I don't think I'm alone in saying what a great time we had Saturday night/Sunday morning at Joxers' for the Cup Final. Once again, the joint was packed by 3:00 a.m., and the crowd was roughly 9:1 favoring Brazil. In particular, what amazed me was the number of non-soccer fanatics who were there; at least three of my site's regular visitors showed up, none of whom had evidenced any interest in the sport at all up until two weeks ago, but who stayed through "closing hour" and watched the game until the final whistle. Speaking for myself, its going to take awhile to regain a normal sleep equilibrium.

Since this is my last post on the subject, at least until Copa America next year, I thought I would share some random observations on the last month:

1. Every four years, what constitutes the sports punditocracy in this country will weigh in about why soccer has failed to generate much interest in the U.S. Predictably, they will write that soccer is popular everywhere else in the world, but because of America's "cultural superiority", it will never catch on here. Or they will talk about how soccer fans are always trying to impose their sport on everyone else. Or they will ridicule the "soccer promoters", who are supposedly predicting that, inevitably, the sport will become bigger than baseball or football in the U.S.(of course, it goes without saying that no such promoter will ever be quoted by name, since no such person has ever made that prediction) To illustrate their argument, they will throw in attendance figures for WUSA games, or the MLS' poor TV ratings.

I have little doubt that those same morons will pop up in 2006, with the same twaddle. Up until this year, they could usually throw in a line in their columns about how in spite of its popularity at the youth and sandlot level, real American athletes abandon the sport once they reach high school; thus, the U.S. would never be competitive in international soccer. However, three things happened this time out that pretty much discredited those writers. First, the U.S. made the quarterfinals, and played with a style and energy that proved that the 0-3 debacle in 1998 was the exception, not the rule. Second, the ratings for the Cup were relatively high, almost a hundred times higher than what ESPN2 or Univision usually get for its early morning programming. ESPN, in fact, got more people to watch the U.S. games against Mexico and Germany than it got for all four of the games it televised during the Stanley Cup Finals, played during the same month. I have not yet seen the ratings for the Final, but it would not surprise me if it was the top-rated sporting event of the weekend. Add to that the ratings for Univision, which in cities like Los Angeles were higher than the ESPN broadcasts (I might add that many of us who speak barely a word of Spanish find those broadcasts to be superior), as well as the good ratings the Cup got in 1994 (and to a lesser extent, 1998), and it is laughable to ever again suggest that there is not significant interest in the World Cup among American sports fans.

Second, for the first time since Pele was playing for the Cosmos, a group of sportswriters, columnists, etc., are now writing positive things about the sport, even though they don't cover it for a living. Sports talk radio hosts actually fielded calls from listeners about the games. Even Jim Rome pretended for awhile that he wasn't rooting against Team U.S.A. Furthermore, stories about hooliganism, 0-0 draws, and all the other cliched tripe that usually works its way into every third-rate writers output on the sport were at a minimum. Those in the media who hate the sport became increasingly dispirited, especially once the U.S. made the quarterfinals.

What must give soccer fans in this country the most hope is the actuarial reality that the anti-soccer crowd is old, myopic, and out-of-touch; once the Lupicas, the Alboms, and the Lipsytes die out or retire, they will be replaced by writers who understand that the World Cup consistently gets better ratings than tennis or boxing in the U.S., and that Latino and Asian Americans, and Americans between the ages of 18 and 35, actually exist, and have sporting interests that are far different from the middle-aged white males for whom their columns are addressed, and that the popularity of soccer is a phenomenum of the present, not the future.

2. On the other hand, as long as the MLS is around, the popularity of American soccer will pretty much be limited to international competitions, such as the Olympics and the World Cup. I have yet to hear anyone give a compelling reason why people are going to start watching the soccer equivalent of the Pacific Coast League, after they have been given a month-long taste of the good stuff. In particular, European clubs are going to be much more aggressive in scouting American high schools and sandlots for the next Landon Donovan or Demarcus Beasley, while the MLS will remain little more than a glorified farm system, developing talent until its ready to start earning some real money overseas.