American Behavioral Scientist
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The "Olympianization" of Soccer in the United States
Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman
American Behavioral Scientist 2003; 46; 1533
DOI: 10.1177/0002764203046011006
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ARTICLE
The “Olympianization” of Soccer
in the United States
ANDREI S. MARKOVITS
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
STEVEN L. HELLERMAN
Claremont Graduate University
What the world calls “football,” far and away the globe’s most popular sport, has led a marginal existence as soccer in the United States, where football denotes a different game that
has remained an integral part of American sports culture since the late 19th century. In the
past two decades, soccer in the United States has undergone a substantial metamorphosis
that has altered its former marginality without, however, giving it cultural power anywhere
near that still exerted by baseball, basketball, football, and even ice hockey. Soccer in America now exists in three universes that overlap yet still remain distinct from each other: the
world of millions of soccer players who pursue the game on the field but have no interest to
follow it beyond their active involvement, a small group of soccer aficionados whose main
identification with the game rests precisely in following not playing it, and a newly developed
segment that neither plays much soccer nor follows the sport yet has come to delight in the
quadrennial event of the World Cup.
Keywords: soccer; football; World Cup; United States; Olympics
There is a soccer underground in this country that escapes every four years. When
that happens, we have a party and let the outsiders in too.
—Alexi Lalas (“America Turns Out,” 2002)1
The imagery is rich and quite revealing: Every 4 years, the American soccer
underground escapes its subterranean existence to throw a party (a good time,
occasionally, but never too serious, with a clear beginning and end) where outsiders, that is, people from the American mainstream and its sports culture, are
more than welcome.
As we have argued elsewhere, soccer played a marginal role in America’s
sports culture throughout all of the 20th century, and two dimensions convey this
Authors’ Note: We would like to thank Alexander Kingsley Cotton for his fine assistance with the
research for this article.
AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST, Vol. 46 No. 11, July 2003 1533-1549
DOI: 10.1177/0002764203252817
© 2003 Sage Publications
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marginalization quite convincingly (Markovits & Hellerman, 1995-1996,
2001). The first pertains to the situation within the United States itself, where the
presence of baseball, American football, basketball, and ice hockey has solidly
comprised what we have termed the American sports space, which constitutes
the nation’s sports culture: the sum of a country’s constant and uninterrupted
collective preoccupation—its following—with a sport regardless of its individual participants, successes, failures, triumphs, and tragedies (which clearly are
all part of it, although its whole is always greater).
The second dimension relates to the United States in a comparative perspective where even a cursory view of the world reveals that soccer—by any measure
the globe’s most popular sport and dominant sports culture—has never attained
anywhere near the importance in the United States that it enjoys in the vast
majority of countries. We have argued emphatically that this has absolutely
nothing to do with such commonly voiced notions as the alleged inability of
Americans to understand and appreciate low-scoring games (the pleasure a
baseball fan derives from a classic pitchers’ duel is but one counterexample),
ties, or a game played with feet and involving few rules and even fewer statistics.
Instead, soccer’s cultural weakness in the United States resulted from concrete
historical developments during the crucial period of 1860-1930, the absolutely
critical decades for the solid establishment of most sports cultures in the modern
world, including that in the United States. Briefly put, soccer’s absence in the
American sports space throughout the 20th century was an artifact of America
creating its own modernity, one that shared many commonalities with that created in (and by) Europe and industrial societies elsewhere but featuring crucial—and lasting—differences. The establishment of modern sports highlights
the shared dimensions; the varying form and content of these sports bespeak the
differences.
In our study, we demonstrated how soccer’s place in the United States
changed considerably during the last two decades of the 20th century. Many factors in the course of the 1980s and 1990s allowed soccer to exchange its stigmatization of “foreignness” to American public life for an integral place in it.
Among the most significant have been the changing role of women in virtually
all facets of American society; new immigration patterns featuring the arrival
of millions from Latin America to the United States; the decisive presence of
suburbs in the shaping of American life; the globalization of a cosmopolitan culture that rapidly diminished established boundaries and introduced new habits
of consumption previously unknown to Americans; a completely changed
topography of communication that favors fragmentation and the creation of
flourishing niches often at the cost of formerly unchallenged hegemonic blocs;
and—pertinent to our topic at hand—the rapid internationalization of all major
American sports that, in the course of these two decades, witnessed the increasing presence of Latin American and Asian players in baseball, Europeans in ice
hockey, and players from all over the world in basketball, leaving only football with
the tellingly appropriate adjective of American to denote the sport’s singularly
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parochial (but quite strong) position in the contemporary American sports
space. But again, soccer has taken a different path in the United States from
everywhere else in the world where it has remained mostly the purview of a
working-class and overwhelmingly male milieu. In the United States, it became
the activity of an often feminized, most certainly suburbanized, middle-class
world best conveyed by that most American of terms—the soccer mom.2 In no
other country in the world has the women’s national soccer team been much
better known than the men’s (at least until World Cup 2002). And only in the
United States have women soccer players provided expert commentary on network television concerning the men’s World Cup. What we have characterized
as America’s “soccer exceptionalism” throughout the 20th century is alive and
well at the beginning of the 21st century.
