I've always been amused by how many American sports fans are threatened by soccer. It has been the most popular and most played youth sport for the past 25 years. With the influx of immigrants coming into the country, plus the MLS, and growing interest in the National teams, soccer is really setting itself up for a big boom in the States. They aren't there yet, but it will be coming and will finally join the rest of the world.
Let me preface my comments by saying that I do follow DC United and the US National Team, although not nearly as avidly as I follow the Capitals and UVA football. I remember going to see the Washington Diplomats at RFK fairly frequently back in the days of the NASL. We always looked forward to Dips–Cosmos games.
I tend to agree with your comments about people acting threatened by soccer. However, I also think that there's an element in the community of hard-core American soccer fans who are hurting their own cause. Some people call these folks the "soccer snobs," but I think they're not the sole problem. The "soccer snobs" are the ones who look down their noses at people who don't like soccer and who say things like, "Oh, you just haven't learned to appreciate it yet," or "Americans simply haven't learned to understand why soccer is better," or crap like that. Telling people that they're somehow ignorant or uneducated just because they don't watch or like a given sport is not a smart way to try to convince them to like it because it comes across as an attack. I also think that saying "soccer is better" is counterproductive. Too many of the hardest-core soccer fans come across—whether they intend to or not—as saying that people should follow soccer instead of other sports, rather than in addition to other sports. (OldChelsea would be the person who best represents the approach I think is the right one—he follows everything!) It's LUDICROUS for anyone to expect that soccer would ever replace the NFL or baseball in popularity in the United States and it's a waste of time for people to act as though it could—or, for that matter, should. When you argue that soccer is somehow "better," or when you imply that it should replace a sport that people know and love, you immediately put them on the defensive.
I think people who say that Americans should follow it just because it's the most popular sport on earth are missing the point. Since when have Americans cared about that? We don't let the rest of the world tell us how we should run our country, or for whom we should vote, or how we should post road signs (although I'd argue that the rest of the world is onto something sensible with metric measurement), so what makes anyone think we'll let them tell us how to watch sports and what we should watch?
I've met too many soccer fans who seem to turn up their noses at new fans. I think there are plenty of people who are willing to learn about the game but that it turns them off if a soccer fan immediately "corrects" them as to some of the jargon. I know one guy who gets angry when anyone refers to a "game"—he insists that you must call it a "match," apparently because he THINKS that is the European term, never mind that most English-language European media sources use "game" and "match" interchangeably. (Moreover, who CARES which you use, when it's AMPLY clear what the term means? I mean, soccer, as with all sports, is indeed ultimately a game.) Certainly some of the jargon is useful and has its place, but it doesn't help if someone jumps down a new fan's throat and demands that he say "pitch" instead of "field" (and when it comes to insisting that the sport should be called "football," don't get me started—that's one argument that the hardcore soccer fans will never win in the United States or Canada). Americans call the playing surface for most outdoor sports a "field" and that's not a problem at all. Why be confrontational towards people who are casual soccer-watchers or who just haven't watched many games?
Why is it a problem if the new fan doesn't use the jargon? Isn't it better to allow him to learn the game by watching and asking questions instead of trying to shove it down his throat?
But yes, ultimately I do find it amusing the way some Americans, especially people down in SEC territory (the college sports SEC, that is), act as though soccer (and hockey, for that matter) is some kind of a threat. I will never understand why it bothers them if someone else watches it. To me, it's kind of like TV—if you don't like a show, don't watch the damn thing! If you don't like soccer, don't watch it, and vice versa if you don't like football, who cares? I think each sport has enough fans to survive without worrying about the other sport's fans as long as MLS doesn't make the mistakes that the NASL did in trying to grow too far too fast and in attempting to elevate itself to the level of the NFL. The NASL was doomed as soon as the Cosmos signed Pele. I read something once that pointed out how for a few years the Cosmos even stopped calling themselves the "New York Cosmos"—they were just "Cosmos" for a while. When a team is too big for New York, then your league has a serious problem! The NASL, in retrospect, reminds me of how the USFL fell apart when the owners abandoned their spring football plan and tried to compete with the NFL. To its credit, MLS hasn't tried to follow that path—they've marketed the league first and foremost to the soccer community and haven't tried to make the assumption that the rest of the country will fall in line.
Certainly, the 1994 World Cup was HUGE. The rest of the world acted surprised, but I've never understood why. After all, if there's one thing Americans LOVE and do really well, it's Big Events. Think about how many people watch the Super Bowl even when they don't like either team (or actively hate both of them).
Edited to add: One thing I really like about soccer, that I wish our other sports would follow, is that TV caters to the sport, rather than the sport catering to TV. When you watch a soccer game, you know it will end within the allotted two-hour timeslot unless it's in a tournament where there MUST be a winner (e.g., the knockout rounds of the World Cup). You don't have these constant annoying TV timeouts that, if you're attending the game, create interminable pauses and suck the momentum out of the crowd when the game is going well. I'll never understand why we never developed the animated in-game advertising you see on the Spanish soccer broadcasts on Univision and some other channels.
