For some reason, the topic of soccer’s popularity draws some people into entrenched opinions more than Sarah Palin, especially those who want to focus on the negative. Soccer fans like me hear how the sport isn’t popular and never will be and ESPN is shoving the World Cup down the throats of an unwilling public who doesn’t want to watch the sport.
After the ratings for the first two days of the event, can we just stop this silly argument. No one is forcing anyone to do anything unless we’re talking about how soccer haters will need to open their eyes and face reality.
Soccer is popular in the United States. To get deeper is more complicated (and we’ll get to that later), but it’s undeniable.
The US match against England drew almost 13 million viewers on ABC alone. The numbers for Univision and ESPN Deportes are not available yet. That’s higher than every Stanley Cup final game and close to the NBA Finals numbers.
But the success goes beyond the obvious jackpot of a high-profile US game on a Saturday afternoon. Every game with numbers available for ESPN on Friday and Saturday has hit or just missed the 2 million viewer mark. Greece-South Korea on Saturday morning almost made it. South Africa-Mexico drew 2.6 million (and another 5.4 million on Univision for 8 million total). Nigeria-Argentina drew 3.73 million viewers. France-Uruguay drew 2.86 million.
Sure, it’s the World Cup, but it pretty much smacks down any juvenile argument that soccer isn’t a big deal. To put the numbers in perspective, the Argentina-Nigeria game has a shot at being on fo the top 25 cable programs viewed all week, a list traditionally dominated by iCarly, Songebob and the WWE.
The problem soccer has replicating this is that between the World Cup tournaments, the few million people who watch the sport on a regular basis- a number which probably is equal to those who regularly watch sports other than the NFL and college football regularly -all split off to watch their own leagues.
There’s no easy to way to add up the number of people watching Major League Soccer, the English Premiere League, the Mexican First Division, La Liga from Spain, the Brazilian league and the many other leagues available on cable or satellite these days. So the sport’s critics pretend that the big audience only exists in some shadow conspiracy by ESPN every four years.
The numbers don’t lie. The weekday numbers may drop some, but I bet they continue to show strength across the board for the World Cup. There are a lot of soccer fans in America. Not every baseball fan watches the same games between the World Series so don’t expect all of us to focus on one thing between World Cups. We’re here. There’s a lot of us. Just deal with it.