Ken Early: Soccer finally cracks the code in USA

Last Thursday afternoon the streets of Manhattan were flooded with spring sunshine, but Smithfield Hall NYC on 25th Street was full of people whose eyes were fixed on floodlit fields in Europe. Who cares what's happening outside in the self-styled capital of the world when you can sit at the bar in darkness and stare at a row of HD screens showing Liverpool v Dortmund and Sevilla v Athletic Bilbao?

The barman mentioned that the new Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, had come in the day before to watch Barcelona getting dumped out of the Champions League by Atlético Madrid.

It's good that Fifa currently has a president who can travel to New York without having to worry too much about being detained for questioning. That he is in New York at all is testament to the increasingly central position the United States occupies in the world of football.

The previous day I had stood at the side of a pitch on the campus of the State University of New York, Purchase College, watching a squad of players train. It could have been a scene from the training of any small college soccer team, except that on that field were three World Cup winners: Andrea Pirlo, David Villa and, presiding over the session, Patrick Vieira.

Big opportunity

The team was

New York City

FC, the

Major League Soccer

club that is 80 percent owned by the people who own

Manchester City

. It was remarkable to see an outfit bankrolled by Emirati royalty training at a facility inferior to the one Ireland used to have at Malahide, before they moved to the National Training Centre at Abbotstown.

Villa and Vieira are used to fancier training grounds, but they understand that playing for this team is a big opportunity. Football is America’s fastest-growing sport and MLS is the most obvious driving factor. The standard may still be uneven, but with average crowds of over 21,000, it’s now the world’s seventh-best-supported football league. The average attendance at MLS matches is now larger than those at top division matches in France or Argentina, and only slightly smaller than those in Serie A. In Seattle, the Sounders are pulling crowds of over 40,000. The Portland Timbers crowd has earned a reputation as the American Dortmund.

But the growth in MLS attendances has been made possible by larger cultural and especially technological changes.

It used to be that immigrants to the US would Anglicise their names, abandon their mother tongues, and start getting interested in baseball. America is no longer so welcoming towards immigrants, but neither is it so casually repressive. New arrivals are no longer expected automatically to drop all their former cultural affiliations and the idea of American-ness is less monolithic.

The US media's old antipathy to soccer was one of those cultural rituals that reinforces the values of the in-group by defining and ridiculing the out-group. The retired New York Times columnist George Vecsey has described how young sportswriters were often told to have a go at covering the sport, and usually returned with reports that could be summed up as 'here is the thing we do not understand and therefore mock'. Writing a couple of those pieces would generally confirm you as a lifelong soccer-sceptic.

Soccer was only able to overcome this carefully maintained cultural immunity when the growth of the internet in the late 90s enabled it to bypass the gatekeepers in the media. No longer were you forced to get by on whatever the US media offered – you could follow it direct from Europe.

Technological factor

Another technological factor was perhaps even more significant.

Roger Bennett

, one half of the hugely successful podcast and NBCSN TV show

Men in Blazers

, is convinced that video games have driven the growth of the sport.

Soccer makes for a great video game. There are Fifa 16 addicts everywhere, from superstars like Pirlo, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, down to all the millions of kids who, to the dismay of their parents and coaches, prefer the video game version of football to the real thing.

It’s by playing football video games that millions of Americans have got to know the game, the players, and the sport’s culture. Noticing at last that American soccer fans represented a huge under-served market, the US media has responded. Thanks to NBC’s $1 billion, six-year deal with the Premier League, Americans now get to see more Premier League soccer on TV than anyone else: every match is available live.

For executives in other European leagues, the implications of America's interest in the Premier League are worrying. The President of La Liga, Javier Tebas, last week spoke of the need to prevent the Premier League becoming "the NBA of football". The same phrase had been used last year by St Etienne co-president Bernard Calazzo, who predicted that the Premier League "will be greater than the Champions League".

Calazzo was on to something: Champions League midweek kick-off times ranging from 11:45am on the west coast to 2:45pm in the east, are not so convenient for Americans who work regular hours..

Not that this concern affected the daytime drinkers in Smithfield Hall. Some things are more important than work.