How North American Journalists Are Trying To Spoil Football For Us All

With the FIFA U-20 tournament and David Beckham pushing football into the North American media limelight, it's interesting to see how sports writers are undermining the growth of the biggest sport in the world in what has been a perpetual backwater.

Exhibit A: The article published in the L.A. Times on July 13 by award winning writer Bill Plaschke.

Clearly, Plaschke is not much of a football fan. He spends much of the piece portraying Beckham as a sideshow amidst the other, more worthy, more American stories flying under the radar because of a "celebrity" not an athlete. At the same time, Plaschke shows that on this day he's not much of a reporter either.

His opening dig at Beckham involves pondering why the new L.A. Galaxy midfielder took so long to come to his new home. The Spanish season ended almost a month ago, Plaschke points out.

Uhhh, Bill, I think that he was still in Madrid because they still owned him. Unlike North American sport, where free agency occurs on a set date for all players, Football contracts have varying termination dates. Yes many of these dates are the end of June, but Beckham's ended in July. He arrived in L.A. when he was no longer employed by his previous club.

That doesn't seem unreasonable to me, but seemed to escape the venerable Mr. Plaschke.

Exhibit B: Where are the stories?

If Toronto FC play a mid-week game, particularly out of town, a sports section is likely to run a inch long brief about the result at most. Pundits on the radio or TV will then talk about how football doesn't capture their or the general public's imagination like the domesticated sports.

How do you generate interest if there is no outlet to spread the word about football? 20,000 people go out to BMO field every game, and that's at least 20,000 people who would read an actual story about TFC, not to mention stories or at least briefs about other MLS teams. Fans are cultivated by learning about a league, not just one team.

Yes, highlights on the nightly wrap shows on TV help, but the context that is provided by well written news stories is invaluable.

Exhibit C: News is not made, it happens.

Just because the 40 - 60 year-old writers who dominate the sports writing industry dislike "soccer," doesn't mean it can be ignored. More people play football in Canada than any other sport, and by a large margin at that. This means there are thousands of football stories out there. Go find them. That's your job.

Stephen Brunt of the Globe & Mail is an exception to this trend. He also happens to be the best sportswriter in Canada and one of the best on this continent. Many of his colleagues would do well to follow his example.

A new player comes to TFC or a young Canadian player goes overseas, interview them. This is news. Simply ignoring this sport because you've been coddled on a strict diet of American football, baseball, hockey and basketball doesn't mean you're right. Editors and journalists not paying attention to the world's game is a failure of the profession.

Fortunately there are great online outlets for Canadian and American football fans. We can only hope that the mainstream will catch up some day with the rest of us.