Revolution in air, but uncertainty still reigns

The 'Big Three' of American football, basketball and baseball dominate sport in the US. George Kimball examines soccer's attempts to create a 'Big Four'

On June 22nd, 1994, the United States defeated Colombia, 2-1. The deciding goal in the World Cup match was scored not by a US player, but by an unfortunate Colombian named Andres Escobar, who put the ball into the wrong net. The victory was the host country's only win of the tournament, but it sufficed to get them out of their group - and to send the Colombians home.

Losing to soccer neophytes like the Norteamericanos was regarded as even more ignominious back in that era than it would be today. On the evening of July 2nd, two days before the US were eliminated by eventual champions Brazil, Escobar was in the car park of a Medellin nightclub when he was approached by an enraged supporter, who shouted "Own goal!" in Spanish before shooting him dead. (On the BBC's telecast of Romania's 3-2 quarter-final upset of Argentina a night later, Alan Hansen noted after a blunder, "The Argentine defender wants shooting for a mistake like that.")

Following his team's elimination by Brazil, the American goalkeeper Tony Meola said, perhaps wishfully, "If we can do half as much in the next four years as we did in the last four, we can win the World Cup in 1998." In France four years later, the US didn't win a game.

The hope and expectation had been that the Americans' unexpectedly strong performance would produce a groundswell of interest in a sport to which US sporting fans had been largely indifferent.

A condition of Fifa's awarding the 1994 tournament to the US had been the establishment of an elite professional league in a country that had never had one. The seeds for Major League Soccer were thus sown that year, although it would be 1996 before the league played its first season.

When it was suggested back in 1994 that soccer was about to enjoy an explosion in the US, Ken Jones - the one-time Welsh star and distinguished British journalist - replied: "Yes. By turning it into a (bleeping) women's game."

Twelve years on it could be reasonably argued that whatever popularity the sport does now enjoy owes at least as much to the successes of the US women's national team (which won the World Cup in 1999) as it does to MLS.

Indeed, US Soccer, the national federation, to this day carefully treats the men's and women's teams as co-equals in its daily dispatches, distinguishing the two only as the "MNT" and "WNT".

From the outset, the fates of MLS and the US MNT were supposed to be inexorably intertwined, but it hasn't quite worked out that way. Some of MLS's early first steps were, retrospectively, boneheaded. American audiences had been reluctant to embrace a sport that offered so little in the way of scoring, and the television networks hated soccer because it offered no natural time-outs in which to sell commercial advertising.

At its outset, MLS attempted to foist on its customers a bastardised brand of the sport it hoped would be more palatable to domestic audiences - the game clock for each half was set, for example, at 45 minutes and ran backwards, as in American football.

And the draw was eliminated entirely as a result. Every regular-season MLS game that wound up level was determined by a penalty shoot-out.

The result was somewhat disastrous. The idiosyncratic alterations failed to make inroads with mainstream American sporting audiences and at the same time alienated hard-core soccer aficionados, many of them immigrants. Eventually, the league was forced to remould its regulations back into something more closely resembling soccer the way it was played in the rest of the world.

"When I think back to the early 1990s and our efforts to lure the 94 World Cup to the US, it seems like ancient soccer history," reflected Clonakilty-born Brian O'Donovan, who went from stadium manager in Foxboro to become the first general manager (to Frank Stapleton's head coach) of the New England Revolution.

"When 53,000 people surprised us by showing up at Foxboro in 1991 to see an exhibition game between Ireland and the US, we knew the potential was there for a soccer culture to be created in the crowded mainstream sports scene here," recalled O'Donovan.

"After our successful hosting of World Cup 94, the launching of Major League Soccer in 1996 was a heady moment indeed. Since then, I have always said that, as simplistic a truism as it sounds, the most important thing for soccer in the US was that a professional league would exist from year to year over a long period of time.

"Every year the league kicked off would be a huge step forward. Those years, not other statistics we love to dwell on here - attendance, scoring, expansion, contraction, business intrigue - would be the rungs to climb up Jacob's soccer ladder."

Even today, the performance of one is tied to the other - should the Americans perform well enough in Germany to advance yet again, it would probably, at least temporarily, translate into turnstile revenues when MLS resumes play.

But when US coach Bruce Arena named the 23-man roster he will take to Germany, fewer than half - 11 - were players currently employed by MLS teams.

Goalkeeping has traditionally been an American strength, and is a major reason the US have qualified for their fourth successive World Cup tournament. (The American goalkeepers are generally more gifted than their Central American and Caribbean counterparts - thus the edge.)

And not one of the three goalkeepers Arena is taking to Germany plays for an MLS team - Kasey Keller, the 36-year-old veteran who will be performing in his fourth World Cup, has spent his entire professional career in Europe and currently plays for Borussia Mönchengladbach of the Bundesliga. Back-ups Tim Howard and Marcus Hahnemann are both former MLS products, but they are currently employed by Manchester United and Reading FC, respectively.

