Bank It Like Beckham

Amidst the frisson that coursed through my network of soccer-loving friends upon news of David Beckham's impending move stateside, one killjoy wondered whether the signing might spark the kind of escalating arms race that torpedoed professional soccer's initial attempt at conquering America.

There's always the chance that the Beckham signing will spark a drunken orgy of spending, but I think MLS Management is mindful of the errors that doomed the NASL and other American soccer leagues. The MLS is essentially a centrally managed corporation that allows its individual units (the franchises) limited autonomy to conduct their business and in their pseudo-socialist way they've done a pretty good job at distributing players and capping spending, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Basically, I look at the Beckham signing as a marketing expense and at $250 million a fairly reasonable one for an organization with the ambitions that MLS maintains. When you're a league without a significant TV contract, you have to take extraordinary steps to generate publicity and sizzle, because an American sports league without a viable TV deal is hardly a league at all, ask the NHL.

Beckham is almost an industry unto himself and will attract more attention alone than the entire MLS did before his arrival. And that's before you consider the run-off publicity sure to appear in all the non-sports related venues on account of his massive celebrity (Vanity Fair, People, US Weekly, etc).

The biggest problem with American soccer (aside from its relative lack of success making inroads into working and lower class populations of the non-recent immigrant variety) is that there's a huge disconnect between its popularity as a participant sport and spectator sport. Tons of people play soccer growing up. More Americans play soccer growing up than any other sport. Probably twenty times as many people played organized soccer growing up as played American football. But people who played soccer from the first grade to twelfth without ever setting foot on the gridiron will breathlessly watch a meaningless regular season NFL game while ignoring professional soccer entirely.

They watch football because the culture, the aura that surrounds the sport is greater than the game itself. In this celebrity-obsessed age, a figure like Beckham can provide a measure of glamour that not only attracts attention to soccer but illustrates to kids deciding what sport to pursue that soccer is as sexy, sexier perhaps, than the alternatives.

Of course, the question is whether you can transform that cult-of-personality into appreciation of the sport as whole, or whether it withers away and dies, a la post-Lance Tour de France. Regardless, I think it's worth a shot because star power can deliver a sport into the national consciousness, in fact, it's practically the only thing that ever has.

A lot of people don't realize that before Bird and Magic burst on the scene, the NBA was a dying league where the championship finals games were shown on tape delay and its games pulled worse ratings than bowling. I don't know if Beckham can have the same effect, especially without a counterpoint (maybe an aging Latin stud (Ronaldo?) to recapture the whole racial subtext that helped fuel Bird v. Magic), but I think it's clear that for a sport to succeed it America it has to rise from the level of athletics to the level of spectacle. If anyone can help do this, it's Beckham. Now, if only we could get Posh Spice into cheerleading...