Soccer in the United States

The ABC Clarion blog will now be publishing some articles from ABC Clarion members. We will mostly be publishing very short or very long articles that would be difficult to fit on to the ABC Clarion print newspaper page and some articles on current events that may no longer be relevant or up to date by the time ABC Clarion can publish them. 

Our first ABC Clarion blog article is by Daniel Zheng, an ABC Clarion member. 
Please feel free to send in articles for the blog to clarionabc@gmail.com. We look forward to receiving your submissions and publishing more on the blog soon! 

Soccer in the United States

    Soccer seems to have found a foothold in this nation of die-hard football and baseball fans. Amidst Team USA’s strong performance at the 2014 World Cup, Americans seem to be more interested than ever before in soccer.

    For a country with a population that mostly watches soccer every 4 years, the US is doing surprisingly well, having made it past the group stage of the World Cup and into the knockout rounds. The Round of 16 means “only 4 wins from glory”, says NY News Daily.Though Major League Soccer has not been very popular, with the 2013 final garnering only 505,000 TV viewers, Team USA’s game against Portugal set a record as the most-viewed soccer match in the US of all time, with an average of 18.2 million viewers.

    Also worth noting is that the popular social network Twitter recently broke a record for simultaneous tweets during a sporting event. The previous record was 382,000 tweets were sent just after the Seattle Seahawk's Percy Harvin returned a kickoff for a touchdown during Super Bowl XLVIII. Nearly 389,000 tweets were generated after Chilean defender Gonzalo Jara’s penalty kick hit the post and allowed Brazil to pass through the Round of 16 once again.

    Will the 2014 World Cup finally ignite a massive US soccer following comparable to that of football and baseball? That remains to be seen.