Blogger 365 Day 182 - Now we test the hypothesis

     So for the last few weeks we have been told that soccer is taking hold in America, TV ratings were at record highs and interest in the sport has never been greater.  This is the kind of self serving narrative the media is so good at, they come up with a subject (in this case the popularity of soccer) and then spend weeks of time talking about how everyone is talking about it, even though  many of the people talking about it reside in the media vacuum and spent the time talking about how other media members were chirping about it.  The true test of whether or not there has been a cultural shift is what happens afterward, and based on past history, usually the answer is not much.

     The MLS, America's professional soccer league, has not seen a growth in attendance, in fact this year there has been a slight decline (-.6%) from last year.  An average MLS building seats 21,096 people and games are playing to 88% capacity, meaning that if you ever want to see professional soccer in the United States you can probably go up to the ticket window on game day, good seats will still be available.

    Mind you this is the same narrative we heard about the women's soccer team (where the United States fares far better than the men's does) and the story was how girls were taking a brand new interest in soccer.  Except they weren't, save for a couple of players from those women's teams the vast majority of those rosters fell into relative obscurity. 

     The World Cup is a unique event, not unlike the Olympics, in that it comes around every 4 years and taps into a certain amount of patriotic fervor of the competing teams.  But after the Olympics no one argues that there is a new found interest in say, track and field or figure skating.  We recognize the Olympics for what they are, a break from the normal, not a long term trend.  Much was made about the fact that the United States - Germany was the highest rated soccer match in history, with 25 million viewers, but how is that different from the last Winter Games in Sochi, where despite all of the media horror stories about the conditions in Sochi (and the media loves to talk about how hard things are for the media), the first three days of those games had the following audiences, 26+ million, 25+ million and 20+ million.  Not all that different than soccer.

    So before I am going to buy into this idea that there is some new found interest in soccer here in the states, I am going to need to see more that a global media spectacle to be convinced.