MLS Commissioner Don Garber looked at a calendar, saw "World Cup" written on it, and decided this would finally be the year Americans pretend to care about soccer for longer than three weeks. Revolutionary stuff.
The plan is simple. Host the World Cup. Watch Americans develop strong opinions about offsides rules they learned that morning. Pray they transfer that enthusiasm to watching the Portland Timbers play the Colorado Rapids on a Wednesday night in July. This has never worked before, but Garber figures the eighth time's the charm.
Every four years we do this dance. The World Cup happens. Bars fill with people wearing jerseys they bought the day before. Everyone becomes a lifelong fan of the US Men's National Team, which they definitely didn't just learn the acronym for. Then the tournament ends and MLS viewership returns to its natural state: family members of players and European soccer fans hate-watching to feel superior.
Garber is banking his entire trajectory-change thesis on Americans suddenly caring about a league where the average attendance is 22,000 and half those people are there because they got free tickets from their employer's HR department. The World Cup will revolutionize MLS the same way the Olympics revolutionized Americans caring about swimming, which is to say for exactly sixteen days followed by complete amnesia.
The beautiful game meets American sports attention span. Garber thinks hosting will change everything. More likely scenario: we watch the World Cup, remember we prefer sports where things happen more than once every forty-five minutes, and go back to arguing about NFL quarterbacks.
But sure, this time will be different. This time Americans will develop a deep and lasting passion for a sport they've been actively ignoring since 1994, which coincidentally was also the last time we hosted and it definitely revolutionized MLS forever.
Garber's banking on a revolution. Smart money's on three weeks of caring followed by fifty weeks of whatever the f*ck we were doing before.
Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash
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