Much ado about nothing
Posted: Friday, July 13, 2007 2:41 PM
David Beckham, a.k.a. Mr. Posh Spice, is going to sell jerseys and get on tabloid covers and fill countless online blogs and celebrity sites with gossip as meaningless as it is breathless about his house and cars and tattoos and glamorous wife.
He and his wife are celebrities; and in this country the fact that he plays soccer is the least part of his appeal. He’s not a guy who scores at a prodigious rate but is more of a playmaker, so the casual fan isn’t going to understand why this highly paid superstar isn’t banging balls into the net every other time down the field – or even every other game.
True soccer fans will understand what he does and put down their money to watch it. They’ll buy his jerseys and watch him on television. And already, he’s selling tickets; tickets to New York Red Bulls games can be had for $20 through the team’s Web site, but tickets to the Galaxy’s visit in August are going for $40 online and are mostly sold out.
But he’s not going to make soccer a major professional sport in the United States. The person has yet to be born who can do that.
I say this with no malice towards soccer, which most of the world considers to be God’s chosen sport. It’s not even an opinion. It’s a truth that has been demonstrated time and again for more than 30 years. Sports viewing habits have proved to be nearly impossible to change. Just as the NFL couldn’t sell American football in Europe, nobody is going to sell soccer in the United States.
This isn’t to say Beckham won’t help the MLS and U.S. soccer; he can’t avoid helping a sport that draws an average of 15,000 fans a game, about one-third of whom get free tickets. And those attendance figures are skewed by big crowds drawn to doubleheaders in which the main attraction is a friendly match between major international teams and the second game is an MLS match.
And this is more than 30 years after the New York Cosmos in the old North American Soccer League drew crowds of more than 70,000 to Giants Stadium when the greatest player in the history of the game, Pele, made soccer the hottest sport in town.
The NASL died in 1984. Major League Soccer, the current pro league, was born in 1996. It’s in no danger of collapsing and Beckham’s team, the Galaxy, was the first team in the league to turn a profit. It also leads the league in attendance with 27,000 per game in the Home Depot Center, a soccer-only stadium, in Carson, outside of Los Angeles.
So professional soccer is here to stay; it should even be able to survive Beckham’s salary – variously reported as either $5.5 million or $6.5 million a year – even though that salary is about 50 times the league average. For the record, Arena Football League players make just a little less than MLS players according to this 2006 survey.
So we’re talking about a league with 10,000 paying fans – on average – per game and an average annual salary of about $100,000.
Only one baseball team draws fewer than 15,000 fans a game – Tampa Bay, and their 14,000 a game probably represents more paying customers than the average MLS team draws. Even the NHL, whose television ratings approach negative numbers, has just seven teams that draw fewer than 15,000 a game. They, too, actually pay for their tickets.
When you count up total tickets, the disparity mounts. Baseball teams play 81 home games; hockey teams 41. An MLS team has 20 home games. And they give tickets away.
The Beckhams will fit very nicely into American pop culture, but David Beckham isn’t going to drive sports discussions in Los Angeles or anywhere else.
“I thought by now this would be a prime-time sports story. Instead, it is a better Perez Hilton story, the renowned blogger working overtime to feed its Hollywood appetite,” says Bill Plaschke of The L.A. Times. "It's more than soccer, it's bigger than sports," Hilton said. "It's David and Victoria, it's Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, it's Hollywood."
In other words, it’s not sports – at least not a sport that the bulk of Americans care about.
