This past Thursday, the USA men’s hockey team lost to the the Czech Republic 4-3 and was bounced from the World Cup of Hockey winless. But more than any reaction to the disappointing showing from Team USA, this news made me ask a simple question: Since when has there been a World Cup of Hockey? Now, I’ll admit that I am not an avid hockey fan, but as someone who keeps a finger on the pulse of the sports world entirely, this was the first I had heard of it. And this is not unreasonable of me.
This year’s tournament is the third ever, but the last time one took place was in 2004. Starting with this year, however, the World Cup of Hockey is set to take place every four years, presumably in an effort to elevate the sport’s presence at the international level.
Seeing this reminded me of the World Baseball Classic, a similar event started in 2006 with the same motive. In both cases, it seems these tournaments are attempts to make a sport popular at the professional level, and create an environment of worldwide competition. They seem to be taking their cues from soccer, which has successful, high-level pro leagues in many countries, and whose FIFA World Cup is one of the most-watched sporting events in the world.
It is too early to say with any authority whether or not this World Cup of Hockey has been successful in drawing an audience, but I believe it is safe to say that it and the World Baseball Classic have a long way to go before they can approach the status of the FIFA World Cup.
Why wouldn’t an international hockey or baseball tournament leave a mark as much as the FIFA World Cup does? The first thing that comes to mind is that soccer’s popularity actually encompasses the entire earth, while hockey and baseball have certain pockets, or regions, where the game is really big. For hockey, these are chiefly North America, Scandinavia and Russia; baseball has the United States, the Caribbean, parts of South America and East Asia. This means that the fields for these tournaments have traditionally been predetermined, whereas every country in the world gets to compete for a chance to be in the FIFA World Cup. This creates more international interest in the tournament overall.
By this logic, tournaments like the World Cup of Hockey and World Baseball Classic would at least be a big event in the areas of the world where that sport sees major popularity. And this is largely true. The World Baseball Classic has consistently been one of the highest-rated television events in Japan (the winner of two of the three tournaments) and other countries where baseball dominates in popularity. I would imagine the same is true of the World Cup of Hockey.
But in the United States, these events and ones like them have had trouble catching on. Is it because America isn’t interested in any event it can’t consistently win. America has won one of three Hockey World Cups and none of the three World Baseball Classics. The United States by nature seems to be a place where the experience of a sport itself is not enough — we need to dominate at every level of it.
But more than this, I believe this gap in popularity has to do with the fact that the United States is home to the top professional leagues in most sports. In both baseball and hockey, the American leagues are unquestionably the best by a significant margin, recruiting talent from all over the globe and generating unmatched revenue. This means that just by following their own domestic leagues, American sports fans can watch the best players in the world face off on a daily basis. In essence, we are spoiled.
In soccer, on the other hand, the most talented players in the world are spread out across the leagues of at least six or seven different countries. This means that the FIFA World Cup gives soccer fans the opportunity to see matchups between the world’s top players that they would not get to see in another setting, adding another angle of interest to the competition and making it a “must-see” event.
American sports fans do not get this opportunity from tournaments like the World Baseball Classic and World Cup of Hockey. To them, these are just ways to see the same players competing in different lineups. In this way, the preeminence of American professional leagues actually hurts the popularity of international competition for many of these sports.
Now maybe it’s unfair to take such a United States-centric view of these sports popular in foreign countries. But as such a dominant force in the world of athletics, the way a sport is viewed and consumed in America has a strong impact on the success it enjoys everywhere. And as an American sports fan, what these sports need is more parity from country to country at the professional club level.
This is not to say that American leagues should stop recruiting as much talent from abroad; it’s more of the opposite. The rest of the world needs to catch up. In simple terms, I am saying that an international tournament cannot magically turn a sport into a worldwide attraction. A “world cup” has to be a reflection of a game that has grown organically and become popular of its own accord. Nothing, not even national pride, can make people interested in a game except the fundamental appeal of the game itself.
