Swept up by my entirely-too-cluttered newsreader yesterday was a blog post out of Australia entitled "A-League has much to learn from football in America". Much of my daily news consumption outside of the usual suspect sites is dependent on my reader finding off-the-beaten-path or American soccer-related items from places I would not normally visit. This post was a perfect example, and the titled intrigued me; as the writer points out, the A-League and MLS have much in common on the surface, and it's always interesting when observers of our "contemporary" league cast their eye to the US.
Much of it is what the title led me to expect; mentions of areas where MLS is stronger than the A-League, what Australian soccer can learn from the US efforts, etc. But the real gem of the post, the bit that caught my eye and the interest of some who read the piece when I tweeted the link, was in regards to the United States National Team, the amount of support it receives here, and how Mexico fills stadiums from coast to coast. Why, the writer wondered, don't the powers-that-be in American soccer do something to change the situation?
The writer, Davidde Corran, says he heard directly from people inside MLS/SUM headquarters that the plan is to wait for the next generation of Mexican and Central Americans to come through; at that point, they expect many of these children of immigrants to be USA fans even if they still carry allegiance to the nation of their heritage.
In a supremely practical way, I can understand the approach. The pure numbers of the situation, meaning those of Mexican and Central American descent living in the United States with the impetus to buy tickets to support their teams when they play here, make it a difficult task for US Soccer. How would one go about turning fans of those teams into US supporters, and is that even justifiable from a sport-morality standpoint?
There is, naturally, a club/country split; while MLS works to convert fans of Mexican clubs into fans of American ones, the job of converting fans of national teams is often much stickier. Fans of Club America will rarely have to choose between the Eagles and say, the LA Galaxy if they decide to support the latter. Not true in international competition, where deep-rooted rivalry with the US might keep even the children of immigrants from accepting the USMNT as their own.
It literally pains me every time I see the US playing on American soil in front of a crowd that is seventy, eighty, or ninety percent behind the visitors. But you can't force people to become USA fans, at least not without a comprehensive re-education program ala the Ministry of Love; not something we'll be seeing, I don't think.
So wait. Throw out a little "propaganda" from time to time, build the ranks of USA fans from the portions of the population that don't have Latin American ties, and do the more important work of improving the team itself. If the US every wins anything, or progress deep into the World Cup tournament, they'll gain more fans then they likely ever could from any identifiable action or program run by US Soccer/SUM/MLS/whomever.
The attitude isn't one of acceptance, necessarily, it's simply a practical appreciation of what is and is not possible within the current American soccer environment.