In our studies of soccer in America and its relations to the established American team sports, we have noticed a marked change in the reception of the World
Cup on the part of the American public. Although this quadrennial event has
been the world’s most popular and cherished, it remained completely obscure to
the American sports public until the tournament in England in 1966. But all
World Cups were hardly noticed beyond a gradually growing, but still marginal,
soccer community in the United States. Things began to change with the World
Cup in Italy during the summer of 1990. Although far from attaining the prominence in the American media accorded all subsequent World Cups, this occasion
undoubtedly represented a qualitative change in coverage in comparison to all
the previous tournaments dating back to 1930 (the first World Cup, held in Uruguay, when the United States advanced all the way to the semifinals). The key to
the increased—although still quite minor—presence of the 1990 World Cup in
America’s sports world was the fact that the U.S. team qualified and competed
(for the first time since 1950). When the United States hosted the World Cup in
1994, a major threshold for soccer’s perception and role in American sports culture had clearly been passed. For an entire month, large numbers of Americans
witnessed—for the very first time and in the most proximate manner—the
world’s most popular sporting event, with soccer performed at the highest possible skill levels. It was this monthlong occasion that established the World Cup as
a known entity to millions of American sports fans, as well as to the American
public at large, although—as we argued in our study—it failed to do much for
the game of soccer itself in the United States.
With the U.S. team again qualifying for the World Cup in France in 1998 and
the great success and phenomenal popularity of the women’s national soccer
team in the World Cup held in the United States in the summer of 1999, this quadrennial tournament had become a known entity by the time the 2002 World Cup
was about to commence. By dint of the singular power of nationalism, which can
drive the popularity of any sport in all societies, the presence of an American
team contributed immeasurably toward these quadrennial tournaments becoming known events in American public perception.3 The big-event nature of the
World Cups attracted further attention, respect, and interest—if not necessarily
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any meaningful affection—from Americans. With the American team qualifying for the 2002 tournament, for the fourth time in a row (something only six
other countries in the world—including such soccer powers as Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and Italy—have ever achieved), all was again in place to make
the World Cup a big event in the United States. Yet, behooving America’s soccer
exceptionalism, many of the accouterments that distinguish the game in virtually every other place in the world were still not present in the United States.
Conversely, it was quite clear from the start that there was now a much bigger
stage in the United States for soccer than it had ever experienced in any of its
many incarnations. And over the course of the tournament, it became obvious
that the World Cup and professional soccer have experienced a massive bifurcation in American sports culture and public awareness over the past two decades:
The former is a recognizable and much-covered international event with a pedigree and panache beyond anyone’s doubt. The latter, however, continues its
quotidian struggle to attain a foothold, let alone a place of importance, in the
country’s sports culture as well as in the daily lives of Americans.
In this article, we feature an analysis of World Cup 2002 in light of this bifurcation in contemporary American sports culture and suggest that precisely on
account of the American team’s success in this World Cup, the former bifurcation might actually be well into the process of mutating into a tripartite segmentation of soccer’s existence in the United States. With a systematic (although not
comprehensive) content analysis of the American media, we highlight how
World Cup 2002 was anything but negligible in American society and how subsequent World Cups are all but guaranteed to enjoy similar attention and popularity among the American public, creating what one might call World Cup consciousness. However, this in no way guarantees the emergence of soccer as a
major player in America’s sports culture for the foreseeable future.
WORLD CUP 2002: AN ASSESSMENT
We anchored most of our empirical findings on a systematic study of 32 daily
newspapers from cities meeting at least one of the following three criteria: They
represented venues that were used in the World Cup of 1994; hosted a professional soccer team in America’s leading men’s professional soccer league,
Major League Soccer (MLS), established in 1996; and/or featured a team from
the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) that began play in 2001. This
yielded major daily newspapers published in the following cities: Atlanta,
Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles,
New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, San Francisco,
San Jose, and Washington, D.C. We also included Miami and Seattle: In the case
of Miami (where an MLS franchise had once existed), a large Latin American
population has rendered it a major soccer city. Moreover, Miami houses the corporate headquarters of Univision, the leading Spanish-language television
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network in the United States and prolific broadcaster of soccer, including, of
course, the World Cup. In addition, previous research has revealed The Miami
Herald as among the newspapers quite committed to covering soccer. Regarding
Seattle, we chose to include a city that by dint of the social profile of its population and its cosmopolitan culture could confidently be classified as a place that
has not been inimical to the game of soccer and likely quite receptive to the
World Cup as an event. We also included USA Today, not only because it is a
national newspaper but for its superb sports coverage, traditionally quite inclusive of soccer. In short, we picked a universe that—prima facie—could be classified as among the most soccer involved in the United States. We began our study
with Monday, May 20, 11 days before the official start of the tournament on Friday, May 31. We concluded our data collection on Thursday, July 4, 4 days after
the final game was played.
