This World Cup was great for MLS. If you enjoyed the World Cup, it’s time to give MLS a chance. Can I get an amen?
Whoa … back up. No so fast, champ.
You can’t force someone to pay attention to something they don’t want to pay attention to. Remember the last time you tried to force someone to read a book they already told you they had no interest in reading? Try telling me that I should dive into Harry Potter. I’m sorry, but I determined long ago that anything that eight year olds and eighty year olds both love is a danger to democracy. Not interested. Try telling someone with a negative interest in techno music that they should give it more time. They won’t. Forced conversion is a waste of time. Not only do you waste other people’s time; you more often than not end up wasting your own time.
As a soccer lover in the US, if you insist on giving others the Jehovah’s Witness treatment, you’re just ensuring that you remain the subject of ridicule in the same circles you’re trying to infiltrate. There are better ways to persuade. Beer, for one, is a great tool to persuade others to temporarily open their minds. Ranting and raving? Not so much. At some point, you would hope that people realize that conversion has its own timetable that rarely agrees with the timetable of the already converted.
The growth of soccer in the US is an inevitable topic that breaks out every men’s World Cup cycle. Capturing more unsuspecting souls to not only like soccer, but to become fans of MLS, becomes the practice du jour for everyone with a vested interest in our top domestic league. But how effective are our attempts at conversion?
The US soccer landscape is actually pretty settled. We know that, for the most part, everything that will take place post-World Cup was already going on pre-World Cup. Bringing Brazil to play the US in August will certainly draw additional fans, but at some point, these sexy events will disappear and we’ll be left with the pieces of the game that have always been here – youth soccer, high school soccer, college soccer, MLS, and the countless leagues smashed in between.
But the question remains: Will attempting to convert our ever-growing US World Cup audience to our domestic leagues work? Probably not. The World Cup and glamor friendlies may put soccer on more radars, but I’m not persuaded that it can successfully convert these spectators into MLS fans. In fact, I’d be willing to wager that there’s very little correlation between successful top level events and any sustainable growth in the audience for our domestic leagues.
Watching the best players in the world feeds the appetite for top level soccer, something that does not yet exist in the US if we’re being honest. Even if we look beyond the World Cup, high-profile friendlies in the US are hardly the proper barometer to measure the state of our domestic leagues as they have always drawn in the US. I recall going to Brazil vs. Germany at RFK in 1993. The crowd showed up, all 35,000 of them at a time when soccer was supposedly barely on the radar on this side of the pond. In 2002, when Real Madrid played Roma at Giants Stadium, the place was packed with over 70,000 soccer fans. These events may just be showing us the potential audience that we’ve yet to capture, an audience that largely is already interested in soccer. So what prevents these fans from supporting our domestic leagues?
Perhaps it’s simply the level of play. Rather than hanging our hopes on World Cups and mega-friendlies, a slow steady investment in improving the level of play is required, while hoping that when there are moments (like the US qualification for a high profile tournament like the World Cup), our teams perform, thereby capturing our collective imagination.
In the US, performance is king. Brazilian tours, at least as related to the growth of the domestic game, are temporary sideshows, an entertaining distraction. When the Brazilians go back to their top flight leagues around the world, we are left with ourselves to look at every day. Don’t get me wrong, we’re looking better every day, but we’re still far from the hottest ticket in town. And at this stage of our development, there’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s the familiar refrain that we Americans just don’t like soccer. But given the number of people who play and the massive immigrant populations in the United States, I just don’t believe that this refrain that we’ve adopted is true. It’s just that our audience is smarter than gimmicks and friendlies, even though our hopes sometimes get in the way of this reality.
Conversion will happen on its own schedule when people determine that there is something worth converting to. It will be less of an epiphany and more of a process of understanding on people’s own terms, experimenting, and then deciding that this new hobby is the right fit for an already crowded entertainment schedule.
We need to get over our fixation of whether THIS is that moment to capture straggling soccer fans. There is no moment for US soccer if we’re talking about our ability to create more fans for our domestic leagues. Moments are for journalists who realize that moments make much better stories than processes. World Cup moments can make people fall for the World Cup, but the would-be domestic soccer fan is quickly returned to reality as they realize that MLS is not the World Cup. It’s not the English Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga or even Ligue 1.
You don’t have to look far to find someone making the argument that certain MLS sides would match up against well against Team X from the popular Y League. But soccer isn’t a game just about scoring. It’s also about the art on the field; art that can make a 0-0 match thrilling. So when we start regularly fielding domestic club sides that can entertain, that can make us dream, then we’ll be able to start converting both soccer fans and non-soccer fans into supporters of our domestic leagues. Simply put, there will be more converts to the domestic game when the product on the field matches the expectation and drama that people require, and for that, we need to be patient and focus on doing things the right way. One exciting World Cup or appearances from the Brazils and Manchester Uniteds of the world are not magic bullets.
So join me in making a concerted effort to refrain from using the World Cup to convert people to MLS. It just won’t happen, not yet. Beer might work. Raucous supporter culture, perhaps. But forced conversion? Meh. Let’s just focus on being patient and leave the conversion stuff to the others who keep knocking on my front door and the Harry Potter fans.
The audience will come, I’m confident of that. It will just take time. In the meantime, just focus on inviting a friend or two for a beer at the next MLS match and enjoy the fact that you can stretch your legs out on the seat in front of you. Soon the seats all around you will be filled with loud-mouthed frat guys with vuvuzelas and you’ll be longing for the days of old like the crabby old-souled people that so many of us already are.
Did I hear beer somewhere in there? Twice? Yes that will work. We’ve been sayin’ that the whole time!
I’ve thought that you’ve had it right all along! Free Beer Movement: Soccer marketing as it’s supposed to be. Hoppy and between 4-8% alcohol.