United StatesNov 19th 2011 edition

American soccer
The Becks effect

Major League Soccer’s big investment seems to have paid off

IF ALL goes to plan, on November 20th David Beckham will lift the Major League Soccer Cup and provide a storybook ending to his American adventure. The English soccer star has yet to deliver much on-field success, but LA Galaxy, the team that he joined on a record-breaking salary (for America) in 2007, has been dominant this year and enters the final as hot favourite. Victory will add to the clamour for him to sign a new deal, but the smart money is on Mr Beckham, 36, playing out what is left of his career back in Europe, perhaps for the Qatari-bankrolled Paris Saint-Germain.

When Major League Soccer (MLS) recruited Mr Beckham, it was more interested in what he could do off the field. Unlike any soccer player before him, the former Manchester United and Real Madrid midfielder had figured out how to commercialise his fame through a range of endorsements. Aspiring footballers might want to “bend it like Beckham”, but America's aspiring league wanted to brand it like him. The cost of doing so, some $250m, was spread evenly among the then 14 MLS teams (there are now 18 of them) rather than picked up just by LA Galaxy because the goal was to boost the standing in America of professional soccer as a whole, previously a poor relation to the country's indigenous sports.

When he arrived, Timothy Leiweke of Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns LA Galaxy, predicted that Mr Beckham would have “a greater impact on soccer in America than any athlete has ever had on a sport globally”. He has not done that. Yet MLS seems pleased with its investment, and not just because of the 600,000 shirts that Mr Beckham shifted in his first year alone or the record average attendances (7% up on last season) that the league has enjoyed this year. “David has been a huge catalyst in helping soccer make the paradigm shift to being cool,” says Will Chang, the owner of DC United, MLS's most successful team. Where once the best athletes would switch from soccer to other sports, such as American football, as they got older, due to a combination of the better prospects for enrichment and of dates with cheerleaders, now they say “David is making as much as Tom Brady” (an American football star), “he has a beautiful wife like Brady, and is photographed by the paparazzi, so they are more likely to keep playing soccer,” says Mr Chang.

Television viewing figures are rising only slowly from low levels, but Mr Beckham's star power has helped legitimise the league, encouraging other stars to follow (such as Thierry Henry of France) and leading to an influx of investment in new clubs in Seattle, Portland and, in Canada, Toronto and Vancouver. Certainly, this is a positive story at a time when some other American sports are flailing (the National Basketball Association is on strike, college football is mired in a paedophile scandal). If professional soccer really does take off, Mr Beckham may reap the benefit, assuming he takes up the option he negotiated in 2007 to buy an MLS team of his own.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "The Becks effect"

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