Keller will share the greybeard's role with Manchester City (and former Rangers) midfielder Claudio Reyna, who will also be performing in his fourth World Cup.

The principal scoring threat is once again Brian McBride, a former MLS product who now toils for Fulham, but younger domestic players like Landon Donovan (Los Angeles Galaxy), Eddie Johnson (Kansas City Wizards), and midfielders Clint Dempsey (New England Revolution) and John O'Brien (Chivas USA) also figure to make their marks in Germany.

The latter two provide an interesting contrast. O'Brien apprenticed in the Ajax system from the age of 15, while Dempsey is strictly a home-grown product. Twenty years ago a talented athlete growing up in Nagadoches, Texas, would have been playing American football, not soccer, and Dempsey's arrival on the big stage could be a portent of the future - the Americans, who in years past relied almost as heavily on the "granny rule" as the Irish, now appear to be growing their own - and in the most unlikely places.

Now in its second decade, MLS has been, like the US team itself, marginally successful. It has yet to turn a profit, and its self-imposed salary cap would appear destined to limit its ability to attract even the borderline world-class superstars such as Bolivia's Marcos Etcheverry and the unfortunate Escobar's one-time team-mate Carlos Valderrama, who characterised the American league's early years.

MLS has undergone fits and starts. Four years ago the league "contracted" itself by eliminating two teams, the Miami Fusion and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This year it added two more - Chivas and Houston Dynamo - while relocating a third franchise (Real Salt Lake) to Utah.

When it was pointed out that these apparently contradictory moves might make the US look somewhat silly in the eyes of the rest of the world, longtime Boston Globe soccer pundit Frank Dell'Apa observed, "Perhaps, but nothing they do could be any sillier than the way US soccer operated before MLS."

While this year's World Cup matches will all be carried on live television from Germany, the ratings won't approach those engendered by events such as the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, or baseball's World Series.

By the same token, calling itself "Major League" hasn't brought parity to the soccer league, which hasn't made a dent in the NFL, NBA, or MLB audiences.

(On the other hand, thanks in part to a labour dispute that wiped out last year's ice hockey season entirely, MLS has made significant strides toward supplanting the National Hockey League for fourth place in the hearts and minds of Americans - but then ice hockey doesn't lend itself particularly well to television either.)

"Has the US, in its 11th year of MLS, made the progress that might be indicated by more than a decade of play?" O'Donovan answered his own question: "I would say, categorically, yes. It is truly phenomenal the progress that has been made on the field and with individual players. This all comes together in the national team and will be under a microscope again in Germany."

Rebounding from their disastrous campaign in France, the US bounced back to unexpectedly reach the quarter-finals in 2002 before being eliminated by Germany, a performance they will be hard-pressed to repeat.

That the Americans are rated number four in the Fifa world rankings says more about the Fifa rankings than it does about their actual potential. (How's this for quantitative analysis? Two months ago the US were rated sixth.) They went off to Germany, where they lost 4-1 to the hosts in a pre-World Cup friendly - and moved up two spots in the worldwide rankings. (Had they only lost, say, 2-1, might they be number one?)

The US are also ranked ahead of Italy, who will play in their group in Germany, despite the fact that the Americans have never - not in 90 years of international competition - ever beaten the Italians. (That the US are also rated ahead of traditional powers like England, Argentina and Spain is absurd.)

Arena assembled his team in Cary, North Carolina, on the second week of May. After two weeks of training camp, the Americans played a trio of friendly matches (against Morocco in Nashville, Venezuela in Cleveland, and Latvia in Hartford) before heading off to Germany, where their task will be a more formidable one.

Should the US fail to get out of their "group of death" (a distinct possibility, given the competition includes Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana), it could have a significant impact on MLS attendance as well. This, in turn, could impact television revenues and sponsorship monies, although MLS commissioner Don Garber disagrees.

"If we don't get out of the group and don't have the success that we had in 2002 today, we're strong enough to stand on our own," said Garber a few weeks ago. "2002 was nice, but I don't think we rely on that today like we needed to rely on it years ago."

O'Donovan points out that the relationship between national federations and a country's professional league have traditionally been contentious, even in nations with a long tradition of the sport, but "in the US, there has perhaps during these nascent years of the league, been a more hand-in-glove approach.

"The US federation recognises clearly that the success of MLS is crucial to their own success," opined O'Donovan.

"Sunil Gulati, one of the founding members of MLS and perhaps the face of US soccer in the 21st century, is now the federation president - and he continues in his role as president of Kraft Soccer, which operates the (New England) Revolution.

"That," noted O'Donovan, "says a lot right there."