From the President’s Desk: Is your next big idea waiting on the sidelines?
Evidence suggests that primates first began to walk upright 3-4 million years ago, but our idea of the “modern” human – one who collaborates, uses tools, and lives as part of society – only showed up about 300,000 years ago.
It likely wasn’t long after that when early peoples started searching for ways to entertain themselves. Sitting around and tossing rocks back and forth were simple, natural pastimes for fun. Fast forward hundreds of thousands of years, and today we still have the pastime of throwing and catching objects, but today, we call them “sports”!
While baseball (probably invented in the mid-1800s) is the sport that has captured America’s heart for centuries, another sport is making headlines this summer: soccer. Baseball sounds old at 200 years, but because soccer requires no equipment (just a ball and agreement of what constitutes various parts of the field), it’s theorized to be one of the earliest sports ever played by humans. Famous derivatives like the ball games of the Mayan civilization are thought to have stemmed from early soccer matches.
This year, North America will be hosting the ultimate soccer competition: the 2026 World Cup.
In the United States, soccer has never had the front stage. Our “American” version of football, played with hands instead of feet, has dominated national conversation for decades, and is so ubiquitous it’s seen as a symbol of the U.S.
But soccer is on the rise. Soccer viewership and participation have grown in popularity in the U.S. for more than five decades. Most kids in my generation played organized soccer in the 1990s, even if we never played American football. America’s professional soccer format, Major League Soccer (MLS), was officially launched in 1996. And certainly, no one can miss the headlines of this decade’s U.S. soccer fans: faces painted, decked in scarves, and singing at the top of their lungs – or in rarer cases, like the 2024 Copa América final, violently forcing their way into stadiums uninvited. U.S. soccer viewership and support are truly at a fever pitch!
Elsewhere in the world, soccer has been steadily in the public eye for hundreds of years – maybe not continuously since those early hominids, but almost. Iconic players whose names still dominate the record books, like Argentina’s Maradona, Brazil’s Pelé, and the USSR’s goalkeeper Yashin, were at the peak of their careers back in the ‘80s, ‘70s, and ‘60s – decades before any popularity in the U.S. Messi, who’s made U.S. headlines since signing with Inter Miami in 2023 (and who could possibly play the last tournament game of his career this year) actually started breaking soccer records around 2009.
With today’s all-out passion for soccer, it seems crazy that a sport ignored by Americans for decades is now so popular. And its popularity seems here to stay. North America’s hosting of the World Cup confirms that, with millions of fans expected to travel to cheer on their favorite teams and some estimates projecting $30 billion in economic activity on U.S. soil! The sport has inspired many young people to start playing and has brought many adults together around a shared sense of pride, community and competition. From stadium construction and merchandise sales to media rights and video games, soccer has generated billions of dollars and thousands of jobs for the U.S. economy — not to mention inspiration for millions of fans watching from home and in the stands.
There are many reasons soccer took so long to gain a foothold in the U.S., and we could spend an entire day unpacking them. But the story of soccer leads me to a much larger question: What else in our lives could be incredible, but gets overlooked simply because it feels foreign to us?
The soccer stars from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s left a mark on American culture, even if the sport wasn’t yet widely embraced. Is there something in your life that caught your attention recently, but that you may have brushed off after just one glance?
The first organized attempt at pro soccer in the U.S. actually came in 1920 – right at the wrong time for the economy. Have you recently had or heard a great idea that could bear fruit if the timing were better?
In 1999, the Columbus Crew pioneered the first soccer-specific stadium in the U.S. But it wasn’t until the 2020s that other cities fully jumped in, with 22 of 30 MLS teams now playing in dedicated stadiums built around the sport. In your sphere, is someone else working on an innovative project you could support early, or pioneering an idea you could build on and make stronger?
Companies like Adidas are long-standing sponsors of the MLS, but in the recent decade, partnerships including ESPN and Apple have driven viewership and revenue to new heights. What’s the power of partnering in your arena, and could it open you up to new ideas or opportunities?
Early hominids constantly challenged themselves through innovation, and those efforts led to massive change. Pushing ourselves into new territory can be uncomfortable, but one way to make it easier is to set aside biases and preconceptions, allowing the best ideas to stand on their own merit. Soccer took a long time to gain a foothold here. What ideas in your own life could benefit from getting started sooner rather than later?
