Nutmeg Radio

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 negative interest in techno that they should give it more time. They won’t. 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.

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 the sport. But how effective are our attempts at conversion?

In reality, the US soccer landscape is pretty settled.  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: Does a growing US audience for the World Cup create a broader audience for our domestic leagues? It may put soccer on more radars, but I’m not persuaded that it can close the deal. 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. 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 1990. The crowd showed up. A few years ago when Real Madrid played Roma at Giants Stadium, the place was packed. 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.

The US team flopping in South Africa would have been a much bigger blow to the growth of soccer as a spectator sport in the US than whether we can line up a hyper-friendlies with teams like Brazil. So what does that say? It says that performance is king. Brazilian tours of the US, at least for growth of the domestic game, is a temporary sideshow, 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.

The right kind of conversion happens when people determine that there is something worth converting to. It’s often less of an epiphany, and more of a process of understanding on your own terms, experimenting, and then deciding whether your new hobby is the right fit. At this point, if we’re being honest, a neutral walking into a English Premier League match will be much more likely to be entertained by the level of play than if they walked into an MLS ground. That shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who knows anything about soccer. But for some reason, many of the rabid MLS supporters don’t seem to get why we can have these magical moments every four years, yet still fail to convert fans to our domestic leagues.

We need to get over our fixation of whether THIS is that moment. 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 fielding domestic club sides (oddly enough, like the early D.C. United 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 isn’t the magic bullet.

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, maybe. Raucous supporter culture, perhaps. But forced conversion? Meh. Let’s leave that to the others who keep knocking on my front door and the Harry Potter fans.