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"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963
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The one where soccer games get lower ratings on TV than fishing, poker and college softball. The one where professional soccer struggles terribly to stay afloat, and where women's pro soccer was a massive flop, even though we have the best team in the world.
Of those 18 million official soccer players, 78% are under the age of eighteen, so the upsurge in soccer that started in the '90s may not yet be visible to you major league sports reporters, but I'm betting it will be soon.
That's been the case since the NASL's glory days in the 1970s. Everyone talked about how 80% of soccer players in the United States (including me) were under 18, and how they would be the future of the sport. They are still saying that 30 years later, and it has still never become a niche spectator sport. It's popular at the youth level, because it is cheap. It's popular as a women's college sport, because it is a place to put the scholarships demanded by the NCAA.
I want soccer to be popular in the United States - it is my favorite sport. I played youth soccer, I've coached youth soccer, and I've covered it from every level from high school to the World Cup.
So, your snark aside, I actually do know what I'm talking about here.
"Soccer is the most popular women's sport in college."
By what measure? Maybe in sheer numbers of players, but arguing that women's college soccer is more popular than women's college basketball is insane.
"the United States has more official soccer players than any other nation in the world - almost 18 million."
That's an old number - it is now over 20 million, but the U.S. has fallen to second behind China. A lot of that has to do with the size of the population - India is third, and soccer isn't even vaguely important to that culture - and some of it has to do with the way that the United States organizes youth soccer to a ridiculous extent.
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That's cool that soccer is so popular in China, too. It's certainly not unpopular in the US, especially not as compared to cricket. But maybe the people who grew up loving soccer like to play it and, like me, don't even watch TV most of the time.
I certainly appreciate it when soccer is playing at a bar I'm at. If any other sport is on, I will most likely ignore it (I'm a bit of a sucker for car racing, but that really takes applied attention and the voiceover to keep good track of, so it's not the best sport to watch in the bar. I also enjoy watching basketball).
Soccer is harder to capture on video than a lot of sports; I bet it's harder to cover live for television -the field is huge and the ball can move from one end to the other fairly quickly - unlike football, where possession of the ball is pretty easy for a spectator to track and most plays move forward down the field in a pretty predictable manner, or baseball, which is also predictable much of the time - you don't know if they guy will catch the ball or not, but you know which guy to aim the camera at. We don't have nicely built up soccer stadiums, and we already devoted money and real estate to baseball, hockey, basketball, and football. To lay the burden of responsibility for the success of soccer as a pro sport purely at the foot of its popularity is to be a little heavy-handed, in my opinion.
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:P