Saw this article in the Daily Mail of London...Surprising that MLS is 7th in the world in average attendance.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footba ... ds-US.html

Nice try by the British tabloid to try to convince people soccer is becoming popular over here. Nobody gives a shit, still. They need to chill on that bullshit and just let us bring real football and basketball over to their country.

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Who has higher average attendance, the MLS or the White Sox?

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Haha, soccer sucks! Also I'm posting from the 90s!

Guess I missed the soccer boom of the past 12 years. Don't know how I missed all those prime time soccer contests.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Of course you missed them, you don't care about soccer.

Of course I dont. But how you or I in particular feel is irrelevent. Let's not pretend like soccer is all of a sudden a popular spectator sport in this country. It's not.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

But it is a popular spectator sport? 18k attendance a game in MLS isn't chump change. Soccer looked dead in the water in the US when Tampa and Miami got contracted about 10 years ago. MLS was sitting at 10 teams and other than Columbus everybody was paying rent to play in shitty football stadiums. Today there are 19 teams with 20 on the way and they're playing in actual soccer stadiums. Seattle averaged 43,000 attendance this year, almosy any other team in any sport would kill for 43k a game. The last national TV deal was the first where somebody actually PAID for broadcasting rights. Before that MLS was buying time. Soccer's not great or anything, but knee jerk dismissals of it are uninformed. MLS was way over their skis when they started up, but it's figured out that slow, steady growth is a good thing, and I think they'll keep it up.

I have to be honest...Since I started watching soccer...I can't watch baseball anymore on TV because I find it boring..I can go to a game and watch it in person..but I can't watch it on TV.

I'm not delusional to think that soccer is going to be as big in the USA as it is in Europe.

I agree that an 18k average attendance for MLS is nothing to sneeze at.

Also, don't forget when teams like Chelsea, ManU, Barca and Real Madrid come to the United States in the summer to play in some friendlies..Those matches are usually sold out.

if you were wondering, An article in ESPN, says the White Sox finished 24th in attandance and averaged
24,271 fans per contest.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/attendance

A World Cup game between the US and England was comparable to an NBA final game in terms of ratings.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entert ... -race.html

Not this again. This is easily debunked.

Put a "Team USA" logo on something and people watch. This is true from gymnastics, to soccer, to track and field, to chess. World Cup games are a result of nationalism, not soccerism. The sport goes away as soon as the final is over. After all, it's not like we are all captivated by swimming right now either.

The average attendance thing is dumb too. Of course soccer has a higher average attendance. Average attendance is a terrible metric. If we use average attendance, the Dallas Cowboys are the 10th most popular football team in the country, with the rest of the NFL falling below that. The NFL as a whole, would be the third or fourth most popular football league in America, behind the SEC, Big Ten, and possibly the Big 12.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

An average attendance of 18k per game is pretty paltry when there are only 19 teams and one of them has an average of 43k to skew that number.

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From my vantage point, all I learned from the Beckham nonsense was that a world-renowned player made efforts to make a sport that in this country is much maligned, if not in fact very much ignored, and he had little to no lasting impact .... would seem to reaffirm the sport of soccer as an outlier in this country, and it will continue to be just that for quite a long time to come.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I think we can all agree that soccer is more popular than baseball

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I learned that he has voice that doesn't match his appearance.

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Explain US nationalism for the World Cup final, whcih did not have the U.S. but still drew more viewers.

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/0 ... ion/56860/



Yesterday’s World Cup Final between Spain and the Netherlands drew a total of 24.3 million U.S. viewers, making it the most watched soccer game in U.S. television history, according to The Nielsen Company. The figure, which includes viewership on both ABC and Univision during the two-and-a-half-hour game window (2:30 to 5pm ET), surpasses the record of 19.4 million viewers that tuned in to the U.S.-Ghana match earlier in this World Cup.

I think we can all agree that you're a dickwagon.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I mean you take out those long TD runs and we held him in check.

It's still nationalism. The United States being in it was able to attract viewers, many of whom stuck around to watch the final. It's the same reason the women's world cup gets huge ratings, and yet the league for women can't survive here.