We encountered a total of 1,403 staff-written articles (i.e., contributions not
from a wire service). This ranged from an impressive 209 in the Los Angeles
Times (the absolute leader) to 3 in the San Francisco Examiner and a disappointing 0 in the Detroit Free Press. However, all papers covered the World Cup by at
least running wire service articles, often more than one a day, some as many as
13 items on particularly important dates. Overall, the following pattern
emerged: The newspapers most involved in covering the World Cup—the Los
Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Atlanta Constitution, the New York Daily
News, The Dallas Morning News, and The San Diego Union-Tribune—were
running articles by May 20 (or earlier), the first day of our research. A number
were staff-written pieces by reporters who had arrived in South Korea ready to
cover the tournament that was to begin 10 days later. All newspapers studied ran
articles on the World Cup on Friday, May 31, the day of the opening game
between Senegal and defending champion France. Of the 32 papers, 9 featured
articles on page one of the newspaper, 16 on page one of the sports section. This
level of involvement continued over the weekend and then nearly doubled on
Tuesday, June 4, the day before the United States was to play its first match
against powerhouse Portugal (touted by some as a potential World Cup champion), featuring Luis Figo, reigning “footballer of the year” (i.e., the world’s best
soccer player). The number of staff-written articles increased from the mid-40s
over the weekend to 71 on Tuesday.
The match—a stunning 3-2 triumph for the Americans—commenced on
Wednesday morning at 5 a.m. Eastern time, and Team USA subsequently celebrated its first World Cup victory outside the United States since its upset of
England in 1950. All 32 newspapers announced this amazing feat (with photos,
captions, and teasers) on page one either later that day (in the case of afternoon
papers) or in the morning editions on Thursday, June 6; we counted 52 staffwritten articles for that day. All on the first page of the sports sections, these
pieces described the events of the game itself as well as various aspects of the
American team’s achievement and its prospects in the tournament. The number
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of staff-written articles receded to 29 for the next 3 days, with wire services continuing to inform readers of all the scores and highlights from the tournament.
Reporting increased markedly, both in terms of its quantity and in the prominence of its placement in the newspaper, when the United States played cohost
South Korea on Monday, June 10. The Americans eked out a 1-1 draw against a
heavily favored South Korean team in the cauldron of Daegu, where the fans
supported the home team in a frenzy that went way beyond the passion of soccer.
Some of the resentment against the United States was in response to Apollo
Anton Ohno’s controversial gold medal in a speed skating event at the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, won because a South Korean skater had been disqualified. All accounts of this impressive achievement by the U.S. team mentioned these particular circumstances, providing readers the necessary context
in which to place this “moral victory.” Suddenly, the United States was poised to
advance to the second round of the tournament, all it had to do was at least tie an
already eliminated Polish team on Friday, June 14. But the Americans lost in
what proved to be their worst performance of the World Cup, yet advanced to the
second round all the same because South Korea defeated Portugal. On Saturday,
June 15, all newspapers featured this event either on page one or prominently on
the first page of the sports section, all making special effort to explain how Team
USA managed to advance to the second round even though it had lost.
By virtue of its qualification into the next round, the United States was to
meet arch-rival Mexico on Monday, June 17, in a winner-advances-loser-goeshome encounter. With the complex and often emotionally charged texture that
can frequently define relations between Mexico and the United States, this contest followed the patterns routinely played out in the world of international soccer, whereby tensions between two countries having nothing to do with the game
itself are greatly magnified by a chance encounter on the soccer field. (However,
the importance was much more intense for Mexicans than for the vast majority
of Americans. A similar inverse relationship between two national publics
occurred when the United States played Iran at the 1998 World Cup. In both
1998 and 2002, the key factors for relative American apathy in the face of
another nation’s feelings of intense rivalry include the hegemonic position of the
United States in the world in terms of so many subjects and matters outside of
sport, the lack of significance soccer holds for most Americans, and the intranational nature of American team sports, whereby international competition is
considered far secondary to—and outside the meaningful realm of—routinized
official league play.) In addition, there were issues pertaining to business on the
field: The two teams had never met at a World Cup tournament, Mexico had also
played very impressively during the first round, and the United States was traditionally the weaker of the two but had been reversing this historical trend over
the past 4 years. When Team USA convincingly defeated the heavily favored
Mexicans 2-0, soccer coverage in our 32 newspapers attained a dimension of
prominence in quantity and quality that arguably surpassed coverage for what
we have termed the 4-day soccer boom of the 1994 World Cup played in the
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United States (Markovits & Hellerman, 2001, p. 220). All papers featured news
of this victory with greater prominence than the upset over Portugal nearly 2
weeks before. The number of staff-written articles attained an absolute peak
with 78, and the bevy of reporting and its placement in the newspaper as a whole,
as well as the sports pages, clearly signified that something special had occurred.
With its impressive victory over Mexico in the world’s premier sporting
event, the American men’s national team had undoubtedly placed soccer into the
center of attention for the American media. There it remained (representing
something of another 4-day soccer boom) until the quarterfinal game against
mighty Germany on Friday, June 21, when the Americans lost 1-0, although they
played superbly and—according to most German commentators and key team
members—fully deserved to win. Not since the first World Cup tournament in
Uruguay in 1930 had an American team advanced so far in this competition.
Moreover, not only had Team USA played extremely well but it had clearly captured the imagination of a large bleary-eyed coterie of Americans who had
begun to follow these previously unknown men halfway around the globe playing a sport that still eluded significance and stature in the United States. Sixty
staff articles appeared in our set of newspapers on Saturday, June 22, providing
decided prominence to the exploits of the American team. But following Team
USA’s exodus from the tournament, the drop-off in coverage was immediately
precipitous and decisive. Except in the newspapers well known for their consistent commitment to covering international soccer (as opposed to domestic
American soccer, MLS included), the World Cup began to fade. To be sure, the
final game on June 30—when four-time champion Brazil defeated three-time
title holder Germany to attain its unparalleled fifth cup (the “penta”)—received
extensive and prominent coverage in all 32 papers. But by July 4, the World Cup
had all but disappeared.
