It is important for you to know that because that is exactly why I believe Coulter might be on to something when she somehow associates the rising popularity of soccer with increasing "moral decay" in the Good Ol' US of A. (And you should know by now I will not link to that kind of garbage; I'm assuming you've probably heard of it already.)
Here's the deal: soccer actually does, in a way, buck several trends that have usually been associated with the more typical sporting passions that claim popularity in this country. My evidence is purely experiential and anecdotal; I completely acknowledge this and make no claims for any kind of scientific veracity. But I see what I see, and that is all I can do.
Around three years ago I went to the first MLS match at Sporting Park in Kansas City, Kansas (it still had the "Livestrong" name attached to it at that point; this was before Lance Armstrong's full and total flameout). It was SRO. The franchise had been playing nothing but road matches at that point for weeks (electing not to return to the minor-league baseball park that had previously been their home), and finally getting to cut the ribbon on their new grounds was both relief and windfall for the club. The match, with the Chicago Fire, ended scoreless, despite several strong runs and crazy long passes and shots that juuuuuust missed.
I spent most of the match walking around, enjoying views not obstructed except for my lack of height (as well as a pretty decent barbecue spot) and generally being surprised by everything. That experience also formed my first "well...huh" observation about soccer in these here United States:
1) It was the most diverse crowd I had ever seen at a major-league level sporting event, live or televised.
This is not to say that MLB or NFL crowds are lily-white; it is to say that the Sporting crowd defied that particular duality in its diversity. I did not see any identifiably Native American folk in the crowd, but that's about all that was missing. Remember, we're talking about Kansas City here, smack-in-the-middle Kansas City. Where were these crowds at Royals games or Chiefs games? Also important here is a secondary point:
1a) This diversity of people came to the match together, or at least met at Sporting Park and hung out together at the game. Baseball games can be diverse, but mostly on a black-white axis and in a more segregated fashion, though not always so and certainly not by compulsion. I am not smart enough to know whether this is mostly because more of the crowd at baseball games is comprised of family units or if something else is afoot, but such division is usually pretty easy to spot at MLB games, and never more so to me than when at an Atlanta Braves game at Turner Field a couple of months ago.
Possibly a related point:
2) The Sporting Park crowd was young. I refer to young adults, not children with their parents. (This was a late start, so I did not expect to see the latter, frankly.) How much 1, 1a, and 2 relate to and intersect with each other I do not know, but there's something there.
(Note: I haven't been to any MLS matches since moving here, but I have caught a few matches of the local USLPro side Richmond Kickers, and the above points seem to hold at least somewhat in this case as well, allowing for the different demographics of the two cities.)
Stepping away from that Sporting Park eye-opener to another point of a more general nature:
3) This fan base does not particularly care whether the USA has the best national team in the world.
Waiting for the US-Germany match at Power & Light District in KC
Check that: they do want to have the best team in the world, but they know it's not there yet and are hanging on anyway.
Here's where a lot of people get a bit mystified. We are virtually the only country in the world where American football (you know, the one with the pads and CTE) is played. Baseball might just be more popular in the Caribbean, Korea, or Japan than it is in the US by now, and it's making surprising headway in Europe, but despite somehow failing to win the World Baseball Classic so far, most would agree that the gravitational center of the sport is still here. Basketball is about as "American" as a sport can get, in that we actually can point to a place and date and person for its invention in this country; that said, the moment US teams started getting beat at the Olympics we suddenly found it convenient to release NBA stars to play there, insuring that we won't lose another Olympics for quite a while.
We're not winning the World Cup any time soon. Even the coach gets this. The US team is certainly better than it's been in a long time and seems to be improving tremendously in recent years, but put us in a regular rotation with Brazil, Argentina, Germany, etc. at their best and we're going to take our beatings. This does not bother soccer fans in the US, many of whom (traitorous pigs that they are) openly root for other countries, and others of whom get that the US has a long ways to go and are in for the long haul (I place myself here, for what it's worth).
This kind of thing infuriates some people. They are baffled and angered when thousands of people gather in large public spaces in Chicago or Kansas City or other oh-so-American cities and live and die with each cross or header or save. That's not American. What's wrong with them?
I could (and may yet) write a huge number of posts about the ethical failings of the World Cup and its overseer organization FIFA (an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel, to be sure): the feckless waste of resources on stadiums that will go unused after the Cup is gone; the deplorable state of Brazilian infrastructure ignored in the quest to put up said stadiums; the complicity of ESPN and like media in steadfastly pretending these things are not true and that many Brazilians have not protested these things, just to name a few. Still, there is something stunning about the way that the sport and its banner event have managed to wear down American resistance and carve out a pretty substantial swath of allegiance and impact not just within my lifetime, but within my adult lifetime. It's a different demographic, with different ideas about how the world works and a decided lack of interest in perpetuating old stereotypes and rules.
Of course this is going to tick some people off.
