World Cup fever (oh wait, it's probably indigestion)

[Sit back and enjoy the glib generalizations, my fellow Americans.]

The World Cup is back, and again some effort is going into attempting to get the American public to regard it with the same fervor that is demonstrated by other countries. Nike has ads running tying in to the games. ABC is airing matches on national TV. And while likely there will be better ratings than there were four years ago, it's unlikely that will reflect a greater interest in football (soccer) by those who weren't interested previously.

There's many theories (I assume) about why football (soccer) is not as popular here as in other countries, and all hold some credence:

• It's a slow game with little (or possibly no) scoring, that doesn't play well on TV.

• It's not a game that we invented. (Although baseball can be traced to cricket and our football perhaps to rugby, both are uniquely ours. Basketball is ours, and hockey... comes from a country right next door, so, uh, that's close enough.)

• We don't call it the same thing the rest of the world does.

• We already have plenty of sports where we're good.

All those apply, but I don't think that's the ultimate dilemma that proponents of the sport face.

Americans love a winner. The Olympics come every other year (between the summer and winter games) and there's enough sports involved that there's some American athletes doing well in at least some of them. Heck, we can even pretend to care about ice dancing for a few weeks. But when it comes to World Cup football (soccer) the U.S. has never won. Many times we haven't even made the tournament, and even when we have our team hasn't fared impressively well. I'm not criticizing the efforts of the American players; these are the best players from around the world, and their countries take it more seriously.

And those other countries are willing to follow their team every four years whether it does well or not. Which only proves more profoundly they aren't Americans.

If the U.S. won a World Cup trophy that would spike interest for a while, but one win does not make one a winner; the U.S. must win multiple to prove that we can be consistently powerful. Only with a reasonable likelihood of victory in tournament after tournament can we change the public's perception about paying attention.

Americans fancy ourselves the best country in the world (and I'm not saying we aren't), but the World Cup suggests that there's at least one area where that's not quite the case. But if there's one thing where Americans are unmatched it is in our ability to ignore what doesn't reinforce our national psyche. There, we're #1. We're #1! We're #1!...

~

But it would help if the rest of the world would just get on board with calling it "soccer." I'm sure that would seem like meeting us halfway.