During this tournament, the United States exhibited important exceptional
characteristics shared by none of the other 31 participating countries represented by their teams. The continuation of league play in the United States while
the World Cup took place was likely the most significant. MLS not only upheld
its regular schedule during the monthlong tournament but used the World Cup’s
popularity to enhance the visibility of its own product. This bespeaks the American exceptions regarding soccer that we now discuss in the context of World Cup
2002.
The World Cup always takes place in June and July, precisely so as to not
interfere with league play in any country. Anywhere soccer is culturally dominant, all facets of its playing season—domestic and international play, club team
and national squad competition—occur from the middle of August (or sometimes early September) until the end of May, but not in the United States. Precisely to avoid competing head-on with the singular powerhouse of American
football and so optimize its chances of success in the overcrowded American
sports space by competing only against baseball, MLS—and its predecessor, the
North American Soccer League, almost a generation before—opted for a
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summer schedule in direct opposition to soccer’s tradition. In countries with a
hegemonic soccer culture, no meaningful aspect of the game on any level is contested, lest it compete with the only matter at hand: the World Cup. (This
includes soccer in the large number of countries whose teams fail to qualify for
the tournament.) But in the United States, these two levels of the game are seen
as complementary and mutually reinforcing.
The temporal linkage between the World Cup and the regular MLS season
was further accentuated by a financial angle that yielded yet another American
exception: For a reported $40 million, MLS bought the television rights to the
World Cup tournaments of 2002 and 2006 (in Germany) in addition to the
Women’s World Cup of 2003 in China (Longman, 2002b). Hence, the Disney
stations of ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 gained a completely free ride in paying
nothing to broadcast the tournament, something their publicists were not shy to
mention.4 Again, this is a reverse from the usual status quo in the rest of the soccer world and that of major American sports. Under most circumstances, broadcasters pay the leagues and/or the federations for the rights to televise games.
Only when a product has very weak market power does it become necessary for
its purveyor to pay a network to televise it. In this instance, it was up to MLS, not
Disney, to sell advertising and amortize its costs. This role reversal further
underlines the very different structural position of soccer in the United States
from that in the rest of the world.
MLS’s support of the World Cup was likely based entirely on a long-term
view of soccer’s fate in the United States because, if anything, the tournament
and the American team’s unexpected success crowded out the already meager
coverage that the league garners in the sports sections of American newspapers.
In our newspaper analysis, we specifically focused on coverage of the continued
play in MLS and WUSA during the 4 weeks of World Cup competition in Japan
and South Korea. With the possible exception of The San Diego Union-Tribune
(whose extensive soccer sections covered MLS games and the local WUSA
team with consistent detail), coverage of MLS and WUSA markedly diminished
because of the World Cup.5 Clearly (and correctly, in our view), MLS banked its
future on the success of the World Cup and the American national team as the
decisive dynamos for soccer’s fate in the United States. Yet, even here, a facet of
America’s soccer exceptionalism manifested itself: We noticed that with some
regularity, local soccer events well below MLS level—such as girls’ games in
youth leagues—garnered more detailed coverage than the World Cup when
Team USA was not in action.6 This total bifurcation in American soccer—an
insular world thriving on the level of local activity with virtually no connection
to the larger, and often international, construct of soccer as culture—was also
evident during the World Cup of 1994, when nearly 7,000 fans chose to attend an
indoor soccer game in Dallas as the second World Cup game ever to be played in
the United States was contested just a few miles away in Texas Stadium, with
tickets still available (Markovits & Hellerman, 2001, p. 171).
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By securing exclusive rights in the United States to each of the next women’s
and men’s World Cup tournaments, MLS has positioned itself to take advantage
of lucrative sponsorship tie-ins (already bearing some fruit), as well as the
potential to reap excellent revenues from television advertising sales. Indeed, it
is quite possible that the $40 million price tag will look like a steal in the not-sodistant future. However, the short-term benefits of the deal were quite transitory
for MLS, and the league continues to struggle to establish itself in the consciousness of the average American sports fan, let alone that of the American public.
MLS experienced a spike in attendance in the weeks following the World Cup,
including crowds of 61,000 and 55,000 in Denver and Los Angeles, respectively,
but the league’s overall attendance for July 2002 was nominally the same (actually down a fraction) from the same month in 2001. And although attendance for
MLS games has respectably increased since 2000 (the bottom of a 4-year
decline from the league’s inaugural 1996 season), television viewership for
MLS games (on ESPN2) has been “just short of invisible”7 (Gardner, 2002).
Prior to the World Cup, MLS received miniscule ratings of .09 (representing
approximately 75,000 homes nationwide) for two games on ESPN2, part of that
cable station’s weekly series of Saturday MLS matches throughout the season.
These broadcasts experienced a bump as a result of the World Cup: a 0.19
average (162,000 homes) for four games in June as the tournament was underway; a 0.25 (215,000 homes) for a match the day after the U.S.-Germany game;
and an average of 0.17 (157,000 homes) for three telecasts after the World Cup
had ended8 (Woitalla & Mahoney, 2002). In the universe of sports programming on cable television, these ratings are in the realm of—or, in some cases,
actually below—tractor pulls, skate boarding competitions, and bass fishing
tournaments.
