Soccer in the United States

Soccer (association football), known simply as "football" in many countries [See the articles Football (word) and Names for association football for more detailed explanations of the differing names for soccer.] , has long been a popular sport in the United States. It is the most popular recreational sport for both boys and girls, and according to "History of Soccer: The Beautiful Game", has been so for about 25 years.fact|date=February 2008 This late 20th century boom is attributed for the most part to the existence of the North American Soccer League from 1967 to 1984, and the New York Cosmos, its marquee team which included among its players stellar names like Franz Beckenbauer and Pelé.

However, professional soccer has been less popular in the United States than in Latin American, Asian, African or European nations. Its professional first-division league is not as well-attended in general as the major leagues of American football, baseball or basketball, but Major League Soccer is also much younger, and has far fewer teams. Major League Soccer debuted in 1996, while other major U.S. leagues have each existed since the first half of the 20th century.

Although MLS is also much younger than most other countries' first divisions, and has only 14 teams in 2008, they are already the 12th most-attended premier division in the entire world [cite web |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/6904077.stm |title=Beckham in Mission Unnecessary |date=2007-07-18 |publisher=BBC] . In 2006, MLS broke its all-time record for attendance at a regular-season match, which saw 92,650 spectators fill the Los Angeles Coliseum on a Sunday in August [cite web |url=http://www.revolutionsoccer.net/search/index.cfm?ac=searchdetail&pid=20327&pcid=115 |title=Twellman scores in Revs’ draw at Chivas USA: Revs play to 1-1 draw in front of largest MLS crowd ever |date=2006-08-06 |publisher=New England Revolution] ; although that claim is somewhat misattributed to the MLS game as it was one of two games played that night, the second being a match between two power-houses of the Spanish speaking soccer world: FC Barcelona and CD Guadalajara.

In 2007, with the arrival of international superstar player such as David Beckham, attendance records for specific MLS teams and stadiums continue to rise.Additionally, the US and Mexico national teams have been playing in front of crowds in excess of 60,000 in the U.S. in recent years, and have also broken several stadium, city, and state attendance records for matches held in the past five years. Television viewership of soccer in the U.S. is at an all-time high, with major sports networks regularly covering games in some fashion and several other channels dedicated mostly or entirely to the sport.

Until recently, American soccer was more of a regional phenomenon than it is today. Soccer flourished in hotbeds such as New Jersey, New York, St. Louis, Southern California, and in areas with large immigrant populations that grew up with the game in their homelands. But soccer is now gradually gaining popularity all over the country, partially due to youth programs, the creation of a Major League Soccer as a high quality professional league, and the recent success of the men's and women's national teams.

History of soccer in the U.S.

It is often claimed that the Oneida Football Club of Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1862 was the first club to play soccer outside Britain. However, the club could not have been playing soccer, as they were formed before the English Football Association (FA) formulated the rules; it is not known what rules the club used, [cite web | url=http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/oneidas.html | title=Were the Oneidas playing soccer or not? | author=Roger Allaway | date=February 14, 2001 | accessdate=2007-06-25 ] and it broke up within the space of a few years. According to "Encyclopædia Britannica", the club is often credited with inventing the "Boston Game", which both allowed players to kick a round ball along the ground, and to pick it up and run with it.

The first U.S. match known to have been inspired by FA rules was a game between Princeton University and Rutgers University on November 6, 1869, which was won by Rutgers 6-4. The FA rules were followed in the Princeton-Rutgers contest: [Gardner, Paul. "The Simplest Game", Macmillan, 1996] participants were only allowed to kick the ball and each side had 25 players. Other colleges emulated this development, but all of these were converted to rugby by the mid-1870s and would soon become famous as early bastions of American football.

Early soccer leagues in the U.S. mostly used the name "football", for example: the American Football Association (founded in 1884), the American Amateur Football Association (1893), the American League of Professional Football (1894), the National Association Foot Ball League (1895), and the Southern New England Football League (1914). However, the word "soccer" was beginning to catch on, and the St Louis Soccer League was a significant regional competition between 1907 and 1939. What is now the United States Soccer Federation was originally the U.S. Football Association, formed in 1913 by the merger of the American Football Association and the American Amateur Football Association. The governing body of the sport in the U.S. did not have the word soccer in its name until 1945, when it became the U.S. Soccer Football Association. It did not drop the word "football" from its name until 1974, when it became the U.S. Soccer Federation.

