Alan Rothenberg had lost a battle. The president of the United States Soccer Federation had implored the Washington, D.C., police chief not to encircle RFK Stadium's field with a fence during this month's World Cup soccer games. The barrier, he feared, would only deepen Americans' skepticism of soccer. But the chief wouldn't budge. He had watched tapes of death and destruction at European stadiums, and he wasn't going to let bellicose foreign fans spoil the World Cup spectacle in the nation's capital.
It wasn't the first defeat Rothenberg had suffered, but the World Cup's top organizer is a man with a mission -- selling Americans on soccer -- and he defiantly believes it's doable. The World Cup, the world's largest sporting event, is coming to the United States for the first time. President Clinton will kick off the 24-nation extravaganza in Chicago on June 17, when defending champion Germany takes on Bolivia. A month later, 102,000 Rose Bowl fans and a global television audience of 2 billion will watch the tournament's final game. Rothenberg is hoping to have the tournament lift soccer into the ranks of major American spectator sports. Next spring, he is launching a new professional league.
Soccer's top U.S. promoter isn't a soccer zealot. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, he has never played the sport. But since going to work as the Los Angeles Lakers' lawyer in 1967, Rothenberg has had plenty of experience in the multimillion-dollar business of American spectator sports. He got his first exposure to pro soccer through the nascent North American Soccer League in the '60s and '70s, and later was tapped by Olympics organizer Peter Ueberroth to head the soccer competition; it attracted the largest crowds of the summer games, twice selling out the massive Rose Bowl.
Impressed by such numbers and eager to establish soccer in the game's last frontier, soccer's Zurich-based governing body, FIFA, in 1988 awarded the World Cup to the United States -- then encouraged Rothenberg to seek the U.S. federation's presidency in 1990. After a two-week candidacy, he unseated the incumbent, putting a leading sports executive at the helm of U.S. soccer for the first time. "He's the best salesman the sport has had," says Paul Kennedy, editor of Soccer America.
Why is Rothenberg, a multimillionaire and past president of the California bar association, organizing the World Cup and launching a new pro league? "Sports management has been my life," he says. "It's more than anything else a desire to climb the next mountain."
Putting on the quadrennial World Cup will be a himalayan task. More than 140 countries began qualifying for the finals two years ago. With a staff of more than 400 and a budget of about $350 million, Rothenberg has to keep a nine city, 52-match tournament among the final 24 teams running smoothly for a month, while ministering to 7,000 journalists and many world dignitaries. He has worked grueling, seven-day weeks for four years, minding details as diverse as the counterfeiting of tickets and quality of the grass on the fields.
So far, Rothenberg has won high marks for his work. He has signed up a full complement of corporate sponsors for the tournament; its 3.6 million tickets are 95 percent sold, and 1,000 U.S. reporters and producers are attending games. To help market the tournament and increase soccer's U.S. visibility, he pressed for and won FIFA's approval to add American-style glitz to the games, signing Liza Minnelli, for instance, to perform at a huge opening gala in Chicago. To spur grass-roots interest in the game, Rothenberg's staff has organized hundreds of soccer clinics and expos around the country with the help of U.S. team players. If the World Cup turns a profit, the bulk of the money will go to building U.S. soccer.
That's Rothenberg's bigger challenge. The U.S. sporting landscape is already littered with six pro soccer leagues that have failed since 1960. Rothenberg himself lost his NASL franchise (and hundreds of thousands of dollars) when the league folded in 1985, the victim of overspending, overexpansion and too much player turnover. Rothenberg vows that Major League Soccer will sidestep such pitfalls. The league will start small, in 12 cities that will probably include both major soccer centers like New York and smaller, sports-starved markets like Columbus, Ohio, and Tulsa, Okla. Rothenberg's business plan calls for average attendance of 12,500 per game, and he has signed ESPN, the sports TV network, to three years of broadcasts.
Local gains. Soccer's salesman is hoping to build on the sport's spreading attraction as a game to play. There were nearly 16 million soccer players in the United States last year, including 6 million women and girls. The American Youth Soccer Association boasts more than 25,000 registered teams, and high school participation has doubled since 1980. The United States has produced internationally competitive youth teams, and the U.S women's team won the first women's world championship in China in 1991.
The question is whether Rothenberg can turn these young soccer players into committed, lifelong spectators. The response of Americans to top-flight soccer has been mixed. The crowds at exhibitions between the American, German, Brazilian and English teams last summer were large and (just as important to Rothenberg) largely families. But the U.S. national team has drawn many small, mainly ethnic crowds to recent World Cup warm- up matches, and even many of the game's ardent promoters have serious doubts. "I have begun to feel that the public at large just isn't interested in the sport," says Eddie Mitchell of the Greensboro, N.C., Dynamo, a team in a regional pro league that has all the needed ingredients for big crowds: a nice stadium, large local youth leagues, little competition from other pro sports teams, a top team and a big marketing campaign. Yet the team draws an average of only 1,600 fans a game.
Many believe that Americans are turned off by soccer primarily because of the game's lack of scoring. In the wake of a lot of boring, defensive-minded play at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, FIFA made rule changes that encourage teams "to go on the attack," says its president, Joao Havalange. FIFA is also introducing a new ball for the World Cup; called the Questa, it travels up to 15 percent farther and faster. Rothenberg backs these and other more radical reforms being tested, like larger goals and one-on-one free kicks akin to penalty shots in ice hockey. "The shot clock and the three-point shot opened up basketball," he says. "That's what I'm looking for in soccer."
One of Rothenberg's biggest worries is that the U.S. press will play up soccer's "hooliganism" problem. Last week, CBS News did just that, airing a segment implying that unwashed foreign soccer hordes are poised to invade World Cup soccer stadiums. In truth, serious incidents are unlikely. England, home to the world's roughest fans, didn't qualify; most U.S. stadiums are located in the suburbs and thus not accessible to the typical soccer hooligan, and standing-room "terraces" that foment rowdyism in Europe don't exist in U.S. stadiums.
Ultimately, soccer's biggest problem may be that it's ill- fitted to station break television. A staggering 31 billion television viewers in 195 countries are expected to watch a portion of the World Cup tournament. But with two 45 minute halves of nonstop play, soccer doesn't offer regular opportunities to cut to commercials without annoying viewers. ABC and ESPN, which jointly paid a mere $11 million to broadcast the World Cup, hope they've found a way around the problem by banishing ads in favor of corporate logos placed by the time clock in the corner of the picture. ABC will broadcast 11 games, ESPN the other 41. But ABC is anticipating only about 4 million homes to tune in per game equivalent to the draw of a top PGA Tour event. Alan Rothenberg has his work cut out for him.
The favorites European teams still dominate the sport
