The British are coming, the British are coming

Well at least 2 of them.

In case you haven't heard the hype, David Beckham and his possibly more famous wife arrived in the US. Beckham recently signed to play with LA in the MLS. The US sports media is making a big deal about how huge this is for US soccer. Maybe I'm missing something here, but a player thats past his prime and barely playing for his national or club team in Europe is suddenly going to make Americans love soccer??

The truth is that soccer will never be a major spectator sport in the US. The size of its niche will fluctuate, but it will always be a niche sport. The one thing making soccer more popular is the number of Mexican immigrants for whom soccer is number 1 (have you seen the crowd distribution when the US plays Mexico in the US?).

As far as our players, too many people have the attitude that "the US should dominate soccer like it dominates other sports". But all sports are becoming more and more international, which hurts us. We're no longer the dominant basketball country, or even baseball. American tennis had its greats, but now our hopes lie with the Roddick who serves hard and shouldn't step on clay and Blake who just forgets how to play tennis every 3rd match. Hockey has never been our best sport. In fact the only thing we're still clearly the best at is American football, but we're pretty much the only ones playing.

Our national soccer team will never dominate the world scene (unless the government decides to ban every other sport), but we can strive to be consistently one of the top 15 countries, capable of beating anyone on a given day. We're obviously not there yet, but its doable, and in my opinion, David Beckham's presence will have little to no effect on this.