I've attended a lot of sporting events in my life. Basketball and volleyball games consumed the majority of my sports time but for a short spell, my mom (bless her soul), got us interested in soccer (futbol).
Now at the time I didn't have much appreciation for the game, let's face it, I was twelve. And on top of that, I was from the Midwest, specifically Nebraska.
Nebraskans are die-hard American football fans. We even built our stadium so that it alone dominates the Lincoln skyline. Little boys dream of one day playing for the Huskers. Every man, woman, and child owns some piece of Husker memorabilia while each fall thousands of fans make the pilgrimage from their homes to THE Homeland: Memorial Stadium.
So when the World Cup came around I expected a handful of fans to be interested in the game because that was about the number of fans that turned out for the games when I was 12.
What I found was that futbol is becoming popular in the Midwest. And I was behind on the times.
The sports bar in Lincoln, complete with Husker jerseys, pictures, and logos on all the tables, was packed with U.S. fans. In fact, I was informed, Lincoln was the starting point for a group of fans known as the American Outlaws which now spans the country cheering on U.S. futbol. Each tense moment in the U.S. v. Belgium game was met with cheers, jeers, and sighs. The tension was nearly as thick as a Husker game as blasphemous as that sounds.
In this city where American football is the epitome of Nebraska-ness, fans of every size and shape gathered to cheer on a team playing a sport popular the world over. The Midwest has caught futbol fever and I don't think it's going away.
Nebraska is changing, slowly but surely, and this change in sports taste reflects that. Whether it's in the big stadiums of Europe of the backyard games we played after VBS futbol is a popular sport.
