Too Friendly

Note: I wrote this post about a week ago, but forgot to proofread / post it until just now.  Better late than never, I guess, although a lot of the concerns I outline below were alleviated (somewhat) by the USA's performance against Turkey on Saturday afternoon.

In just over two weeks one week, the United States Soccer national team will play it's first game of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  For many casual / emerging soccer fans, this World Cup will be their first real exposure to high-level soccer; though the MLS is gaining in popularity and soccer is widely played among children, the typical American sports fan limits himself to watching baseball, basketball and football with a little hockey mixed in.  To some extent, this will change over the next month and a half; the World Cup will begin to dominate ESPN and other international sports news outlets starting in mid-June and, as with the Olympics, Americans will begin to cheer on the red, white and blue in a sport they're not used to watching.

Earlier this week last week, the U.S. played the Czech Republic in a World Cup tuneup game in Hartford, Connecticut.  The Americans lost 4-2 to the Czechs, a unsurprising result considering U.S. coach (and Princeton alum) Bob Bradley elected to sit his top players.  True soccer fans understood that, from the coach's perspective, the most important outcomes from this match were to avoid injuries to key players (such as Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey, neither of whom dressed for the game), evaluate players on the fringe of making the final 23-man World Cup roster (30 players were eligible to play in the friendly versus the Czech Republic), and determine the amount of progress made by players recovering from injury (such as Oguchi Onyewu).  Despite the loss to the Czechs, who failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, Bradley saw what he needed to see and had the information needed to trim his roster down.

Off the pitch, however, there were secondary goals that the U.S. soccer team ignored during their friendly match with the Czechs.  For many, the 2010 World Cup will be an introduction to soccer, and last Tuesday's match was as an introduction to the 2010 World Cup.  For fans looking to jump on the U.S. bandwagon, Tuesday's game had to be discouraging.  None of the top players played, so anyone eager to see Landon Donovan (one of the few household-ish names on the U.S. team) or the other top players was likely disappointed.  Although it was an exhibition game, the fact that the U.S. looked sloppy in losing to a team that wasn't able to qualify for the World Cup won't inspire confidence in casual fans looking for the Americans to make a run this June.  While it's true that, to a soccer fan, the loss is easily explainable and understandable, someone tuning in to ESPN to watch soccer for the first time on Tuesday only saw mediocre play from the guys with USA on their jerseys.

Obviously, success in the World Cup will ultimately be what attracts casual fans to U.S. soccer, so if the information gained by Bradley and the rest of the U.S. coaching staff leads to first round success against England, Algeria and Slovenia, this will all be moot.  That being said, the U.S. national team likely dug itself at least a shallow hole with its performance on Tuesday.  Hopefully next time the stars will be on the field, the results will be different and the casual fans will give their team another pre-World Cup chance.