The whole world, that is, except for the hosts. Will Americans care?
The answer depends on who the American is. Any merchant within shouting distance of the tourist business is smiling. The 15th World Cup-as the quadrennial tournament is formally known -will bring more than $4 billion in foreign money to Theme Park U.S.A. The sponsors are grinning tightly, having forked over up to $25 million each for the right to spend even more money, rendering it impossible to turn on a television without seeing a flying soccer ball with a FOR RENT sign on its side. And the souvenir hawkers are delirious. Sales of World Cup merchandise at Tasneem Tahir’s newsstand at Washington’s Dulles International Airport are, he says, “not good, not better, not excellent, but amazing.”
The new America-the land of masses yearning to breathe free-already has declared a month-long fiesta. Korea Town, Los Angeles, braces for a new hero, Kim Joo-Sung, the first Asian world-class Player. In Jackson Heights, N.Y., capital of the Colombian diaspora, otherwise adult men run around in blond wigs, imitating the locks of their beloved midfielder Carlos Valderrama. Roughly 80,000 Team Mexico fans have already filled Pasadena’s historic Estadio de las Rosas (formerly the Rose Bowl) for an exhibition match, leading the U.S. national team to wonder just who the home team was anyway.
Among young America, the World Cup is a matter of passion, too. The boys and girls of soccer-mad suburbia mark off the days on their athletic-advent calendars until the great German team, the defending Cup holders, kick off against Bolivia in Chicago, now the city of big feet. Even the politicians have joined in. Streets of northeast Washington near RFK Stadium, pockmarked since the McKinley administration, are being paved lest they make the capital of the free world look like the civic mess it has become. And recently both White House Communications Director Mark Gearan and David Kessler, boss of the Food and Drug Administration, have used the image of little kids chasing a soccer ball to signify a chaotic pack mentality. (This image now joins “back to square one” as a phrase that derives from soccer: you didn’t know that, did you?)
But why should those Americans who aren’t making a buck off the games or suffering nostalgia for the auld sod or catering to a pee-wee player’s obsession care about this spectacle? The main reason: soccer is a beautiful game. it’s a beautiful game because it’s a simple game. Ever since the first set of modern “laws” was drawn up in 1863, soccer has avoided excessive specialism (basically, apart from the goalkeeper, anyone can do anything) and constant tinkering with the rules. To encourage more open, attacking play, however, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the international game’s governing body, has introduced two slight modifications for this year’s World Cup.
Some Americans new to the game, it’s true, will find soccer difficult to follow on TV. The essence of soccer is not what happens to the ball but what the players who don’t have the ball are doing-running into position, diverting defenders. To the uninitiated, this can give the impression of as much order as particles whizzing round a nucleus. And much more than in traditional American sports like baseball, the players, and not the coach or manager, determine what happens on the field. Some of soccer’s finest players have been on-field generals -men like “Kaiser” Franz Beckenbauer, the great German of the 1960s and 1970s, or Johan Cruyff, whose Dutch team of 1974 was perhaps the second greatest team ever seen (the best ever, since you ask, was the Brazilian team of 1970).
So long as you get the hang of it, a monthlong treat beckons. Divided into six groups, 24 national teams will play in the first round, in nine cities. These aren’t necessarily the best 24 teams; such a roster would certainly include Denmark, the current European champions, France and England, who all failed in the tough European qualifying rounds. But this year’s crop includes a record five teams from Africa and Asia: Cameroon, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. The top 16 advance to sudden-death rounds, with the final set for July 17 in the Rose Bowl.
All this will be on TV, where ABC, ESPN and Univision have divided the spoils. Since soccer is played in two 45-minute halves with a break only between them, there’ll be much less time spent on commercial breaks than American viewers expect -just 12 minutes in a game compared with 33 minutes during an NFL contest. Instead, American viewers will get used to something that in the rest of the world is familiar -“permanent” commercials in the form of billboards lining the field of play.
Most of the games are sold out, with vast chunks of the tickets controlled by sponsors, foreign tours and scalpers. in large measure, the huge numbers of people who want to see topflight soccer is a reflection of the even larger numbers who now enjoy playing it. According to a marketing survey by the Soccer Industry Council of America, a coalition of sports-goods firms, 16.4 million Americans played soccer last Year, a jump of 8 percent over 1992. More impressive are the gains among adults playing soccer-now 4.2 million. a rise of 19 percent over 1992-and among those who play at least 25 days a year, a group now 7.2 million strong. Soccer, claims the council, is now the fourth most-popular participation sport for all those under 18, and second only to basketball as a participation sport for children under 12.
What America doesn’t have is a fully fledged professional league, capable of drawing huge crowds, with a massive television contract. Creating one was an explicit condition of awarding the United States the 1994 World Cup. Last month Major League Soccer (MLS) headed by Alan Rothenberg, the Los Angeles lawyer who is chief executive of World Cup ‘94-announced that it had received bids from 22 cities, from which it will select 12 to take part in an inaugural season in 1995.
They can build it, but will anyone come? Skeptics (I’m one) have always thought that the failure to establish a professional soccer league in the United States had nothing to do with the fact that soccer is supposedly a boring game (if it was, your kids wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about it) and even less to do with the ownership of teams. The key fact, rather, is that the United States is an astonishingly sports-rich society with four high-quality professional leagues, to say nothing of college football and basketball. Combined, this offers all but the most lumped couch potato a rich diet. Is there really room for a soccer souffle on top of that load of red meat?
We may never know if the U.S. team does poorly: an embarrassing failure might indeed nip soccer’s growth in the bud. True, the American preparation has been rocky, with some games lost that shouldn’t have been. But nobody else has set the world alight. The Italians, Germans and Brazilians, the three favorites, have had unimpressive pre-tournament runs.
So don’t write off the Americans: they have the players to do surprisingly well. Bora Milutinovic, once a Yugoslav star and now the American coach (page 24), has seen that the millions of Hispanics who play the game should be a source of strength to the American team. Formerly the coach of Costa Rica, he has introduced the skillful Latin style of play, which emphasizes short passes and close control.
Now, if America has a half-decent team, all it needs is half-decent fans. The World Cup finals have never seen any serious fan violence. Instead, the Cup attracts true fans: half-naked Brazilian men and women, dancing the samba; fully clothed Dutch, all in orange, singing the triumphal march from “Aida”; Italians, with faces and bodies painted green, white and red (confusingly, the team wears blue). A few chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” won’t do. What’s needed is a really good, well-known song-perhaps “When the Saints Go Marching In” or “Great Balls of Fire.” Also armfuls of confetti, flags, banners (,the wittier the better), horns and drums.
Then all we need is a goal like the finest one scored by the finest team Brazil’s fourth in the 1970 final. The incomparable Pele pushed the ball into empty space to his right, and there, galloping from nowhere, came Carlos Alberto, Brazil’s fullback and captain, who crushed it from an impossible angle into the Italian net. A few minutes later the game was over, and the field was full of the samba dancers, stripping their heroes to the waist, carrying them off in triumph. in a display of joy, exuberance and national pride that only the championship of the simplest game provides.
