Beautiful game fails to win over Americans

NEW YORK, July 1: If you look west from Germany you will see the United States stifling a yawn at the World Cup.

Despite a doubling of television ratings for the first-round matches this month, before the US squad failed miserably, soccer still ranks below televised poker tournaments in a land where baseball, basketball and American football rule.

ABC-TV's average rating of 2.5 for the first eight matches it aired represents barely 8 million viewers in a nation of just under 300 million. Only 3.9 million Americans watched the 2002 World Cup final, which had an audience of 1.1 billion worldwide.

By comparison, nearly 91 million viewers watched this year's Super Bowl, the glitzy climax to the season for North America's home-grown form of football. Nearly 39 million watched the Academy Awards, Hollywood's big night, in March and 36 million tuned in for May's finale of ''American Idol,'' a television talent show.

On ABC's sports cable network, ESPN, which presumably attracts more serious sports fans, the World Cup has had few viewers, averaging around 1.75 million on channels that reach 91 million homes.

No surprise, then, that a poll by the Global Market Insite (GMI) market research service found that only 11 percent of Americans surveyed were ''definitely'' interested in the World Cup, compared with 45 percent of respondents world-wide.

''Despite an estimated combined 420 million dollars invested in official partnerships by US-based corporations to gain worldwide visibility, the facts don't lie: the US lags significantly behind other countries when it comes to being passionate about 'the beautiful game' of soccer,'' GMI said.

The poll revealed that 56 percent of Americans did not even know that the 2006 World Cup was taking place in Germany.

Soccer just is not part of the culture in a country that often prides itself on sporting isolationism.

Millions of children play the game in the US but whereas spontaneous soccer breaks out on Rio and Cape Town beaches, or in the alleys of Berlin and Bologna, you will not see youngsters kicking around a ball on the streets of Philadelphia or Memphis.

World governing body FIFA had hoped to boost interest in the game when it awarded the US hosting rights to the 1994 World Cup.

The event attracted the largest average crowds in World Cup history and spawned Major League Soccer which now has 12 teams but has struggled to find a place in the crowded US sports market.

Reuters

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