrounding the 15-year-old Freddy Adu, whose first professional season at DC United has been difficult, fans are well aware that the MLS is not at the same level as the Premiership or La Liga.
This knowledge is also why Manchester United, who are also touring here, and the rest of the G14 clubs are so anxious to establish footholds in this market. After all, eight million is an awful lot of replica kits.
For all the publicity United’s link-up with the New York Yankees a couple of years back engendered at the time, it appears to have yielded only one serious benefit, an often bizarre block of Manchester United TV programming on the Yankees’ own channel late at night.
Real signed a deal with Disney in Orlando last November that looks potentially more lucrative, making their merchandise available at Disney retail outlets across the US. The Spaniards have also talked about the possibility of establishing a feeder club in Florida to compete in the MLS.
In this respect the European giants are already lagging behind. Last January eight Mexican clubs took part in a play-off tournament at venues in California, Dallas and Houston to decide which two of them made it to this season’s Libertadores Cup.
That they attracted more than 30 000 supporters explains why from next season Chivas USA, owned and operated by Chivas of Guadalajara, the only club in the Mexican league that boasts never to have had a foreigner in its line-up, will play in the MLS.
Backed by the multimillionaire Jorge Vergara, Chivas USA will probably share a ground with the Los
Angeles Galaxy and hope to tap into the enormous Hispanic market. If half the existing Chivas supporters in California attend their home games, they would immediately become the best-supported side in the league.
Since millions of Hispanics are undocumented illegal aliens, and do not fit easily into the ‘white soccer mom†stereotype usually affixed to the game here, they are often overlooked in the greater scheme of things.
Yet they represent another vibrant part of the American soccer culture and one more reason why, over the next fortnight, too many column inches will be wasted by visiting journalists fretting about whether soccer can ever usurp baseball, basketball, gridiron and ice hockey in the American sports pantheon.
It will not, but it does not need to in order to survive and blossom.
Having signed a sponsorship deal with Nike worth $25-million a year, the US Soccer Federation spends hugely on player development, including a residential programme in Florida for the country’s best teenagers.
There are more than 300 Division One universities here that offer soccer scholarships to American high-school children, allowing them to combine further education with playing competitively at a decent level. Most of these institutions have coaching budgets and facilities far superior to those of Second Division clubs in England.
In addition to Brad Friedel and Claudio Reyna in the Premiership, graduates of the system play professionally all over the world and backboned the team that reached the quarterfinals of the last World Cup.
The Americans will enjoy the spectacle of ChampionsWorld and relish the opportunity of seeing the marquee names in the flesh, but two weeks from now the game here will be no better or worse off. It will still be doing just fine. —