okr on 11 March 2008
Like I expected, everyone in this thread keeps neglecting the importance of women's football in USA.
The US women's national soccer team is facing Denmark in tomorrow's Algarve Cup final (an invitation tournament held every year in the Algarve region of Portugal with the world's top national teams):
http://www.ussoccer.com/common/stContent.jsp_26-2007AlgarveCup.html
Like I stated in my previous post, the US women's national team is ranked #2 worldwide at the moment:
http://www.fifa.com/worldfootball/ranking/lastranking/gender=f/fullranking.html
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And to those who just want to discuss the importance of men's football/soccer in USA (and especially to those who stated that US boys can't play soccer) - The men's US soccer national team is on #26 (out of 202 nations) in FIFA's national teams ranking at the moment:
http://www.fifa.com/worldfootball/ranking/lastranking/gender=m/fullranking.html#confederation=0&rank=166
Not bad for a country where no one seems to like football/soccer according to some comments in this thread.
The mass media/sponsors don't jump aboard. The media cake was divided long ago among several extremely popular and traditional US sports and - fortunately imo - you can't impose a "new" sport on people. It was tried several times with new incarnations of the ever languishing MLS. You'd need a huge amount of money and quite some perseverance.
It didn't work in Europe with American Football, either. The NFL was burning a lot of money with the "NFL Europe" from 1991 to 2007 with little to no effect. The expensive experiment was stopped last year and replaced by regular season games held overseas (first overseas game was Doplhin vs. Giants in London Wembley Arena last October).
