David Beckham Statue Disappears, but Media Coverage does not

By: Bob | July 10th, 2007

We’re into the homestretch of the prelude of the great David Beckham coming to America saga, which means that the people who get paid to punch out words for a living are working overtime to reproduce the same story over and over again. I believe if you hit “F7″ on your keyboard it will automatically produce a story about how Americans don’t like soccer, which is true because the first phrase we all learn growing up is “soccer is boring.”

Want to know why American soccer fans have an inferiority complex? It is because we have to constantly defend ourselves from attacks from both home and abroad. We have to defend the sport to our fellow Americans and we have to defend the level of play in the US and our level of soccer knowledge to everyone else. I’m resigned to the fact that this won’t change in my lifetime and I expect to live forever.

My favorite take on the totally expected Beckham media madness comes from It’s a Simple Game which points out that it is weird having a league that has been ignored for more than a decade suddenly in a manufactured, carefully crafted spotlight. A lot of MLS fans have wanted the league to get attention, but is this the attention they really want? I’m not so sure. Sometimes authentic obscurity beats inauthentic popularity, or at least that is what I told myself as an authentic high school outcast.

While the Madison Avenue marketing folks can steal our league, they can’t steal the Beckham statue. That has already been nicked. There must be a big black market for soccer statues.

T-minus four more days until the great unveiling in LA….