U.S. presence grows with another World Cup appearance

It is a different sort of American exceptionalism that moves to the front burner as soccer's World Cup makes its quadrennial appearance this week. While 31 other Cup nations breathlessly ponder their on-field possibilities in the month-long tournament, the Yanks continue to hear the old chatter questioning whether the sport ever will have a breakout moment on these shores.

In fact, the sport broke out years ago, both in terms of spectator interest and on-field compentency. The United States has risen steadily from third-world futbol status to being a legitimate player among the established powers.

Dating to 1990, when the United States rode a rag-tag bunch of mostly college kids to its first World Cup appearance in 40 years, the Americans have qualified for six consecutive Cups - a streak matched by only six other nations and not including such soccer heavyweights as England, France and Mexico.

The current 23-man U.S. World Cup squad is stocked with a majority of pros (17) earning their living - and some starring - in elite European leagues, a situation unheard of just 15 years ago. Two others play professionally in soccer-loving Mexico, which had been the region's unquestioned sovereign until replaced by the Yanks, with their 10 victories and two ties in the neighbors' 16 games since 2000.

For the second of last week's two pre-Cup "send-off" exhibitions, in Philadelphia on Saturday, the U.S. drew a hefty crowd of 55,407 - a big-league number that nevertheless was only the national team's 23rd largest ever, with 20 of those (peaking at 93,869) coming since 1994.

Major League Soccer, the U.S. domestic league formed in the wake of the wildly successul U.S.-based 1994 World Cup, is in its 15th season and doing fine, among the world's top dozen leagues in attendance.

ESPN, the weather vane of sports interest in the country, will air 250 hours of World Cup coverage from South Africa this month, involving more than 300 employees, after going live with the U.S. team's final roster announcement on May 26, in the manner of the NCAA basketball bracket show.

Part of the ESPN calculus involves cashing in on the American appetite for big events. But in a nod to the exponential growth of avid soccer fans in the land, the network has ditched its 2006 World Cup strategy of using a play-by-play man whose real expertise was in baseball.

"There was a time," former U.S. national team defender Alexi Lalas said, "when people really didn't care" about soccer in the States. Now, he said, U.S. coach Bob Bradley "has assembled 10 or 11 players that I'd put up against anybody in the world" - and a good portion of the public will be watching.

Yet U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati still hears assertions of soccer's ongoing void in the American consciousness from the students to whom he teaches economics at Columbia University and his soccer-connected friends in Europe.

Gulati's answer is "to just cite the statistics" of success. "We're not the same as England or Germany or Brazil," he said. "This country won't shut down when the U.S. wins or loses a game in the World Cup, but we'll break some ratings marks this year."

Gulati is heading a committee, whose spokesmen include Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, that is bidding to bring the World Cup back to the United States in 2018 or (more likely) 2022. And that, said Jurgen Klinsmann, who played in three World Cups and coached another for his native Germany, is the next "huge boost" coming for U.S. soccer.

A resident of San Diego since 1998 and a finalist for the U.S. national team coaching job three years ago, Klinsmann noted the obvious, that "your culture and environment are different from Europe and the rest of the world. It's unique here.

"But what's happened [in soccer] the last 10, 15 years in this country is unbelievable."