How do we ditch the niche?

For the past several weeks since the end of the World Cup soccer coverage has returned to the dark ages once again. Relegated to thirty second mentions on Sportscenter and dedicated blogs (such as this one) because, as so many have felt the need to tell us, soccer is just a niche sport. Well that's well and good but us fans want more. We want our sport to be taken seriously alongside the big four in the United States. But in order to do that we need to break out of the "sports niche" genre of athletics.

How does soccer move from the same breath with lacrosse and curling and become a "major sport"?

1. Television: This is something that the MLS is already working on. Their new contract with ESPN/ABC will kick money back into the league (I believe this is the first contract in which the MLS will be paid). This isn't something that needs to always happen on a national scale either, local or region broadcasts of games will get channel surfers to take notice and get new fans to the teams. Stations such as Fox Sports Net air rerun after rerun some days, why not air games on the region that teams are in. Another move that should be made is to get Fox Soccer Channel into a more basic cable package. Fox already owns a specialty station in most basic packages (Speed Channel) I can see FSC being in the very same line if not even more succesful than Speed.

2. Stop Hyping Individual Players: Soccer is not the NBA. The game is extremely team oriented and can rarely be broken down into 1v1 situations. When it happens it is amazing to see, don't get me wrong, but in basketball it happens nine times out of ten possesions so that kind of advertising works. In soccer there are more than twice as many players on the field and all of them have a role to play. The colors ad that is running now treads a thin line between advertising solitary players and their teams/league as a whole. Advertise the fact that DC United has scored the most goals in the league, not a pubescent teen who has only one of them. Freddy Adu is a subject who deserves a post all on his own (and will get one on here soon), but he is not the only player in the league. Unfortunately some of the best players in the league are not American or have names that make them sound foreign (Jaime Moreno, Dwayne DeRosario, Ante Razov, etc). The bigwigs think that we'll turn on these players or not want them to succeed in the US if they aren't the stereotypical "all American boys". This type of racism disgusts me and embarasses me as a fan.

3. Provide for the media: Working with the Minnesota Thunder this summer I have first hand knowledge of how much better a broadcast can be when the teams willingly provide as much information on their squads as possible. I've also seen that the local papers use press releases from the team nearly verbatim as their match write ups. Therefore I can only imagine that the more a team releases to the media regarding match results, record breaking preformances, transfers, etc, the more information that gets printed and into the hands of the fans. The more info that's out there the quicker we'll move from a niche sport to a full fledged summer season.