Soccer might be the most popular sport in the world, but for decades,
Americans have managed to resist its charm. Their attention has been
focused, of course, on the big three American sports: baseball,
football and basketball. And while soccer is rapidly gaining popularity
among younger Americans, the older generation remains detached from the
game, even when the rest of the world is glued to TV screens watching
the 2006 World Cup matches.
It’s not as though soccer is a stranger to American shores. The U.S.
national soccer team played in the first World Cup in 1930. But from
the start, the game had an image for many Americans as an immigrant
sport. Still soccer began to attract more attention in the United
States after the 1974 World Cup.
The following year, the country got its first professional soccer
teams, with the launch of the North American Soccer League. The New
York Cosmos became the league’s flagship franchise when it acquired a
stellar roster of players from 16 different countries, including the
Brazilian soccer legend Pele, the high-scoring Italian great Georgio
Chinagalia, and German superstar Franz Beckenbauer. By 1977, attendance
at American soccer games had grown to a record 62,000.
Peppe Pinton, a veteran soccer player and the executive director of the
Cosmos soccer camps, likes to recall those golden days when American
fans packed the stadiums to watch some of the world’s best soccer
players — most of them playing on the same team. “Americans are used
to watch winners,” Pinton says. “Americans are used to watch
superstars, great players in all sports, and they are not settling for
inferiority. The Cosmos team was not successful in the early years, but
it was successful when those players came here.”
People lined up to get into the stadium like they would line up to get
into a popular restaurant, Pinton says. “People attracted people. And
the Cosmos made this happen all over the U.S.,” he says. “It drew
record crowds in Seattle, in Miami, in Tampa, Boston, in Chicago and
then they went all over the world. They went even into China when
nobody was reaching China those years.”
But for 40 years, the U.S. was unable to qualify for World Cup games
because most of the players on its soccer teams were not American
citizens. Finally, in 1990, with enough home-grown or naturalized
players on its rosters, the U.S. was able to field a World Cup team.
