GLOBALIZATION AND SOCCER'S EMERGENCE IN THE U.S.

            Soccer has only recently become popular with fans in the United States. While the sport has had its die hards, it is only in recent years that the sport has had wide spread popularity. A recent poll stated that Soccer was the 2nd most popular sport for people between the ages 12 and 24. The first being the NFL.[i] There has been a giant leap forward in the sports’ exposure in the US over the last 5 to 10 years. Soccer has journeyed from never being seen on television to having special soccer channels and sometimes games being shown on network channels like NBC and FOX. Why has it taken so long for soccer to grab a foot hold among American sports and why is it suddenly happening now?

        Through out its history, soccer has always thrived through the exchange of culture. This is why the sport has flourished in Europe. The relative size of these countries and their proximity to other nations caused or even forced plenty of exchanges between different cultures. This is not thee case for the United States. As we know the US is a relatively large country. Because of its size and amount of resources, this type of exchange has not been as essential for America.

   Even though the organized sport is said to have come out of England, during the latter half of the 19th century it was not English coaches who developed the sport’s most successful style of play. It wasn’t until men like Jimmy Murphy began to look to the continent and utilize the methods of coaches from Spain and Hungary that English soccer began to grow and become competitive with other programs across the European continent. This “osmosis” in soccer is no different than any other aspect of cultures mixing with one another. Just as with food or art, this mixing has allowed for many different styles as well as more accessibility to develop in regards to this sport.

      The United States has always been a very independent nation. From its very inception with the writing of the Declaration of Independence, it possessed a determination to set its self apart.  Others have rarely dictated both US culture and policy. So, from the very beginning, it was going to be difficult for soccer to spread to the US the way it did through out Europe. Simply the nation’s size allows for it to be less dependent. The smaller countries of Europe actually formed the European Union, in part, to emulate the US’s economic capabilities. Just as the smaller European nations were forced to interact because of their size and close proximity, The United States was allowed to be more isolated because of its larger size.

       The internet has changed all of this. The emergence of technology that connected us all has figuratively shrunk the globe to a much smaller size. New media technology has a history of popularizing sports with in the United States. With the emergence of the radio came America’s past time. Baseball exploded. Families gathered around their radio sets (which were more of a piece of furniture at the time) to listen to their team every night or each week. For the first time fans did not have to go to the game to become a spectator. People could witness the game from the comfort of their own homes at minimal cost. This also allowed for the sport to gain fans that it might not have had. Women and children who might not or could not have traveled to the stadium could now follow their team from home.

       Then mid way through the century the television arrived and with it American Football. Football was able to excite sports fans with intense action they could watch from home. The television became the perfect vessel to popularize football to the American masses. Football was a game that needed to be watched. It existed before the television became a house hold item but it wasn’t until then that the sport really blew up. While baseball continued to be called America’s past time and continued to be a popular sport. Football slowly became what it is today: the number one sport in the country.

            Finally at the end of the 20^th century came the Internet and with it a whole new world. It was 1997 when my family first had the Internet in our home. In the decade and a half since then, the world has become a different place. I am not sure that there is another time in history where the world has changed so much in such a short amount of time. In that time we have seen the sport of soccer finally gain a place among America’s most popular sports. Soccer did have a run in the 70’s with big stars being drawn by massive amounts of money but this did not last. It was the Internet that lured American fans to the sport. In 2005 you could very rarely find a game of soccer on TV. Sometimes ESPN would show Champions League matches or some of the world cup. Now every game of every major international tournament is shown on cable. NBC has bought the rights to the EPL in the states and has pledged to display every game. Back in 2005 if you wanted to watch soccer regularly, you had to find a grainy and blurry stream online that would almost always cut out right as someone scored! It has only been 8 years since. Now most MLS and EPL games are televised. Major League Soccer has 19 teams with 14 soccer specific stadiums. We have come along way since the league’s inception in 1996.
        Of course, this goes both ways! While the internet has been popularizing "the world's
sport" in the United States, it has been doing the same thing for American football in other parts of the world. The NFL has never been more popular in places like the United Kingdom than it is now. Games are being shown on television and the sport is developing a fan base. They are even staging games in London for the sports promotion abroad. This just shows again how much the internet and globalization has changed the way American culture interacts with the rest of the world. 

            The national team should get a lot of credit. There is nothing Americans like more than to cheer for the nation in a sporting competition regardless of the sport. However, the US men’s team’s performance in the 2002 world cup showed that an American team could be successful and began drawing attention to the sport. Once again though it is likely that the success national team saw was because of the spread of coaching and development philosophy spread more easily in a now much smaller world.

            Soccer became available to Americans via the Internet. Even though America never had the close proximity relationships with other nations as European nations did, the Internet allowed these cultural exchanges to occur any way. It is simple globalization. As more technology becomes available, the world becomes more connected and more culture is diffused into new places through out the world. The United States is now a top 20 team international, the MLS is drawing more and more stars and there is a soccer game on TV every day. It is safe to say that Soccer is now a force to be reckoned with and will only become bigger and more successful in the years to come.

This is a very short very rough draft of a longer paper that would include more research. Hopefully, sometime soon I will get around to finishing it. For now I would love to hear any feed back that is offered!