Next year at this time, ready or not, American sports fans may finally get hooked on the world’s most popular team competition. Soccer will dominate the scene from mid-June to mid-July, when 24 nation’s goat each other for the World Cup in 52 games played in stadiums from Foxboro, Mass… To Pasadena. Calif. World Cup matches rivet the rest of the world every four years. A billion people watched the 1990 final on television—four times the audience for this year’s Super Bowl. Only in America do soccer teams come and go without public commotion, but that will surely change when hordes of foreign fans descend next year. The soccer smart have already snatched up virtually every ticket for the first two rounds of play. Is the U.S. team ready? Well, no one expects the Americans to take the cup; they’ll do well to make it to the second round. But the squad looked sharp last month when it beat the mighty British ill a warm-up tournament. In the soccer world, that was a stunning step up for America. In Britain it was devastating, Skeptics challenged the wisdom of staging the World Cup in a country that didn’t much care. Germany, whose national team won the 1990 competition, tried to get the decision reversed, But America has always been good at spectacles, and on the early evidence it looks as if this one will work just fine.
Article extracted from this publication >> July 16, 1993