I'm the perfect example. I'll watch the World Cup. I've even watched the women's World Cup. I have no interest in soccer other than that.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I certainly agree with that

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How does US nationalism play into U.S. tv ratings between Spain and the Netherlands? I like basketball but I don't care for the women's game, and i am not going to watch just because they are playing in the Olympics.

I have never watched the Ryder Cup until this past year and that was only for about the last 15 minutes. i am not a golf fan, so why am I going to watch a sport I don't have an interest in?

The World Cup is the Super Bowl, NBA finals, World Series etc of soccer, it is soccers biggest event. If you are saying that there are more casual fans watching the World Cup than say MLS final, sure. But there are casual fans watching the Super Bowl, NBA finals etc.

Millions of people do exactly that though. Interest in the World Cup was huge in part because the United States made big news in it. It got people watching. It almost all goes away after the World Cup is over. Do you honestly think that the massive ratings around the World Cup are from soccer fans? Where do they go for four years?

It's nationalism, and every non-major sport in the United States sees a massive bump in viewership when it's involved.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Soccer viewership is fragmented.

There are soccer fans who do not watch MLS, there are fans who instead may watch the English league, or maybe they watch the spanish league. There are fans who maybe are not interested in those leagues and watch Mexico, or South America.

If you are a football fan you are watching NFL, or if you are a basketball fan you are probably watching the NBA.

There is no one league for soccer in the U.S. But the World Cup is the one event all soccer fans watch.

Gymnastics, Hockey, soccer, swimming, track and field, ice skating are all sports that get massive ratings in the United States for the once every four year events and then almost overnight all those "fans" disappear.

If your point is that a lot of people watch the World Cup, then I agree. A lot of people watched swimming and gymnastics. Those people will again in 2016.

The point is that the "once every four years" events are not indicative of real interest. It's a cute little thing to follow for 2 or 3 weeks and then it goes back to being ignored. Soccer is no different.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

So the fact that soccer is on ESPN, NBC Sportsnetwork and occassionally on the FOX mother station, there are 3 cable channels devoted exclusively to soccer, that ESPN showed every game of the European Championship this past summer, or the Women's World Cup, investors have spent money on building soccer specific stadiums, all this is done because there is no interest in soccer.

Yeah, it's not basketball, football or baseball, but to say there is no interest or that it's only once every 4 years is laughable.

If they put the MLS games on ESPN on say tuesdays and ESPN 2 on thursdays and they actually marketed the teams and the individual players it could definitely grow. People will be more likely to watch a "team" or the "individual" than the game itself. How many people would watch a game that featured 2 teams they didn't know and dozens of players they do not know? A few purists but thats about it.

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The same is true of lacrosse.

Obviously, there is some interest. Don't take me literally on that.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Are there are three cable stations devoted exclusively to lacrosse, or they are building stadiums for lacrosse? There is as much lacrosse on TV as soccer?

i will leave it at this, my boss is starting to look at me

ESPN covers lacrosse a lot, and so does NBC and NBC sports network. There is no lacrosse network yet.

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His five years here have been underwhelming. It was a money/publicity grab. No one cares now or really cared at the time, outside of the media muppets in the US who portrayed him as some kind of unifying symbol who would spread soccer to the masses. Becks never appeared fully committed the Galaxy. He spent much of his early years injured and was always trying to engineer extended loan spells to teams in Europe, especially after he got recalled to the England squad. And then he would trotted out as the official mascot for every Olympics bullshit media piece or for England's failed World Cup bid. I think many casual fans had this image of Beckham as this great English footballer but he wasn't even the most influential player in his prime at Man United. I'd say Keane, Scholes, and Giggs were more important.

I don't think he did much for MLS. He may have made the Galaxy a shitload of money with shirt sales but he's still a guy playing in a middling league that is a few notches below the best European leagues. One 30+ midfielder wasn't going to increase the MLS audience in the USA. The best talent isn't on this continent. Outside of college football, no person is going to prefer to watch or patron an inferior league.

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Back off, Warchild. Seriously.