Coca-Cola, GM, McDonald's and Gillette are on board as sponsors at $15 million to $20 million apiece. A multimillion-dollar ad campaign has been launched with American icons like moonwalker Neil Armstrong. And billions of viewers worldwide are expected to watch the telecasts. So why is everyone so worried? Because the sport is soccer, the event is the World Cup, soccer's Super Bowl, and the locale is the United States--where the sport is considered as boring as ... well, soccer.
For decades now, soccer lovers have been predicting an explosion of the game in America. But while an estimated 15 million Americans participate in the world's version of football, the conventional wisdom here remains that it is a sport better played than displayed. Still, the international soccer establishment is hoping that next summer's World Cup '94, a month-long frenzy of 24 nations playing 52 games in nine major U.S. cities, will establish soccer once and for all as a major sport here. "We've got to do more than just sell all the tickets," says Bob Caporale, head of the World Cup effort in Boston. "This is our one chance to catch the wave."
Perhaps the last chance. Several professional soccer leagues, some boasting stars like Brazilian legend Pele, have already come and gone. The last outdoor soccer league collapsed almost a decade ago. Even the Major Indoor Soccer League, a hockeylike bastardization of the sport aimed at satisfying American tastes for fast action and high scoring, went out of business last July, after losing millions of dollars.
Soccer's biggest domestic problem is TV's verdict that it isn't ready for prime time. ABC and ESPN, which will televise the World Cup in the United States, have displayed their disdain by paying a paltry $11 million for those rights. While more than 2 billion people watched Germany defeat Argentina in the 1990 final, only an estimated 570,000 of those were in the United States. "Soccer is low-scoring and defense-oriented," says Jack Loftus, a TV analyst for Nielsen Media Research, "and Americans won't tolerate that." Moreover, the game's nonstop 45-minute halves don't lend themselves to commercial interruption. For example: in the 1990 Italy-Ireland quarterfinal, TNT broke away for an ad and missed the game's lone score.
To overcome American resistance, the ad strategy apparently is to appear early and often: a campaign was launched in print last week and begins on TV next week. These promotions swaddle the game in American images. The ad agency, Dentsu Corp. of America, went through a veritable course in Americana, contemplating every possibility from Paul Revere ("The World Cup is coming! The World Cup is coming!") to bouncing a soccer ball off the presidential heads on Mount Rushmore. In the end, it opted for even more famous Americans than Revere, like Walter Payton, and bounced its ball off the pitchfork of the "American Gothic" farm couple.
The World Cup's sponsors and marketing partners are most concerned with reaching the overseas audience. But it will be hard to generate maximum excitement abroad if the World Cup plays to half-filled stadiums. Corporate America is counting on this country's enduring affection for the big spectacles. "Once you get [Americans] to realize this is the biggest sports event in the world," says Gary Hite, Coke's vice president for sports, "people will say, 'Let's get out there'." Hite likens the phenomenon to the recent "Storm of the Century," the blizzard that pulverized the East Coast, where folks ventured outside just to say they were part of it. If he's wrong, it could be the corporate backers donning those T shirts that say I SURVIVED WORLD CUP '94.
