The Super Bowl took place in New Orleans last month, and as I drove through the streets of New Orleans, where more work has been done to uplift the city in the past three months than has been done in the last three years, I couldn’t help but be grateful for the renovation but generally apathetic to the actual reason.
You would have thought with America’s biggest sporting event taking place in my current town, with my hometown football team on one side (Philadelphia Eagles) that I’d be ecstatic, but I was more worried about the availability of going to the supermarket to get food and having to dodge traffic than the actual sport.
A record was set last year with more than 200 million viewers watching the Superbowl; that pales in comparison with the 1.5 billion people watching the World Cup. But if you consider that it only involved two American teams, and that the sport is professionally played in only a handful of countries in the world, that’s not bad.
The Road to 2026
What really excites me is that the World Cup is coming to the US (not forgetting Canada and Mexico) in under 18 months. There will be 11 US cities hosting matches including Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco.
With the US being so vast, traveling to any of these cities will be more like a European tour for Brits, with the nearest city being a six hour drive, or a two hour flight. I plan to see the spread of matches and possibly catch games near my home town in Philly, or near a drivable city like Houston or Atlanta. I also have friends in Toronto and Vancouver which are both hosting matches, and there is a draw to actually go to Mexico to see a match in El Azteca which is one of the grandest stadiums in the world – that is if the US and Mexico don’t engage in their own bout after all of this recently news about changing the name of a body of water.
The Rise of ‘Soccer’ in America
As we’re referring to it in American terms, I’ll have to ask you dear reader to allow me to use the word you’ve given us, ‘soccer’ to describe the sport that for a great while has been on the lower rungs of American interest but is climbing. With the World Cup coming to the States, I can only hope as an avid ‘football’ fan, that my fellow Americans will begin to see soccer in the brilliant light that the rest of the world does.
There has been an uptick recently in popularity of the sport based on multiple factors. For one, global media coverage and the profit of broadcasting has brought the sport to viewers. Where just five years ago you had to have a special subscription to an unknown streaming service to see some of the matches, half of the West Ham matches are now broadcast on a cable television station this season.
Messi, MLS, and Changing Demographics
Also MLS has started to increase in quality and with the addition of big name players and most importantly Messi joining the league, football has seen a surge. Our season has just started, we run February to October, so as not to compete with American Football, and to give fans something to watch during the summer months when most leagues are off season.
There has also been an increase in Latino and Hispanic citizens, and since the last World Cup was held in the US in 1994, we have increased from 22.4 million hispanic peoples to 65 million; a jump from 9% to 19.5%. That is a great potential pool of new fans. Other smaller factors might be that parents are putting their children into soccer to avoid the higher head injury rate that American football has; that our women’s international team was so successful in the past, and that American players have gone over to the Premier League where we have American presence on the big stage.
Looking Ahead: De Bruyne and Bowen
Although the first sport I played was soccer at the age of five, and in terms of impromptu play it’s one of the easier sports to enjoy with a group of friends, I didn’t really catch any of the 94′ Cup. This World Cup I’ll be excited to view the last hoorah of the Golden Age of Belgium football and possibly De Bruyne’s last stand.
Although the England team doesn’t really hold a special place in my heart now that Rice has gone over to Arsenal, I’ll still be rooting for Bowen and hope to see him. And as the American team will have players I’ve followed for several years, I’ll be excited to see how early we, as the home side, drop out, unless there’s some sort of patriotic pride that comes with being the home team.
If you’re thinking about coming to the World Cup in America, send me a note and we can meet up and share a pint. I’d offer my spare bedroom but you’d have to drive six hours to grab a seat at a stadium.
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