Two more soccer leagues were started in 1967, the United Soccer Association and the National Professional Soccer League. These merged to form the North American Soccer League in 1968, which survived until 1984. The NASL also ran an indoor league in the latter years. [ [http://sdmlsproject.com/about.html thenasl ] ]

Indoor soccer was a great success in the 1980s to the 90s, in part due to the input of the North American Soccer League. When the NASL folded, other leagues, including the Major Indoor Soccer League filled in to meet the demand. Twenty-five years hence, the current version of MISL exists with nine teams slated for the 2007-2008 season. [ [http://www.misl.net Major Indoor Soccer League ] ]

Expansion in popularity

There has been a large expansion in the United States since the mid 1990s, this has been attributed to the 1994 FIFA World Cup being played in the United States for the first time, winning the sport more recognition. In the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the United States team did surprisingly well which also succeeded in winning more converts. Both the 1999 and 2003 FIFA Women's World Cups were held in the USA, and the United States women's national team is one of the best in the world. They are currently the first-ranked team in the world by FIFA, have won two of the five FIFA Women's World Cups held thus far, and have also won gold medals in three of the four Olympic women's football tournaments held to date. [The Olympic tournament is far more prestigious in women's football than in the men's game, largely because the women's tournament is contested by full national sides without age restrictions. The men's tournament is generally restricted to under-23 players.] Their home crowd of over 90,000 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California for the 1999 World Cup Final remains the largest crowd in the world ever to witness any women's sporting event.

A number of leagues have existed, within the United States. Today, the first division pro league is Major League Soccer, which has 13 U.S. teams plus one in Canada as of the 2008 season, with expansion planned for an eventual 18-team table within next five years or so, according to the league's Commissioner, Don Garber. The United Soccer Leagues contains two divisions of professional teams, with a total of 21 teams, an amateur league, as well as a women's league. The Women's United Soccer Association, an 8-team, fully professional women's league, was founded in 2001 but folded in 2003. The league's founders, however, continued to work to revive the league, and eventually announced plans to launch Women's Professional Soccer in 2009, again with 8 teams. The Major Indoor Soccer League thrives in a few cities and has been around since 2001. Other professional indoor leagues have existed since at least 1978.

Leagues outside the United States, such as the English Premier League, are highly competitive with MLS for American fans watching the sport on television. Major League matches are all shown live on TV, but so are matches from all around the world. The U.S. even has at least five national networks devoted mostly or completely to the sport, the largest and most-well known being the Fox Soccer Channel, a 24-hour cable soccer channel, consisting of live coverage of the Premier League, Serie A, Major League Soccer, the FA Cup, the US men's national team, CONCACAF club and national team competitions, and other matches, along with news programs and league or team specific programming. Other important channels are Setanta Sports North America, the U.S. version of a channel based in the British Isles, and Gol TV, which operates both a Spanish and English language channel. The rise of these media outlets means that soccer fans living in the United States have near constant access to programming about the sport in a way comparable to those living in Europe or Latin America.

The overall league structure in the United States is significantly different from that used in almost all the rest of the world, but similar to that used by other North American team sports leagues, in that there is no system of promotion and relegation between lower and higher leagues but rather a minor league system. The playoffs employed by the leagues differ from most European championships, but are more popular in the Western Hemisphere. The American game incorporates features common to American sports, most notably the determination of champions by playoffs between the top teams. However, in several ways, MLS has become more similar to leagues in the rest of the world:
*Originally, MLS games could not end in ties; several different tiebreaker methods were tried. Starting in 2005, the league went to the international model of letting ties stand in regular-season play, and adopted FIFA's tiebreaker rules of 30 minutes extra time, followed by a penalty shootout if necessary, in knockout playoff matches.
*MLS originally used a downward-counting clock that stopped in dead-ball situations, and play would automatically end when the clock reached 0:00. This type of game clock is still in use in American high schools and colleges, but is completely foreign to the international game, in which the clock counts up with no stoppages and the referee adds on time to compensate for game stoppages. MLS adopted the international clock in 2000.
*For the first decade of MLS, the front of teams' shirts did not bear advertisements, as commercial uniform sponsorship is uncommon in American sports. However, starting in the 2007 MLS season, clubs were allowed to accept corporate sponsorship on the front of their shirts.

