Soccer might be the most popular sport in the world, but for decades,

Americans have managed to resist its charm. Their attention has been

focused, of course, on the big three American sports: baseball,

football and basketball. And while soccer is rapidly gaining popularity

among younger Americans, the older generation remains detached from the

game, even when the rest of the world is glued to TV screens watching

the 2006 World Cup matches.

It’s not as though soccer is a stranger to American shores. The U.S.

national soccer team played in the first World Cup in 1930. But from

the start, the game had an image for many Americans as an immigrant

sport. Still soccer began to attract more attention in the United

States after the 1974 World Cup.

The following year, the country got its first professional soccer

teams, with the launch of the North American Soccer League. The New

York Cosmos became the league’s flagship franchise when it acquired a

stellar roster of players from 16 different countries, including the

Brazilian soccer legend Pele, the high-scoring Italian great Georgio

Chinagalia, and German superstar Franz Beckenbauer. By 1977, attendance

at American soccer games had grown to a record 62,000.

Peppe Pinton, a veteran soccer player and the executive director of the

Cosmos soccer camps, likes to recall those golden days when American

fans packed the stadiums to watch some of the world’s best soccer

players — most of them playing on the same team. “Americans are used

to watch winners,” Pinton says. “Americans are used to watch

superstars, great players in all sports, and they are not settling for

inferiority. The Cosmos team was not successful in the early years, but

it was successful when those players came here.”

People lined up to get into the stadium like they would line up to get

into a popular restaurant, Pinton says. “People attracted people. And

the Cosmos made this happen all over the U.S.,” he says. “It drew

record crowds in Seattle, in Miami, in Tampa, Boston, in Chicago and

then they went all over the world. They went even into China when

nobody was reaching China those years.”

But for 40 years, the U.S. was unable to qualify for World Cup games

because most of the players on its soccer teams were not American

citizens. Finally, in 1990, with enough home-grown or naturalized

players on its rosters, the U.S. was able to field a World Cup team.