Hollywood Producer And Seattle Sounders’ Owner Joe Roth Sees Obama And Soccer Support Overlap, Both Winning

When heavyweight film producer Joe Roth decided to buy a major stake of the Seattle Sounders MLS team, he did it in true Hollywood fashion. He decided that if he were going to roll out a new franchise, he might as well copy the tried and true techniques that got him movie hits like Major League, The Jerky Boys and Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise. So he got a true leading man in Freddie Ljungberg; he rolled out the promotion machine by hitting the internet hard and even creating TV programming, a reality show for team tryouts; and his target audience was burgeoning, so he decided to cater to them, as opposed to what was dictated before. Wait, this sounds a bit familiar, no? While Roth was preparing for the Sounders’ launch into the MLS, he was also ramping up the L.A. arm of the Obama machine, and getting that inside view, he saw that what made his campaign work so far in terms of ground game and fundraising could work in finally making soccer work in the U.S.

“If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you’d see an incredible overlap,” he told me. “The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama — white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball.”

Yes, those guys who bitterly call into talk radio and cling to their pigskins and hoops tradition. There are a lot of those guys, but will they still be around in 50 years? Roth’s eye census–taken at MLS games–says that they’re not the future. Will Smith in I, Robot told him so!

“The way America is changing in its ethnicity — becoming more Latino and African American — is going to make soccer a major sport in the same way those ethnic shifts are helping Obama. Soccer’s fastest growth is in liberal, better-educated cities, places like Seattle, Portland, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal and Los Angeles. All you have to do is look at the MLS crowds — they’re young, they’re noisy and they’re not that different from the youthful spirit you’d see at an Obama rally.”

Wow. We now know we’ve reached a new age in American politics. No, we’re not talking about the country possibly electing its first black president (although that’s huge). But the fact we’re able to speak openly about America and soccer in terms of a winning solution. (/wipes tear) We never thought we’d see the day.
Would Obama’s election make soccer a major league American sport? [LA Times]
Image [goalseattle.com]