Beckham’s legacy game’s greater reach
When David Beckham arrived in North America in January, 2007, he laid out a mission statement in his first public utterance.
“I’m not saying me coming over to the States is going to make soccer the biggest sport in America . . . but I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think I could make a difference.”
Now that our football missionary has gone, after winning his second title, he can look back with some satisfaction. He made converts of many of the sporting heathens.
Beckham’s play and his trophies didn’t make any difference. His contribution was the crucial element of glamour. Glamorous sporting heroes are in short supply these days — we’re too quick to tear them down. Thanks to his off-field brightness and tireless PR work, Beckham’s glamour never wore off.
If we can point to a signal achievement, it is this: his tenure put paid to a tired fixture of every sports conversation, the jolly football ignoramus.
Nothing about soccer has changed between now and then. It remains a game antithetical to the typical North American palate — slow to develop, seldom to score.
The Beckham effect can best be seen not in the people who were gripped all along, but in the many more who now feel compelled to fake an interest.
There is no competent sports enthusiast who cannot now give you some opinion on Cristiano Ronaldo’s place in the pantheon or talk just a little about Chelsea’s manager woes.
Beckham’s play and his trophies didn’t make any difference. His contribution was the crucial element of glamour
This is what Major League Soccer did not foresee — that Beckham’s ability to grow the game was not the same thing as growing their business.
As an example, take last year’s MLS Cup game.
That one also featured Beckham and the Galaxy versus Houston Dynamo. It drew a 0.8 TV rating in the U.S. (meaning 8/10ths of a percentage point of viewers in America’s 56 largest urban markets, including L.A. and Houston, tuned in).
That same afternoon, a tapedelayed broadcast of Chelsea-Liverpool drew a 1.5 rating, double the domestic TV audience.
MLS prefers to talk about its live attendance figures, where the aggregate high-water mark continues to rise each season. Of course, a lot of this is down to the regular addition of new franchises. MLS has added at least one in every year Beckham has been here. Nothing attracts gawkers like novelty. Each season, the bottom line is boosted by the new arrival (Montreal did them the favour last season, ranking third in attendance). That can’t go on forever.
The league also likes to point to all those new franchises (seven) as proof of Beckham’s success, though most of those deals were in play before he arrived. If Beckham did anything, it was drive up the entry fee.
But there is little evidence to suggest that MLS’s growth is keeping pace with the infectious spread of international soccer in North America.
In a piece several months ago, social scientist Rich Luker, an ESPN trendspotter, suggested that professional soccer is now the second-most popular sport amongst Americans aged 12-24. A substantial number of those soccer fans that he termed “avid” were more interested in the international game than the domestic one. America’s favourite soccer player: Lionel Messi. As bold as it was, here’s where MLS’s Beckham coup may have come a decade or two too late. Mass media is changing the nature of fandom. The traditional pathways into a sport — playing it, and then watching it live — are being swamped by new entry points. It’s been suggested that the most effective gateway drug to soccer addiction is not watching it, but playing some iteration of the “FIFA” video-game franchise. The televised nature of sport loosens the connection with a hometown team. There are 5.5 million people in the GTA. Only 20,000 go to a game live every week. The rest are consuming sports on TV, radio, laptop, smartphone, what have you. Those people have an unlimited choice of who to follow (and choose largely to ignore MLS). Local still matters with legacy sports like hockey. It makes almost no difference when it comes to arrivistes like MLS. In an era when the players come and go, when I may never see a match played live, when there is no history connecting the club to my life, when I “know” the players from hours spent playing FIFA 13, when various communities of fellow supporters are easily available on the Internet, what difference is there to me between the Montreal Impact, say, and Real Madrid? It’s a competition between the tug of home and Beckham’s favourite lure, glamour. Glamour is winning. Manchester United alone claims an international fan base of 659 million supporters — one in 10 people on the planet. Beckham can take a good deal of residual credit for that as well. Like all observant followers, those globally dispersed United (or Barcelona, or Inter, or Bayern, and on and on) fans don’t think of themselves as any less devout because they may never go on pilgrimage to see their idols in person. They worship electronically. That United fan base doubled between 2007 and 2012. It’s hard not to see some of Beckham’s travelling saleswork in that figure. He came here to sell a product. He succeeded. What his employers did not foresee is that he wasn’t working exclusively for them. Beckham did what he promised. He expanded the reach of the game. He never did say to where.