Still, the World Cup—in notable contrast to professional soccer itself—has
attained a much more immediate recognition, maybe even a modicum of respect
and interest (if not quite affection) with the American public, and this was certainly not the case a few days before the tournament began in late May. Unlike
the players on the other 31 participating teams, the Americans left for the tournament as virtual unknowns, treated like any other tourists departing New YorkJFK, anonymous and generally ignored. Meantime, the send-off to Japan and
South Korea of any of the European and Latin American teams were invariably
nationally televised events, often attended by leading politicians, clergy, and
celebrities. The Americans had the only team whose arrival in South Korea was
a much bigger affair than its departure from home, and not only for receiving the
most prolific security among all attending. Rather, the team had left a world
where what it did accounted for little and arrived in one in which its activity was
all that mattered (Longman, 2002a; “Massive security,” 2002).
Before the World Cup began, the newspapers in our sample ran many human
interest stories about the international community in their respective American
cities preparing to watch the World Cup games in the wee hours of the morning
or very late at night, depending on one’s lifestyle and location. Most of these
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pieces noted how terribly inconvenient times for these matches would force
most Americans to miss virtually all of the tournament and that foreigners in
American cities were about to become totally preoccupied by a monthlong event
to which Americans were either not privy or, perhaps, not quite completely welcome (Kaufman, 2002; Leonhardt, 2002). The tenor of these pieces portrayed
Americans as existing for the duration of the World Cup in a separate universe
apart from the immigrants and foreign workers, students, residents, visitors or
tourists among them—two distinct cultures speaking mutually unintelligible
languages. Almost as a public service, some papers, such as the San Francisco
Chronicle, listed the bars and establishments in town planning to stay open late,
even after closing hours, to show the games (“Open for Soccer Business,” 2002;
Ortiz & Jorge, 2002). But something quite unique and totally unexpected began
to occur after the American team defeated Portugal on June 5. A nocturnal soccer culture that had hitherto remained largely the purview of foreigners began to
attract hundreds of thousands of American fans all across the country. Hundreds
of additional bars and eateries opened up early on the East Coast and in the Midwest to show the games (with coffee the favored beverage, as liquor sales are
generally not legal at such unusual hours). In the West, establishments stayed
open long after “last call.”9 Most fascinating—indeed, quite unique in the annals
of American sport—was the opening of stadiums in the middle of the night for
fans to watch the games collectively on scoreboard big-screen video.10 In
Columbus, Ohio, hundreds showed up at the beginning of the tournament; this
later grew to thousands, peaking at 7,500 fans for the United States versus Germany (Lalas, 2002; Vecsey, 2002). Parallel developments occurred at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, and Mile High
Stadium in Denver, where The Denver Post invited citizens to join in support of
the U.S. team with “PJ’s optional . . . [and] breakfast . . . of pastries, fruit, juice,
and coffee . . . available for purchase” (“The World Cup,” 2002).
Television data also confirm that this was a World Cup out of the ordinary,
particularly in the increasingly important niche of cable. The Spanish language
network Univision averaged 987,000 households for its 56 live World Cup telecasts, up 16% from an average of 850,000 homes during the World Cup in
France in 1998 (when the games were televised during the middle of the day).11
Even more impressive was the phenomenal increase at ESPN, which averaged
963,000 households for 24 live telecasts, up 39% from its 1998 average of
691,300 homes for 27 broadcasts. Similarly, ESPN2 averaged 490,000 homes
for 34 live telecasts, up 52% from its 1998 average of 322,900 households for 23
live broadcasts (“World Cup Ratings,” 2002). The U.S.-Germany quarterfinal
was ESPN’s most-watched and highest-rated soccer telecast ever, with an average of 3.77 million homes tuning in. This was higher than the semifinal between
the United States and Brazil at the women’s World Cup in 1999 (2.88 million
homes). With a rating of 4.36, the U.S.-Germany game surpassed the 4.26 garnered by the first-round match between the United States and Colombia in the
1994 men’s World Cup (previously ESPN’s highest-rated soccer telecast)
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(“U.S.’s Loss,” 2002). The 998,000 households that watched the United States
defeat Portugal on ESPN2 at the beginning of the tournament also constituted a
record for that channel. During the first week of the tournament, ESPN’s
viewership was already up 58% above the usual 270,000 it averages for that time
of night, whereas ESPN2 exceeded the 83,000 it usually draws for that time slot
by a whopping 445% (“Univision’s Rating,” 2002). Despite airing at 2:30 a.m.
Eastern time, the United States-Mexico game was that week’s third most
watched cable program among 18- to 34-year-old men (a most coveted demographic for advertisers), surpassed by just two primetime wrestling shows
(Johnson, 2002).12
The numbers for ABC, the national broadcast network telecasting the World
Cup, were somewhat less impressive. ABC’s 10 World Cup broadcasts from
Japan and South Korea averaged a 1.4 rating and 1.48 million homes, down from
an average rating for 1998 of 2.6 and 2.55 million homes for 14 telecasts (all carried live, whereas the final was the only game carried live on ABC in 2002)
(“World Cup Ratings,” 2002). The downward trend from France also pertained
to the 2002 final, watched live by 2.64 million households and by 1.58 million
during a replay later that afternoon, an overall decline of 25% from 1998
(“World Cup Ratings,” 2002). Still, there were some local spots where the ABC
viewership for certain games was genuinely impressive by any measure. The 5.4
rating attained by ABC for the final in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, pooled
with the 10.0 rating on Univision, amounted to a 15.4 combined local rating,
equal to about 239,000 homes, higher than typical NBA Finals ratings and just
below those for an average NFL regular season Miami Dolphins game (Jackson,
2002). Now, that is a remarkable feat for soccer in the United States!