The English and Spanish-language telecasts of the 2006 FIFA World Cup Championship Final combined to attract an estimated 16.9 million American viewers, comparable to the average viewership of the 2005 World Series of Major League Baseball. [Richard Sandomir, [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/sports/soccer/11sandomir.html "TV SPORTS; Ratings Up, But Networks Can Improve"] , "The New York Times", July 11, 2006, p. D1] Interestingly, Univision paid more than three times as much for the Spanish-language television rights for the 2010 and 2014 FIFA World Cups as Disney's ABC and ESPN paid for the English-language rights to the same competitions.cite web|url=http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_17/article.html |title=One World Cup |first=Steve |last=Sailer |authorlink=Steve Sailer |publisher="The American Conservative" |date=2006-07-17 |accessdate=2006-07-16] In 2007, the CONCACAF Gold Cup attracted record television viewership, and in the case of one particular group stage match, it was the most-watched primetime program on any network that night among 18-49 males. The Univision telecast of the final between USA and Mexico was the third-most watched Spanish-language program of all-time in the United States, beaten only by two FIFA World Cup finals matches.

One factor contributing to the relatively slow pace of growth in popularity is the competitive nature amongst various American youth sports programs, primarily centered around community clubs in the pre-teen years and secondary school teams thereafter. In some regions of the U.S., high school soccer and American football are both played in the fall and a student generally cannot devote time to both. Until the 1980s, most high schools in the U.S. did not offer soccer at all, and youth soccer programs were extremely rare until the 1970s. Thus, older generations of Americans living today grew up with virtually no exposure to the sport.

In recent decades, more and more pre-teen youth sport organizations have turned to soccer as either a supplement to or a replacement for American football in their programs. This is primarily for economical for a cash-strapped youth organization than American football because far less player protection, fewer officials and less complex field equipment is required, while at the same time the insurance risks associated with American football are far greater. Simultaneously, with increased urbanization, American high schools have grown to the point where most offer both sports in their autumn sports seasons. Due to the rising popularity of youth playing, the term soccer mom is used in North American social, cultural and political discourse, broadly referring to a middle- or upper-middle class woman working and having school-age children.

The result is that the participants of these expanded programs have become today's players with representation in many teams in Europe as well as in Major League Soccer.

American players in foreign leagues

Since the early 1990s breakthrough of the US national team, many American players have found opportunities playing soccer in bigger leagues overseas. Among the first Americans to become regulars in European leagues were John Harkes (Sheffield Wednesday), Eric Wynalda (Saarburcken), and Earnie Stewart (NAC Breda). The following is a list of active Americans playing in foreign leagues.

U.S. women professional players today

The success of the women's national team has not translated into success for women's professional soccer in the United States. The most successful attempt at a national women's soccer league was the Women's United Soccer Association. It featured successful American players Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm, and many other national team stars. The WUSA ceased operation at the end of 2003, but many of those involved in the league are working to restart the league in 2009 under the banner of Women's Professional Soccer, once again with eight teams. The W-League of the United Soccer Leagues and the WPSL have also had some success with teams in cities all across the country.

America's approach to growing the game among women has served as a model for other countries' development programs for women at all levels. The relative lack of attention afforded the women's game in traditional soccer-playing countries may also have contributed to the US's early dominance of the international women's game. Another factor is Title IX, requiring college and public school athletics programs to support men's and women's athletics equally.

American soccer leagues and associations

*Major League Soccer
*United Soccer Leagues
*National Premier Soccer League
*Women's Premier Soccer League
*Women's United Soccer Association (defunct)
*Women's Professional Soccer (coming in 2009)
*Major Indoor Soccer League (defunct)
*Professional Arena Soccer League
*Premier Arena Soccer League
*Xtreme Soccer League
*American Indoor Soccer League
*National Intercollegiate Soccer Officials Association
*National Soccer Coaches Association of America
*American Youth Soccer Organization
* [http://www.usyouthsoccer.org United States Youth Soccer Association]
*United States Adult Soccer Association
*United States Soccer Federation

American teams

*United States men's national soccer team
*United States women's national soccer teamThe following national teams of U.S. unincorporated territories compete in their corresponding regions. Their governing bodies are either member or associate in the corresponding regional federations. For all but American Samoa, players for these territories are, like most local residents, U.S. citizens. Natives of American Samoa are U.S. nationals, but not U.S. citizens.
*American Samoa national soccer team
*Guam national football team
*Northern Mariana Islands national football team
*Puerto Rico national football team
*U.S. Virgin Islands national soccer team

ee also

*United States soccer league system

Footnotes

References

* [http://www.aafla.org/SportsLibrary/SportsHistorian/1996/sh16f.pdf "American Exceptionalism: Soccer and American Football"] by Ivan Waddington and Martin Roderick, 2 Sept. 1996, retrieved 6 Dec. 2005.