No wonder soccers not popular here

[xlite]

while i still lived in England i played football for a team almost every week of my life for about 10 years and with friends before and during that time. It was great fun and although i started out hardly being able to get an appearance on the team, rarely starting and considering myself lucky at times if i got on the pitch for the alst 5 minutes of the game. I progressed and at the end of the U18 i had started every game for the last few years and won the managers player of the year that season.

It was at the end of this season that i moved to America and dropped the sports. I sat and played games, worked and looked after my kids. In my first year at uni here i checked the uni website for information about a football team, when i could try out etc. I found info about the girls team easily but couldn't find ANY information about the guys football team. Oh well i thought, they must jut not have one. Later that year i found out they did have one so at the start of next year i went and enquired at the gym about it .... they had already tried out during the summer and the season had started ... oh well guess i'll just use the off season to get fit and see if i can't get on a local league team for the spring(which is when their season apparently starts here)

Yea right! i've looked at the utah football organisations website time and time again. They have listings of all the registered clubs in utah and the leagues fixtures scores etc ... no contact info for any of the clubs. So i email them .... no responce at their general enquiries email ... so i look up the members (such as the president) email and the emails come back undeliverable .. WTF?!

no wonder football isn't big here ... as a kid you play during school if you want to kind of like in england for the school team ... as soon as you leave highschool and turn 18 there is nothing for you unless you search and search and search and with a bit of luck find some information or miraculously find out when uni trials are and get on a uni team

As a lover of football i hate to see this .. it is growing in popularity here but only very slowly and in my opinion its down to things like this ... Only people who really really want to play after they are 18 will find information on teams and trials etc. What do you guys think i should do? The situation has to be improved.

or am i just missing something?!

[Old Ska]

Ya know, I really question the assumption that "soccer is not popular in America". If I look at the MLS attendance figures I have to admit that it is as popular is in, say, Belgium and the Netherlands (for the most part). I was at an FA Cup match last year in London at Upton Park and the attendance was around what RSL was drawing at home early in their season. There are lots of non-MLS soccer teams (unaffiliated, MISL, PDL, USL, etc) that draw in the thousands. Consider then that the US also has NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, Nascar, college sports, etc. and it is really amazing that soccer does as well as it does.

I agree that the US model of bringing people into pro soccer is based mostly on how it works in pro football and pro basketball, and that this is less than ideal. But, if you are a good high school player in the US you will get recruited into college teams and even pro or semi-pro teams. I have had 2 high school students who have worked for me in the last 2 years have this happen to them. You, unfortunately, are outside the radar of the recruitment efforts and that really sucks for you. I don't think, however, that the fact you haven't made it onto the radar of anyone looking to beef up their squad yet is why soccer isn't popular here (which, as I note above, is not a premise I accept anyways.)

[xlite]

here's the thing ... i look at the stats and yes you're right soccer has been drawing in large crowds of people and i think someone on the board even said we had avg attendance the same as the jazz this year but you have to admit that its not perceived as a popular sport here ... talk to people about basketball and football and they know what your talking about team wise on the most part ... soccer it isn't so true and we get less coverage it seems on television (atleast on the stations i get) and almost at times appear to be a laughing stock of sports in some articles. Like i said the numbers of attendances say we're not an unpopular sport but the attitudes of a majority of people say we are ...


as for my original post i just meant that if you go places like europe where soccer is a lot more popular (percentage wise) they all have much more opportunities to get onto teams .... i mean even if you're bad .. they won't know it and thats what trials are for ... its easy to find out about clubs and talk to managers etc. I read on one of my previous threads that someone has called the utahsoccer org many times and left msgs but never got a reply ... you have to admit this could well be the reason .. atleast in utah that soccer popularity isn't growing as rapidly as it could be

As for your attendance argument i don't see this as a viable argument. Utah is the size of the UK(although admittedly less populated). Now consider the fact that the UK probably has atleast 60+ teams all drawing in 15000+ fans a game. Utah has 1 major league team and it still only attracts the same as each of the teams in england ... and the english teams are appealing to a much smaller area.

Take for example the south coast of england .. my hometown Southampton. Its probably as far away from Portsmouth as ogden and provo .... if not a little closer. Both southampton and portsmouth will be getting around 20k attendance each homegame ... and then you compare an area of the same size ... provo to ogden and instead of 30-40k fans wanting to go watch a major league game you only have 20k...

As for the other sports England has other sports too ... Rugby, hockey, cricket, basketball, tennis, Formula 1 ... and soccer is the most popular of them all. I'm not saying that soccer should be as popular as nfl and nba but you have to admit at the moment it doesn't even compare in popularity ...

