I think this may be my best post to date, even if it is a little long. I apologize for the length in advance; just stick with it and please comment with your thoughts. It does get just a bit over-dramatic at the end, but I was reaching for a conclusion and couldn't come up with anything that more aptly summed it up.


As Americans, we've come to expect the best. Our prosperity and prominence has allowed us the luxury of always having the newest, the biggest, and the fastest. This attitude is a product of our environment, a trait so innate that we often take what we have for granted. When something fails to measure up to the standards to which we have become so accustomed, we, as a society, almost always summarily reject it. Without a history, without a legacy, without tradition passed from father to son, we simply choose to ignore that which we either don't understand, or deem unworthy of our passion.

Americans are, in a word, jaded.

Not only does our jaded nature cause us to be reviled in many parts of the world, it often keeps us from embracing new and "foreign" ideas. For many Americans, soccer fits this bill. Specifically, MLS fits this bill. Our top level soccer league is not, by anyone's estimation, one of the best leagues in the world. This is matter of fact, a fact which has retarded the growth of the professional game in the U.S. by turning away the average American sports fan.

In the modern connected age, information is no longer at a premium. Soccer fans around the world are able to watch their favorite teams, and therefore their favored leagues, from continents away, while choosing to completely ignore their domestic leagues if they so choose. Many soccer-loving residents of the U.S. (both citizens and ex-pats) do this every week, either adopting a club from another country, or carrying their allegiances with them from their homeland. These potential fans of the professional game here turn their noses up at MLS (the dreaded Eurosnob syndrome), seriously hampering the efforts of those who wish to see the league and the game succeed in this country.

For Joe Six Pack, sitting in his recliner in middle America, this combination of factors is fatal to his potential interest in soccer. There is no question that the sports he follows are played in leagues that are clearly the greatest in the world. His natural disdain as an American for anything second best is buoyed by his ability to see the best in American football, basketball, hockey, and baseball. The NFL is the only game in town for American football, so there's no question of it's supremacy. The NBA and NHL draw players and fans from all over the world, and dwarf leagues abroad in quality and exposure. Major League Baseball continues to draw away the biggest stars from Japan, the only other place where the sport is played on a level remotely comparable to its own. This isn't the case with soccer. Although Joe himself would be new enough to the game that he would likely be unable to pick up on the subtleties that separate the EPL, La Liga, and Serie A (not to mention South American leagues) from the American version, he doesn't give it a chance. He's heard from pundits, from talking heads, from blowhards, and maybe even from friends, that MLS is an inferior product. He knows, or is aware, that the league's salaries often pale in comparison with those in the other sports he follows. The games he might flip by on TV are often played in mostly empty stadiums (which are always full for other sports) on fields that were clearly not made for soccer (the ugly football line problem). Perception is reality for Joe, whether he chooses to embrace the game or not.

What to do? The league itself can do little to improve it's place in the pecking order when it has rightly chosen financial restraint over the free-wheeling spending it would take to rapidly improve quality; the lessons to be learned from the failure of the NASL are clear and important. Salaries will continue to lag behind those in other sports as long as attendances remain mediocre and teams are struggling just to get out of the red. Stadiums built for the game aren't yet the rule, and those already in use are only slowly impacting the aesthetics of play with atmosphere and field conditions. So Joe, along with millions of other sports fans for whom soccer remains a mystery, is unlikely to gravitate towards a league and a sport that is so obviously second rate in comparison to both other American sports leagues and other soccer leagues around the world. Americans just don't do second rate.

Clear answers to this problem elude me. If I wanted to be reactionary, I could just call Americans idiots and wash my hands of those who refuse to see the greatness of soccer and the potential of MLS; if I wanted to be reasonable, I could argue that Americans are simply slow to adapt and will enter the fold eventually. The first attitude is surrender, a way to convince myself that I don't care if the rest of the country learns what I know; that being that soccer is one of the greatest sports on earth, and at the least, worthy of any sports fan's attention. The second attitude is also a type of surrender; a way of throwing in the towel on converting the unconverted, convincing myself that I can be content waiting for professional game to take off in the U.S. Neither leaves me satisfied. There are those out there with a stake in the future of the sport and a love for the game that are attempting to spread the word the best they can; so I'll continue to do my part, small as it may be, to convince sports fans that even though it may not be the best, MLS is good enough.