07.21.07
Baffled by Beckham
I don’t get the wave of excitement about David Beckham coming to America to join the L.A. Galaxy and play in the MLS soccer league. ESPN was advertising this like mad. His wife, a former spice girl, is even getting her own reality show.
First thing I don’t get: How does an MLS team have $250 million to pay this guy? Does the entire league bring in that much money?
Second thing I don’t get: Why does anyone expect this to get American’s excited about soccer? Getting the World Cup in 1996 couldn’t do it, so how could one man? But there’s no arguing with the true believers.
The whole hysteria has made me very cynical today. If you want to get people excited about something, you don’t tell them how great it is or try to explain why they should be excited. No, you just act as though the rest of the country already is excited. I’ve often wondered if ESPN could pull this off with a lesser-known sport like disc golf. If they covered professional disc golf events on SportsCenter and brought in some talking heads for a “Disc Golf Tonight” show to analyze the week’s events, people would start to care about it.
Neil said,
August 5, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Er, I think you’ll find it was 1994 when you hosted the World Cup. Although pretending that it didn’t exist was almost a viable strategy for those of us whose countries failed to qualify. That or pretending to be Irish.
Mind you, you’re welcome to the Beckham circus. Beckham is a very good player, fairly talented, but wouldn’t bother the very top echelon of players, the likes of Moore, Beckenbauer, Zidane, Pele. Maradona (etc and so on – Beckham would IMHO be very lucky to make the top 20). He is very hard working though. It’s the anorexic fame-whore he’s married to that’s the problem.