[Old Ska]

Originally Posted by xlite

As for your attendance argument i don't see this as a viable argument. Utah is the size of the UK(although admittedly less populated). Now consider the fact that the UK probably has atleast 60+ teams all drawing in 15000+ fans a game.

And the UK has what, 30 times as many people as Utah? What other sports in the UK regularly draw 15,000 people to a game? In Utah you have RSL, Jazz, BYU and U of U football, and a number of smaller sports. And it is quite a strech to say that there are 60 teams that draw 15k+ every week. Check the 2004-2005 stats at http://european-football-statistics.co.uk/attn/2005/aveeng.htm. Millwall, for example averaged only 11.656 and that represented an 11% increase over the previous season, and their highest attendance was just over 15k. And that is Millwall!!!! In fact, I only counted 36 teams that averaged more than 15k in attendance. Many of those are also darbys influenced by travelling fans from within the same city...particularly London.

Americans attend more sporting events than any other country, and soccer gets a smaller share of the overall fan base, this is true. But, it is not true that soccer is "not popular". It is less popular than some other sports, but it is not "not popular". MLS attendances are comparable to Belgian Jupiler league, and with the exception of the top couple of clubs, also the Dutch Eredivisie.

And face it, Utah is a very small state (34th out of 50 in population, and less than 1% of the population of the country as a whole) and isolated geographically and culturally in some ways. If anything, it is stunning that soccer is so popular that they could even get 10,000 people out to a soccer game on a regular basis, much less draw a decent crowd for a World Cup Qualifier and build a soccer specific stadium.

[xlite]

You're right utah has byu u of u jazz and rsl ... but whats to say people can't go to jazz and u of u or jazz and rsl or rsl and u of u .....

You say soccer is popular here because of the attendance ... and you're right in utah it is popular ... with a population of 1.7million in saltlake utah davis and weber counties (the main areas a team located in salt lake will attract interest from) and averaging 18,000 att a home game ... quite comparitive to hampshire, england the area attracted to southampton football club hampshire has 1.2mil pop and 20,000 avg att.

But then look at places like New england ... a population of 14mil ... granted not all of the area will want to travel to the stadium due to distance so lets take a 1/4 of the area ... taking it down to 3.5mil and yet only an attendance of 12000 a game ..... for every argument about attendances there is a counter ....

You can say soccer is popular cus we get attendances equal to nfl college football and nba in places but lets face it. Soccer in america isn't even in the same league of popularity as nfl college football and nba.

NBA has 30 teams total each with large interest ... NFL has 32 teams with huge interest ... College football (admittedly i haven't ever watched and don't intend to research) but seems plentiful and if you say u of u gets 15000+ a game i am sure there are plenty of others that do too showing great interest in that ... and then theres MLS ... 12 teams across the country .. with an ok following.

the popularity of one thing is defined by the popularity of the things surrounding it. Yes our teams may be popular by belgium or dutch standards according to attendance ... but they are certainly not popular by american standards...

[xlite]

there is also the fact that was raised a week or two ago that a lot of people thought the talent pool was too shallow and that there was barely enough talent out there for the current teams to become good let alone expansions teams to come. Whether this is true or not i don't know, as i said at the time i am unfammiliar with the way that teams recruit and unfamiliar with what talent is out there. But for this problem to even be brought up says something about the popularity of the sport .... NFL and NBA with their 32 and 30 teams seem to have plenty of talent out there to pick from and they have double the amount of teams we do ...

its just a thought

[montgjules]

xlite: It seems to me that you should forward your experience to the head of Utah Youth Soccer Organization, Utah Soccer Association (Adults), USASA, RSL and whoever else might be interested. Let them know your thoughts and that you'd like to see adult soccer more accessible to people. Not only might they be able to point you in a good direction, but they might take notice and improve their web presence, public relations, etc. to really make a difference.

[xlite]

thanks ... thats what i wanted to see. i am good at finding things i want changed/think should be changed but i never have any idea of who to talk to etc...

[Jim Umber]

Originally Posted by montgjules

xlite: It seems to me that you should forward your experience to the head of Utah Youth Soccer Organization, Utah Soccer Association (Adults), USASA, RSL and whoever else might be interested. Let them know your thoughts and that you'd like to see adult soccer more accessible to people. Not only might they be able to point you in a good direction, but they might take notice and improve their web presence, public relations, etc. to really make a difference.

I agree. Actually the problem mentioned is not so much indicative of the lack of interest in soccer, but the method of finding talent. We don't really have a good system in place to locate and develope soccer talent.

In order to do that we need to have easily accessible teams for those of all levels. Then those with more talent can gravitate to the better teams and eventually be discovered.

I actually think that RSL is making efforts in this area, and maybe this suggestion will give them some ideas.