Soccer Cant Make the Big Time in the U.S.A. :: Cause Effect Essay Sports

Soccer Cant Make the Big Time in the U.S.A. Soccer or football (or foosball or futbol), as it is called by the rest of the world outside the United States is surely the most universal drama in the world. Every four years, the world championship of soccer, the cosmea Cup, is watched by literally billions all over the world, beating out the United States professional footballs Superbowl by far. It is estimated that 1.7 billion television system viewers watched the reality Cup final exam between France and Brazil in July of 1998. And it is also a genuine world championship, involving teams from 32 countries in the final rounds, unlike the much more parochial and misnamed World Series in American baseball (that doesnt even involve Japan or Cuba, two baseball hotbeds). But although soccer has become an important sport in the American sports scene, it will never make inroads into the hearts and markets of American sports the way that football, basketball, hockey, baseball, and e ven tennis and golf have done. There are many a(prenominal) reasons for this. Recently the New England Revolution beat the Tampa Bay Mutiny in a game played during a horrid rainstorm. Nearly 5000 fans showed up, which shows that soccer is, indeed, popular in the United States. However, the story of the game was buried near the back of the newspapers sports section, and there was certainly no television coverage. In fact, the biggest reason for soccers failure as a mass appeal sport in the United States is that it doesnt conform easily to the demands of television. Basketball succeeds enormously in America because it regularly schedules what it calls television time-outs as well as the time-outs that the teams themselves call to re-group, not to mention half-times and, on the professional level, quarter breaks. Those time-outs in the action are ideally made for television commercials. And television coverage is the lifeblood of American sports. College basketball drop dead s for a game scheduled on CBS or ESPN (highly recruited high school players are more likely to go to a team that regularly gets national television exposure), and we could even say that television coverage has dictated the pace and feel of American football. Anyone who has attended a live football game knows how commercial time-outs slow the game and sometimes, at its most exciting moments, disrupt the flow of events.