A Stage to Sell Soccer

Great article… will the US capitalize this time around??????

In less than six weeks, dozens of teams, hundreds of television crews and thousands of journalists will travel to South Africa for the World Cup, perhaps the most popular sporting event in the world, and the biggest global sports event ever held in Africa.

For South Africa, the pivotal question is: how will this event change and enhance the brand of a nation once defined by apartheid, then by Nelson Mandela?

For the United States, the big question is almost exclusively tied to soccer: will this World Cup be the one to inject the game into the bloodstream of a vibrant United States sports culture? More to the point: will a World Cup in Africa be the magnet for attracting African-American athletes to the sport?

Last week, Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of the World Cup organizing committee, visited the Hugo Newman School in Harlem to promote soccer and the tournament.

Jordaan spoke about the significance of Africa’s hosting a sports event on the scale of the World Cup for the first time. Then he issued a call to arms. He encouraged the largely African-American student body to embrace soccer.

Jordaan said he told the students that “the only Africans in this world who are not playing soccer are the African-Americans, so if you want to be true Africans, you must play the sport of Africa.”

Jordaan was reminded that young African-Americans are often pushed, pulled and drafted in all sorts of athletic directions. They are staples of football and basketball recruiting pools, and Major League Baseball has established an initiative to help the sport grow in urban areas. Soccer, on the other hand, has been slow to follow suit.

But Jordaan was unmoved.

“The primary sport on the continent is football,” Jordaan said of Africa. “Go wherever on the continent, the sport is soccer. So, we want to bring you home.”

Soccer in the United States continues to fight for attention with the N.B.A., the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball.

Soccer in the rest of the world draws heavily from the working class and the poor. For the better players, the game offers an opportunity to earn a good living.

But in the United States, the rise of travel teams and training camps and the decrease in available free space have made the game more expensive to play. The increasing costs are limiting the potential pool of players.

Soccer’s challenge in the United States is how to expand the pool from which to pull and develop talent, not only among African-Americans but across the board.

Jordaan said he hoped that Africa’s hosting the World Cup would encourage African-Americans to visit South Africa and perhaps in some way boost their participation in the game.

“This World Cup has opened up new spaces, and into those spaces you see economic spaces,” Jordaan said. “I hope as the U.S. moves towards finalizing a bid for 2022 that we see a significant number of African-Americans into the sport by 2022. I think this may be the trigger.”

Not everyone believes it will.

Don Garber, the commissioner of Major League Soccer, has said in the past that he did not see a link between a World Cup in Africa and a boost in African-Americans’ interest in the game.

“I think it’s probably putting too much into it,” Garber said. “I think at the end of the day, the World Cup in South Africa is going to be one of the great moments in world history.

“The fact that the world of sports will be shining on that country and providing great economic possibilities for the people who live there. Just a great chance for everybody to see how far that country has come.

“I don’t believe that our support of what’s going on in Harlem or in other cities across the country is related to the World Cup, but certainly it has people paying more attention to what’s going on in underserved communities.”

Indeed, the World Cup has already attracted the attention of Americans.

Jordaan pointed out that the performance of the United States national team in June in the Confederations Cup in South Africa, where it surprised Egypt and Spain before losing to Brazil in the final, helped establish the Americans as a credible team, one that could compete.

“They left our country with a lot of supporters and admirers,” Jordaan said.

Jordaan said 160,000 World Cup tickets had been sold in the United States.

“Maybe it’s because people believe in the team, maybe it’s because many of the people in the U.S. want to be part of Africa’s first World Cup — they want to celebrate good news on the continent,” Jordaan said. “To move away from the idea that the continent is about disease, is about desperation, is about war, is about famine. The other side of the story never gets told.”

Beginning next month, a multitude of stories will be told. One will be about a country, South Africa, hosting one of the world’s most important sporting events for the first time. Another will be about a country, the United States, attempting to attain unprecedented heights in that event.

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN
Published: May 2, 2010
Source: NYTimes