Many boys in Mexico grow up dreaming of playing soccer in that country’s big leagues. In Chicago, a lot of young Mexican soccer players share that dream, and are lining up for a chance to play south of the border. Scouts from Mexican professional teams are traveling here to poach some of the area’s young players.
Continue here: http://www.wbez.org/Content.aspx?audioID=43111
Soccer’s growth in popularity in the U.S. can be seen and measured at high schools across the country. Read my post on the topic at The New Republic’s soccer blog, Goal Post:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/world-cup/75903/the-other-reason-soccer-keeps-growing
Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein picked up a paragraph from the Goal Post interview and posted it here, prompting a lively discussion from readers.
The complete url:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/06/why_arent_there_more_mexican-a.html
Seen The New Republic’s soccer blog, Goal Post? This thing started a week ago and it is already the best short-form soccer blog I’ve seen. Run by Franklin Foer (How Soccer Explains the World), Goal Post is intelligent, literary, and relevant not just to soccer fans. And I’m not saying that just because they called Boys “a great book.”
Jesse Zwick from Goal Post interviewed me about Boys late last week. The Q and A was posted today. You can see it here:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/world-cup/75440/latinos-and-us-soccer
A recent change to the website Goal.com explains why soccer in the U.S. is going to be a permanent fixture in our sporting world, and why ESPN is putting so much money into promoting the sport this summer. Hispanic-Americans are a valuable market for advertisers to reach. The simplest way to consider whether soccer will ever compete for market share with the big three team sports in the U.S. is by asking whether there is a soccer audience that advertisers want to reach. There is, and that audience is growing. The more growth we see in Latino populations in the U.S., the more important soccer will become. Is soccer ever going to be big in America? It already is.
http://www.hispanicmarketweekly.com/featureArticle.cms?id=1643
