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New Changes in the Soccer World

autumnlphillips
Nov 15, 2017
2 min read

Pro teams in Soccer all over the world compete against each other to see who is the best across the nation. With either soccer (or futbol) many teams love the energy and fans that go into making their games so successful and worth the hype. In 1998, the United States was awarded the privilege of hosting the 1994 FIFA World Cup, this was huge for the U.S because

they hadn’t qualified for a World Cup in 38 years! FIFA was a huge honor to have and even host, because everyone would be watching this game and showing their support to each team coming together to play the game they love. MLS has changed a lot since the beginning of its start, and a lot of teams that started off, are no more, vice versa with newer teams. I am going to talk about many things that MLS has changed, or switched up.

One of the major differences that has changed, is that Instead of an upward counting game clock, MLS decided to count down from 45 minutes at the beginning of each half. The clock stopped during dead ball situation, so there was no stoppage time. Another major difference is that for penalty shootouts, the player taking the penalty would start 35 yards out and have five seconds to run toward the goal with the ball. The keeper would come fully out of the net in an attempt to stop the penalty shot.

In these times, other sports may be dominating in the sports industry rather than Soccer. Why is that? We are seeing that this millennial audience we have now that are about 30 years and under, don’t know very much about the MLS. Most of the older generations grew up with the traditional game, and can understand it better. We want growth in the MLS and we want more people to understand it even more. Since 2015, the MLS viewership is actually up all around the world. A variety of new agreements and partnerships with big time media like FOX, ESPN, and Univision gave the league much more exposure than in the past decades.

According to Twitter, the Even better, the gross viewership was 17.3 million among the coveted 18-49-year-old demographic, accounting for a 25% increase over 2014 among that group. As long as we can keep these numbers growing and steady, we should have no problem with Soccer becoming just as popular and televised as American Football, or the MLB. I believe there could be more sports marketing behind the scenes with Soccer, or even Futbol, and this will lead to more attendance at these soccer games.