Soccer in America

I’ve had multiple conversations with people in the last few weeks about a general sense among everyone that soccer is making a significant movement currently in the collective consciousness of Americans.

By now most of you know of my love for the Beautiful Game (in fact there’s probably some that are tired of the videos of great goals - to which I respond…too bad!)  I was ecstatic this summer when the US team made headlines by beating Spain and taking Brazil to the wire.

In my mind, there’s a few macro-reasons for the recent momentum for soccer in the US.

1. The Internet - the widespread proliferation of high speed Internet and the “flattening” of the world has led to the ability to support international soccer teams as if you lived in the home country.  The fact of the matter is that the best soccer in the world doesn’t exist in North America.  And yet it doesn’t matter, because you can get local news from your country of choice, highlights of games almost immediately, and can generally follow your favorite team no matter where you live.  This has been HUGE.
2. Cable/Satellite TV and live soccer on the tube - Almost a corollary to the above, but the ability to watch live soccer on TV, pretty much 7 days a week if you’re looking for it, is another reason for the growth.  Now that the ESPN family of networks is showing English Premier League and Spanish La Liga games, it will only serve to feed the fire. And I hear that ESPN is going to blow out the coverage for the World Cup next summer in South Africa, which is going to be awesome.
3. A generation grows up - for the most part, everyone that is my age and younger played youth soccer to some extent as a kid.  While many kids quit playing in the 10-15 year old range, there was at least some exposure to the game as a kid.  Now we’re making up the better half of the 18-35 demographic (which is a sort of virtuous cycle for #2 above…as we make up this valuable demo, advertisers will want to reach us, can do so through sponsoring soccer).  As we begin to have kids and they begin to play the game, I think the generational impact is going to be huge.

There’s many more reasons, but these are a few.  Want to know how big soccer is now?  You can now get weekly highlights of the best goals in the English Premier League on Hulu.  Here’s the 5 best goals from last week. Enjoy.