Bringing The Beautiful Game to The Mainstream of American Sports

Image via Wikipedia

The rest of the world calls it football, but association football is known as soccer in the United States. Here, American football is king. While soccer won’t be able to change American football’s dominance over the U.S sports market, there are a few things FIFA can do to make the sport more popular with American sports fans.

First, expand the maximum size of the field by five to ten meters. There will need to be at least two to three more goals per game to keep the American fans’ interest, but the spirit of the game can’t be substantially changed that much without defeating the purpose of the changes. Expanding the field meets both of these requirements and allows the great play makers a little more room to maneuver will help facilitate their ability to make fancy plays and breakaways towards the goalie. Purists may be appalled, but they can keep their field dimensions by providing a range of field sizes that soccer where soccer can be played.

Next, allow unlimited substitutions. Fresher legs provide a better standard of play, and also provide a level of strategy that gives another dimension for the soccer viewer to follow. Outside of baseball, North American sports fans are used to unlimited substitutions as a standard practice when it comes to sports. It would probably be going too far to allow substitutions in the middle of play like in Ice Hockey, but then again, it might not be for some fans.  As long as eleven players are on the field at once, I say play on.

Finally, drop the traditional North American frozen tier franchise system and adopt the promotion and relegation system. There are already five tiers in the U.S Soccer Pyramid: Major League Soccer, the two divisions of the United Soccer Leagues, the National Premier Soccer League, and the United States Adult Soccer Association provide the lowest amateur tier.  In many other soccer playing nations, a pickup squad can theoretically play against the best professional teams in the country if they are good enough and promoted enough times. Although the odds of this happening are astronomically low, the mere fact that it could happen gets the fans out of the stands and onto the field, increasing their appreciation of the game when it’s played at the higher levels. For the most part now in the U.S, only children play soccer while it’s the main sport for all ages in most of the rest of the world.

Adopting the relegation/delegation system also allows small market teams in middle tier leagues to have a shot to become a “major league team”, something that many small market cities can never hope to achieve in traditional American sports. After all, if you’re living in a small town, would you rather see the best players in a sport play your local team or have to go somewhere else, potentially hours away to get the same thing in another sport?

It won’t be easy by any means, but Soccer has the potential to crack into the mainstream of the American sports consciousness; it just needs to think outside of the goalkeeper’s box.