With the WUSA folding last week (more on that later) and sagging attendance figures at the MLS, it looked like Soccer's fragile foothold in the American sports market was beginning to ebb away.But wait, what's this? A report in USAToday saying that over 40% of American homes have a soccer ball lying around somewhere. Could there be hope for the beautiful game? Ok, Ok, I know that means that it was probably a discarded brithday present or a vain attempt to get Jimmy off "that damn interweb." But it still shows there's an investment in the game, and, more importantly, a grass roots movement in soccer that has sown it's seed in the most important market of them all; youth. The youth soccer movement in America really began to take hold during the late 70's and early 80's, possibly as a result of the moderate success of the NASL which featured the legendary figures of George Best, Pele, and Franz Beckenbauer. Kids began playing, and now every town has it's ubiquitous youth soccer club. Unfortunately the numbers drop off dramatically between the last few years of high school and college. There's too many distractions; other sports, cars, the opposite sex, part time jobs. But the important thing is, there's now a mechanism in place the seems to be consistently generating a handful of world class players. Players like Landon Donovan, Bobby Convey, Santino Quaranta, and Tim Howard all got their start playing their town's youth soccer leauge. In fact Landon continually attributes his success to his youth soccer coach. As politically driven as youth soccer has become (been there, done that) I think it might be the key to the future success fo U.S. soccer. With the great run in the 2002 World Cup behind us, there's alot of work to do, building the foundations for another great run in 2006. Now if we can just get those 41% of people to actually go to an MLS game....