Indeed, telecasts for the 2002 World Cup rank quite favorably in comparison
to the National Hockey League’s 2002 Stanley Cup playoffs, played mostly in
primetime, where ABC averaged a rating of 1.5 for all its broadcasts of Stanley
Cup games, not much higher than the average rating of 1.4 for its 10 World Cup
telecasts of which ABC televised 9 on tape delay (with the exception of the final,
which, as already mentioned, was telecast live), often well over 24 hours after
the actual game had been played (Associated Press, 2002). For its primetime
broadcasts of three Stanley Cup finals games, ABC averaged a rating of 3.67,
whereas ESPN garnered an average rating of 2.76 for its telecasts of the first two
games of the finals (again, in primetime), well below the 4.36 achieved on the
same network by the United States versus Germany (on a weekday at 7:00 a.m.
Eastern time and 4:00 a.m. Pacific time) in the World Cup (Baker, 2002). On the
other hand, ratings for the 2002 World Cup appear quite diminutive when compared to the quadrennial sports events most recognized by the American public,
the winter and summer Olympics. The 2002 winter games held in Salt Lake City
achieved a cumulative average primetime rating of 19.2 on NBC; that does not
include the Sunday afternoon telecast of Canada’s 5-2 victory over the United
States for the gold medal in hockey (a contest wherein top players of the NHL
represented each side) that garnered a rating of 10.713 (Fendrich, 2002). The
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2000 summer Olympics in Sydney were considered something of a disappointment in terms of television ratings for NBC, yet still managed an overall average
rating of 14.4 and a 24.5 share (representing 24.5% of all television sets in use)
for 13 nights of telecasts during primetime (when all events were shown on tapedelay) (“2000-2001 Top Rated TV Sports,” 2002). This represented a significant
decline from the overall primetime average of a 21.6 rating and a 41 share that
NBC garnered for its 17 nights of telecasts from the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta
(when most of the big draw events, such as gymnastics, were broadcast live)
(Lafeyette, 1996). Although these numbers highlight how the World Cup still
lags far behind the Olympics in gaining the interest of the American public, this
does not negate the evidence that soccer’s premier global tournament has made
significant strides as a recognizable quadrennial event for American sports fans,
as well as for significant segments of the American public at large.
Perhaps the pinnacle of the World Cup’s acceptance into mainstream (particularly male) American culture was its completely positive incorporation into the
world of Jay Leno and David Letterman, who—dating back to the 1994 competition and again in 1998, and even at the very beginning of the 2002 tournament—had heaped contempt and ridicule on soccer in general and the World
Cup in particular.14 Just before the U.S.-Germany contest, Leno interviewed live
by satellite four members of the American team in South Korea on his show. Not
to be outdone, a few nights later, Letterman had members of the barely returned
Team USA assemble on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York (the
show’s studio) to kick soccer balls at various targets in the distance while the
young and photogenic Landon Donovan, one of the team’s newly crowned stars,
was interviewed by the host. Donovan made the cover of Sports Illustrated that
week, similar to his teammate Clint Mathis a few issues before.
Even the president of the United States took the time to acknowledge Team
USA’s marvelous accomplishments, telephoning the players just before the
Mexico game to offer praise and encouragement. But the president’s actions and
words mirrored yet another important sentiment for millions of Americans supporting their team thousands of miles from home: He confessed that he knew
nothing about soccer but yet was proud of the team’s achievement. Unlike his
Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, who stayed up to watch the game and
requested members of his staff and cabinet to do the same, Bush did neither.
Instead, he went to bed and so, presumably, did his cabinet and staff. There
would have been no break in an important meeting of the administration in
Washington for news that a World Cup soccer player had suffered an injury, as
occurred in London when Prime Minister Tony Blair interrupted a crucial gathering of his cabinet on the news that David Beckham had broken his foot. And no
American officeholder would have his or her meetings organized for an entire
month so as not to interfere with the national team’s playing schedule, as did
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany and many of his European and Latin
American colleagues during this World Cup (indeed, as politicians outside the
United States have done for all World Cups). President Bush, David Letterman,
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and Jay Leno only noticed the World Cup and the game of soccer on account of
the American national team’s excellent performance and unexpectedly good
results in a singularly prominent context. In doing so, they spoke for millions of
Americans who, in the course of the past two decades, had gradually been
weaned to register the World Cup as a quadrennial event. The U.S. team’s
achievements in June 2002 might have made World Cup fans out of many of
these people, a significant difference, to be sure, from converting them into soccer fans.
