Lord Stanley's Cup is Gold with Envy

Hockey is dead. It's barely even arguable at this point. When I learned that the NHL was headed for Versus I was worried that it would tarnish any sort of sports credibility the PBR had built up on that network.

After the '06 World Cup was over my endangered species friend, a devoted hockey AND soccer fan, and I were discussing what would replace hockey as America's fourth sport. The only possible replacement we could come up with was soccer, even after considering the sad state of the MLS. (You can try this game at home, just don't give me MMA as an answer. I know it's huge, but it's a different animal entirely.)

Yesterday, that notion got a little bit of vindication with the report that Sunday's Gold Cup final between the US and Mexico drew a higher rating than the final game of the Stanley Cup. In a score befitting both sports, it was Soccer 2.5 Hockey 1.8.

Now that's not a huge margin--41% actually--but here's the kicker: that's only based on Univision's viewers. Forty-one percent more people watched a soccer game--a game that didn't mean a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things--in Spanish than watched hockey's championship on broadcast television. So we're not even counting those people, like myself, who watched on Fox Soccer.

What does this mean for the MLS? Probably nothing. Watching the national team and watching Real Salt Lake are two completely different things. For your average American, I would guess that rooting for the US, in the only underdog role we likely have left, is a very patriotic thing to do. But talking at length about the Texas-dominated Western Conference standings? Well that still feels like communism.

This is why international soccer hooked me and it looks to be working on a lot of others as well.