U.S. Sports Trends

ESPN.com has a section called Sportsnation, in which one can vote on a selection of various topics, and then see how the rest of the nation has voted, breaking the results down even to state-by-state. One intriguing question I found a few days ago: Would you rather see Team USA win a World Cup or a gold medal in hockey? The result: the majority of the nation voted for a World Cup! But it was by a fairly slim margin. In fact, most of the North/Midwest voted for a hockey gold, including my state of Michigan, but I found the question to be intriguing because both hockey and soccer are on the upswing in popularity. Over the past year, I detected more buzz about hockey than I did in previous years, including last year, where one could have argued that hockey was no longer in the top 4 of sports. But they have stars now, Crosby is awesome, and even I have to admit that I watched my first two hockey games in over a decade, having seen games 6 and 7 in the Finals. Both of those games had absolute ferocious endings, and I realized this is a very entertaining sport! It's similar to soccer in that a one-goal difference will probably result on a flurry of activity as time is winding down, which is exactly what happened in both games 6 and 7. Fantastic stuff! These are world-class athletes performing at very high levels. You have to enjoy that. I suspect that ESPN has some kind of hockey deal in the works, and that is why they had been talking it up over the past year, but in the end, the playoffs were a dream scenario for the NHL, and I know the final game got huge ratings for NBC.
Similarly, soccer in the USA is coming around. I base this on the fact that the European championships were aired on ESPN - every single game. That was unheard of 10 years ago. I saw the Finals in Chicago last year at the ESPN Center, and the place was packed. The only slight regret I had was a twang of treachery as I was rooting for Spain against Germany, my second homeland, because I supposedly had a jersey riding on the outcome (a jersey I have yet to see).
Another reason I see soccer's popularity increasing is in the fact that the ESPN family of networks has been airing all of the Champion's League matches in the last couple of years. Once again, unheard of 10 years ago. Now, I can't see every match unless I had ESPN Deportes, or some of the other random channels, but at least one big match is broadcast during each of the rounds, and coverage is dedicated to showing highlights of what happened in the other matches. My last reason for demonstrating soccer's upswing is that ESPN now dedicates one night a week to showing MLS matches, and it also shows Team USA's World Cup qualifiers. Now all we need is a big-time U.S. born soccer star, which we don't have yet. Our best players are probably Landon Donovan and Josy Altidore, and that's not saying much. Altidore is a player to watch, though. He's probably the best we've got right now. Soccer needs its Tiger Woods or Sidney Crosby - as the Sportsnation poll indicates, we are on the prescipice of paying attention.