Popularity of Soccer

association foot nut case or footb exclusively, as it is called by the rest of the world outside the United States is surely the just about popular recreation in the world. Every four years, the world title of soccer, the public Cup, is watched by literally billions all everywhere the world, beating out the United States professional footballs Superbowl by far. It is estimated that 1. 7 billion television receiver viewers watched the World Cup final between France and Brazil in July of 1998.And it is overly a genuine world championship, involving teams from 32 countries in the final rounds, conflicting the much more parochial and misnamed World Series in the Statesn baseball (that doesnt tied(p) involve Japan or Cuba, two baseball hotbeds). But although soccer has become an important sport in the American sports scene, it pull up stakes never make inroads into the hearts and markets of American sports the way that football, hoops, hockey, baseball, and even tennis and golf have d unitary. There argon many reasonablenesss for this.The biggest reason for soccers failure as a mass appeal sport in the United States is that it doesnt conform easily to the demands of television. Basketball succeeds enormously in America because it regularly schedules what it calls television time-outs as well as the time-outs that the teams themselves call to re-group, non to mention half-times and, on the professional level, quarter breaks. Those time-outs in the action are ideally made for television commercials. And television coverage is the lifeblood of American sports.College basketball lives for a farinaceous scheduled on CBS or ESPN (highly recruited high coach players are more uniformly to go to a team that regularly gets national television exposure), and we could even say that television coverage has prescribe the pace and feel of American football. Anyone who has attended a live football game knows how commercial time-outs slow the game and sometimes , at its most excite moments, disrupt the flow of events. There is no serious objection, however, because without television, football knows that it lonesome(prenominal) when wouldnt remain in the homes and hearts of Americans.Also, without those advertising dollars, the teams couldnt afford the sky-high salaries of their costly superstars. Soccer, on the other hand, except for its half-time break, has no time-outs except for half-time, it is eonian run, run, run, run, back and forth, back and forth, relentlessly, with only a few seconds of relaxation when a goal is pass waterd, and that can happen seldom, sometimes never. The best that commercial television coverage can hope for is an injury time-out, and in soccer that happens only with decapitation or disembowelment.Second, Americans love their violence, and soccer doesnt deliver on this score the way that American football and hockey do. There are plan moments, spurts of violence, yes, but fans cant expect the full-time men u of bone-crushing carnage that American football and hockey can deliver minute by and bywards minute, game after game. In soccer, players are actually singled out and warned shamed, with embarrassingly silly white-livered cards, for acts of violence and duplicity that would be smiled at in most American sports other than tennis and golf.Third, it is just too difficult to score in soccer. America loves its football games with scores similar 49 to 35 and a professional basketball game with scores below 100 is regarded as a defensive bore. In soccer, on the other hand, scores like 2 to 1, even 1 to 0, are commonplace and apparently enviable games scoreless at the end of regulation time happen all the time. (In the 515 games played in the final phase in the history of the World Cup games through 1994, only 1584 goals have been scored. Thats three a game And if there is no resolution at the end of overtime, the teams resort to a shoot-out that has more to do with luck than with re al soccer skills. Worse yet, it is accomplishable for a team to dominate in terms of sheer endowment fund and shots-on-goal and still lose the game by virtue of a momentary lapse in defensive attention, a stroke of bad luck, and the opponents break-away goal. Things like that can happen, too, in baseball, but the problem somehow evens out over baseballs very long season of daily games.In soccer, it just isnt fair. Soccer authorities should consider making the goal smaller and doing away with the netkeeper to make scoring easier. And the business of starting over after distributively goal, in the middle of the field of operations, has to be reconsidered. Its too much like the center-jump after each goal in the basketball game of yesteryear. It seems unlikely that Americans will ever fully comprehend or appreciate a sport in which players are non allowed to use their arms and hands.Although the footwork of soccer players is a magnificent skill to behold, most American fans are perplexed by straitjacketed soccer players inability and unwillingness to pick up the darn ball and run with it The inability to use substitutes (unless the player to be substituted for is lying bushed(p) or maimed on the field of play) is also bewildering to Americans, who glorify the sixth man in basketball and a baseball game in which virtually the entire roster (including an otherwise unemployable old man called the designated hitter) is deployed on the field at one time or another.Finally, the field in soccer is enormous. Considerably larger than the American football field, the soccer field could contain at least a 12 basketball courts. Americans like their action condensed, in a small field of vision ten enormous sweaty people bouncing off one another and moving rapidly through a space the size of a medium-sized bedroom, twenty-two even larger people in big uniforms converging on a small, oddly shaped ball. In soccer, on the other hand, there is a premium on spreading o ut, not infringing upon the force field occupied by a team-mate, so that pick up foot-passing is possible.This spreading out across the vast meadow of the soccer performing field does not lend itself, again, to close get-down-and-dirty television scrutiny. Soccer is a great sport and it certainly deserves the increased attention and popularity it is getting on all levels. But primarily, again, because it does not lend itself to television it will never make it big in the United States the way these other sports have, not until it changes some of its fundamental strategies.