CONCLUSION
Perhaps as a result of World Cup 2002 and Team USA’s superb performance,
the formerly bifurcated Gestalt of soccer in America—nearly 20 million recreational players, most with virtually no cultural connection to soccer, and on the
other hand, a much smaller coterie of enthusiasts who follow the sport on all levels, domestic and international—is in the process of becoming tripartite: First,
soccer continues to flourish—perhaps even grow—as an activity on the grassroots level. Here, millions of players—male and female; children, adolescents,
and adults—enjoy the game for its own sake, completely decoupled from soccer
as a spectator sport, virtually oblivious to its history and many manifestations on
the domestic and international level. Second, largely as a consequence of developments (mainly the American team’s presence at all World Cups) since 1990,
but with a distinct impetus from Team USA’s superb performance in 2002, what
one could call a quadrennially recurring World Cup consciousness has emerged
among a relatively large number of American sports fans (and just regular
American citizens) that simply did not exist before. This new awareness of the
World Cup affects many, although certainly not all, of the grassroots participants
constituting the first level of soccer’s Gestalt mentioned above. However, it also
includes a sizable number of sports fans and citizens who do not play or follow
soccer on a regular basis but have definitely caught the World Cup bug. And last,
there exists the third level, composed of genuine American soccer aficionados
who routinely follow the game as it is played both in the United States and
abroad. Needless to say, this group is far and away the smallest of the three.
Although these three worlds interconnect because they focus on soccer, they
are actually more discrete in the United States than in any other country in the
world where soccer dominates the sports space and overlap among these three
levels is virtually complete. Briefly put, one simply cannot be a recreational soccer player in Europe or Latin America without following league and cup play at
least in one’s own country (although often beyond) as well as the national team’s
games in all competitions, most of all the World Cup. This is not the case in the
United States, where the three levels have existed and continue to coexist side by
side with some overlap, but each with a great deal of independence and autonomy. However, there is absolutely no doubt that there has been immense
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development over the past two decades. Indeed, it signifies a major change that
we can now discern soccer’s tripartite Gestalt in the United States in place of the
former bifurcated mode. But whereas the ostensible dynamo responsible for the
creation of this new intermediate level—what we have termed World Cup consciousness—has been the success of the men’s national team (first to qualify for
the tournament in 1990, 1994, and 1998, then to shine in 2002), the largely
unsung and invisible motor for the recent triumph has been none other than
Major League Soccer.
Despite MLS’s various shortcomings (particularly in the all-important venue
of television) and continued fragility as a viable representative of soccer as a bigtime professional sport in the United States, there can be no doubt that without
its presence, the greatly increased level of World Cup awareness would not exist
in the United States. Among the most tangible factors usually presented to demonstrate MLS’s contributions to the success of Team USA in World Cup 2002 is
that 11 of the 23 players on the American national team were from MLS, 8 of
whom were on the field of play when the United States defeated Mexico (Martins, 2002). Five of the seven American goals scored in the tournament were by
MLS players, and many of the stars of the American team—such as Landon
Donovan, Clint Mathis, Josh Wolf, Brian McBride, Cobi Jones, and Eddie
Pope—play for MLS teams. We would like to add what in our view is far and
away the league’s most significant, although surely least measurable, contribution: the continuous and visible presence of a legitimate organized association
that forms the unchallenged peak of soccer’s pyramid in the United States. For
the first time in its 130-year-old history, American soccer has a relatively welldefined national structure rather than the localized chaos that was its bane for a
very long time.
NOTES
1. The imagery of the Olympics has been widely used. For example, Joe Williams of the
Orlando Sentinel writes, “I think the World Cup is kind of like the Olympics. People don’t pay attention to figure skating until the Olympics roll around” (Williams, 2002). An unsigned column in The
Miami Herald opined,
Yes, soccer—like synchronized swimming, luge and that little diner in Dubuque that
attracts more presidential candidates and bib overall-wearing network anchors than
actual patrons as the Iowa primary approaches—flares onto the national radar once every
four years, then quietly retreats to something close to nonexistence. (“While World
Awaits,” 2002)
Last, Sam Donnellon’s analogy is worthy of attention:
But until this victory [against Mexico] translates into swelling crowds at games here or a
jump in television ratings, it is presumptuous to ascribe any more importance to this victory than Carl Lewis winning all those Olympic golds, or Michael Johnson winning all
those golds, or even the U.S. “Miracle on Ice” hockey gold 22 years ago. (Donnellon,
2002)
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A few paragraphs later, “Soccer’s best shot for a shot in the arm in this country is a long and prolonged baseball strike, in conjunction with a long and prolonged football strike, and a long and prolonged basketball strike.” Here we have the crux of our general argument: Perhaps the largest impediment to soccer’s making it in the United States depends on the largely—perhaps even excessively—
filled American sports space where soccer, in our view, bears the heavy burden of a late comer and a
liability of newness.
2.
The game in the U.S. has become shorthand for happy families. A typical ad, which once
might have taken baseball as a symbol of upper-middle-class values, now features a
beaming child kicking a ball, with a text that begins: “While Jessica takes an afternoon
off to focus on scoring goals, her parents’ Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch focuses on
meeting her family’s goals.” The American game has come to be seen as a protective
mother’s heaven: nonviolent, suitable for children, and female-friendly. (Kuper, 2002)
3. On the ubiquitous and immensely powerful role of nationalism in the popularization of any
sport, see Markovits and Hellerman (2001, pp. 34-39). But here, too, we detect an American exception of sorts pertaining to sports. Everywhere else in the world—particularly in relation to soccer—
nationalism is constructed between and among nations (i.e., internationally), but in the United
States, sports, along with their competition and the identities formed around them, remain primarily
confined to their North American context. Hence, they are largely intranational in nature (if one is
allowed the indulgence of including Canada, for this particular purpose). Soccer’s internationalism
creates two interrelated developments largely absent in American sports: It fosters a heightened,
often antagonistic, competition between and among nations but at the same time, it also creates an
international level of communication and understanding (a common language, so to speak).
