U.S. and Ghana World Cup Match Sets Record, But It's Not Good Enough
It seems that everyone I know was watching this year's World Cup telecast. In fact, ABC's coverage of the U.S. loss to Ghana attracted some 14.86 million viewers, making it the most-watched men's World Cup match ever in the United States.The 1999 women's World Cup final, in which the U.S. defeated China, is the only match to average more U.S. viewers (17.97 million).
Those are pretty impressive numbers, at least at first glance. Upon closer inspection, however, one realizes that in comparison, a regular-season episode of American Idol this year pulled in six million more viewers than the men's game; in a down year for Idol no less.
A friend of mine who grew up in London and who now plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy (Landon Donovan's team), put things in great perspective for me. He and I spent six hours today watching a bunch of YouTube videos of soccer games played in England and Europe this past year. Sometime during those six hours it finally dawned on me: Soccer is like a religion for the fans in those countries.
The same can probably be said of soccer fans everywhere else in the world other than the US and arguably Canada.
Other countries' fans live, breathe and literally bleed soccer to the point that I think soccer means more to the rest of the world than even American football may mean to us in the States.
Having realized how little fan support the US team receives in comparison to other teams across the world, I am now even more proud of all that the US Men's World Cup team was able to achieve this year.
No one can blame this year's US team for not progressing as far as we, the so-called fans imagined, or hoped.
If we want the US to do well in the World Cup next time around, we need to start getting more involved in this sport now and start paying soccer players on a scale more comparable to football, basketball and baseball players.
Only then, will we have great athletes who want to play soccer. If things stand the way they are, we will lose our best potential players to other sports which reward their players much more fairly than soccer.
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