4. The following point regarding ESPN’s relationship to broadcasting the World Cup is quite
revealing:
Ask yourself how much respect soccer can genuinely be earning when ESPN openly
boasts that it paid nothing for the rights to telecast the Cup, instead getting them in a nearinfomercial deal with their U.S. holder, the American pro circuit Major League Soccer. . . . And how much respect has the sport earned when ESPN, riding the little popularity surge propelled by the unexpectedly strong U.S. performance, couldn’t bother to
update the edition of the sports roundup show “SportsCenter” that aired immediately
after U.S.-Germany? Instead of the world-championship-tournament soccer game that
viewers had just watched, ESPN’s recycled “SportsCenter” after Friday’s game led with
all of the previous night’s exciting action from the middle of the 162-game baseball season. (Johnson, 2002)
5. The situation at The Boston Globe, to take one example, highlights this predicament: Frank
Dell’Apa, surely among the finest journalists in America covering soccer on a regular basis—much
of it as a beat reporter on the New England Revolution of MLS—was in the Far East reporting on the
World Cup almost on a daily basis. Although The Boston Globe continued to inform its readers about
the Revolution—much more thoroughly in comparison to other papers in MLS cities—the paper’s
MLS coverage suffered noticeably on account of the World Cup. A definite crowding out of local
MLS news had occurred in the month of June 2002.
6. For example, on June 4, the day before the United States was to make its World Cup premier
against heavily favored Portugal, the Ann Arbor News featured two lengthy articles on local girls’
soccer and only one on the World Cup.
7. The overall average for the 10-team league’s 2002 season through July was 15,880 per game,
an overall increase of more than 2,000 customers from the 2000 season, when the league had 12
teams.
8. It is interesting to note that in this age of cable and satellite broadcasting, games from firstdivision European soccer, as well as competition from Mexico and Latin America, are often available—either live or, more often, on tape delay—for viewers in the United States. Although these
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broadcasts might raise overall awareness on the part of Americans regarding professional soccer,
they also detract from MLS as a product and may negatively affect MLS viewership.
9. Indeed, one of the very few articles that the San Francisco Examiner ran in connection with
the World Cup was a deeply critical piece of the San Francisco Police Department Chief Fred Lau,
under whose aegis some overzealous officers raided three bars in the Richmond section of town
“where coffee-sipping soccer fans were huddled together . . . to watch the ultra-impressive United
States team have a go at the heavyweight Germans for the quarter finals of World Soccer Cup [sic], a
once-in-a-lifetime situation” (Hinckle, 2002).
10. Nothing like this had ever occurred in American sport for two reasons: First, all the major
sports that comprise America’s mainstream culture and capture the American public’s imagination
and passion are completely domestic and thus not subject to broadcast at odd hours of the night
instead of prime time. Second, events that did occur elsewhere and at inconvenient times for Americans—most notably the Olympics—tellingly never attained the same collective passion as the U.S.
team’s performance at this World Cup. Most Americans interested in Olympic competition were
content to stay in bed and wait to watch these rare televised events later on tape delay.
11. In 1998, the games reached the East Coast of the United States in the late morning and early
afternoon, whereas in 2002, they did so in the middle of the night and very early in the morning (2:30
a.m., 4:30 a.m., and 7:30 a.m., Eastern Daylight Savings Time).
12. Johnson (2002) proposes a compelling hypothetical scenario:
It would be interesting to see how well the games would have done if they had come from
a country where they would fall in prime time, rather than from Korea and Japan. Nearly
as well as some Olympic nights, I bet. Probably close to the “Monday Night Football”
average of about 15 million households.
Although it is obvious that one can never actually confirm or refute Johnson’s thoughtful ruminations, our comparative data do shed some useful light on this interesting hypothesis.
13. The highest average prime-time ratings in the United States for winter Olympics were
achieved by the games in Lillehamer in 1994, an average of 27.8 for what some have called the
“Nancy (Kerrigan) and Tanya (Harding) Games.”
14. For examples of Letterman and Leno jokes about soccer in 1998, see Markovits and
Hellerman (2001, pp. 336-337). However, similar to millions of Americans, Letterman found great
appeal in women’s soccer and the American team during the 1999 World Cup (see Markovits &
Hellerman, 2001, p. 177).
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ANDREI S. MARKOVITS is professor of politics in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and adjunct professor of political science and sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He obtained all five of his university degrees at Columbia
University. A specialist in German and European politics, Markovits has held teaching positions at a number of American universities—Harvard University, New York University, Wesleyan University, Boston University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, among
them. He also taught at universities in Germany, Britain, Israel, and Austria. His avid devotion to sports on both sides of the Atlantic has led him to pursue this subject in a scholarly
manner, resulting in numerous publications in many languages. It is by dint of these that he
was invited to coedit this special issue of American Behavioral Scientist.
STEVEN L. HELLERMAN, a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz (where
he met Andrei Markovits), is a sport journalist and a doctoral candidate at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Politics and Economics.
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