This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

When Sports Illustrated Senior Editor Mark Mravic, 46, interviewed for a job at the magazine in 1996, they asked him what he was interested in. He said “soccer,” to which the reply came: “Well, we really don’t do a lot of soccer.” More than a decade later he’s finally the soccer editor. Now will the coverage improve?

SI’s 2002 World Cup preview, in which Clint Mathis graced the cover and was heralded as the new face of American soccer, was the “least-read and third lowest-rated cover story measured since 1995.” Four years later, the 2006 World Cup preview “tied for 199th in readership out of 208 cover stories measured to date.” There has never been a feature profile of America’s present face, Landon Donovan, and the recent David Beckham cover story—“a big get” for the magazine—performed less than stellar with readers.

What’s a soccer-loving editor at the classic American sports magazine to do? TIAS sat down with Mravic in his SI office to discuss the past, present, and future of soccer in America Sports Illustrated.

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Mravic with his son, Branko, at the U.S.-Czech Republic game in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 2006.

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TIAS: You edited books before joining the wonderful and sadly short-lived magazine Inside Sports. Then you arrived at Sports Illustrated, first for “SI Presents,” which produces the commemorative issues, then to the front of book section “Scorecard,” and afterward college football. Now you are the NFL editor. Where does soccer come in?

MM: I have been kind of the stealth voice of soccer here for a while. Hank Hersch had been the soccer editor since I got here, and he recently moved up to assistant managing editor, so the thought was to bring me on to manage the coverage in the magazine, but Hank will still be heavily involved in what we do, guiding the coverage.

I was your classic soccer hater growing up. I played mostly baseball, but soccer was popular at my high school in New Haven, Connecticut. This was sort of the first wave in the 70’s when soccer seemed to be catching on. I think maybe soccer was happening in Connecticut more so than elsewhere, but I was always like, ‘Eh, it’s not American. I’m a baseball guy. It’s odd. It’s different.’ A lot of my friends played, so I wasn’t a serious antagonist like you see from a lot of people still today.

I remember the first game I watched was the 1982 World Cup. It was Germany-France, I think the semi-final where Germany came back from two goals down. I was watching on Univision with rabbit ear antennas and thinking, ‘Man, this is really cool.’ And gradually my interest grew from there. There wasn’t much happening with soccer in the States at the time, so it was mostly around World Cups when I would get back into it. As soccer became more accessible, my interest grew. I traveled around the U.S. for the 1994 World Cup—San Francisco, Washington—and somehow got stuck watching mostly Swiss games. But that is when I really started getting into it. I went to World Cup 2002 and 2006.

Soon after the 1994 World Cup you arrived at SI and MLS came into the market. Take me through soccer as a subject to cover at SI during your time.

I was actually living in LA when they hired me. Mexico played the U.S. in Pasadena as the first game of a double header which included a Galaxy game. Andrew Shue (from Melrose Place fame) played in that game, if it gives you an idea of the time. The Mexico game pulled like 100,000 people and maybe 20,000 stayed for the Galaxy. It was obvious that it was a start-up league, and the quality was not great, but it could have the makings of something.

When I interviewed at SI, they asked what I was really interested in, and I said soccer, and the Olympics, which I’m a big fan of too. They were like, “Well, we really don’t do a lot of soccer.” And we haven’t done a lot. We’ve done more over the past decade—since MLS has started—than we did the previous 40 years. It was World Cup previews and round-ups and maybe a brief review of the NASL when it was around. But it was an oddity, some sport foreigners play.

We’d do a preview of the MLS season. We covered the championship game for the first MLS season, which was when I worked for “SI Presents,” before I worked on the magazine. When I took over “Scorecard” (the front of book section) I would always try to sneak in soccer information. I was getting some news in there. Freddy Adu for instance. I think SI was the first national media to mention Freddy Adu. We did a little “Scorecard” thing that said his mother had turned down money from Inter Milan because Freddy was only 10 or something. That came from just me reading Big Soccer at the time, which is where Freddy was being talked about when he was 10—very below the public consciousness.

One thing we did do was what we call “Advanced Text.” It’s these pages that don’t go to everybody who subscribes to the magazine. They are demographically targeted for high income subscribers or whatever it might be. So it would go out to like 30 percent of subscribers—these extra pages of content for advertisers who wanted to reach this certain demographic. I was editing those pages too, so that is where a lot of our soccer was turning up–national team games or MLS stories that would not get into the main magazine. Our readership doesn’t have that demand. But the presumption was that these higher end subscribers may have a more expansive view of sports.

The obvious stories are always there. We covered Tim Howard when he went to Manchester United. That was a pretty obvious story. That is a story an American sports fan who may not be an avid soccer fan would still want to read. He’s an interesting guy; he has turrets syndrome; he’s going to the biggest club in the world.

And ESPN just got around to telling that story.

We still get pitched by freelancers. “You guys should do this story on Tim Howard.” Well, we did that a few years ago. Jay Demerit is another great story–one of those stories that kick around the hard core internet audience but don’t make it to the larger sports audience. Those stories are the ones that fall in our wheelhouse. You have to really sell soccer.

It has to be that obvious homerun of story.

Yeah, Hopefully it will take less of a sell in the coming years. Of all the sports that are vying for attention, underneath the NFL, MLB, and the NBA to a certain extent, I think soccer is in position for growth. The next generation of kids who are now coming into their 20’s and 30’s played it, have friends who played it; it’s not viewed as that sort of oddball, foreign thing anymore.

Magazines often take on the persona of the top editors, reflecting the coverage they want to see, the subjects they are interested in. Do you see that generational pro-soccer change on the staff—taking it as a slice of the American sporting audience?

Yeah. There is definitely a dividing line, which may be right about where I am. Between “I don’t know about it; I don’t want to know about it,” and others who are open to it even if they are not avid fans.

Sort of like the Kornheiser-Wilbon line if you watch soccer discussed on PTI?

Yeah, but no one here is as stridently outspoken against it as some others are out there. And the young reporters and editors are pitching soccer stories, traveling to the World Cup, paying attention. There is a real appreciation for it, and it has helped turn some of the older guys onto it. In that way it still has that exotic appeal to it. It’s different. It has an outsiders quality to the fan base. You wake up early on weekends to go watch games at bars with fans from all over the world. No other sport has those exotics attached to it.

On the other side from the editors, whose personal tastes obviously drive some of the coverage, you have the readership. How do you guys track that? How do you know soccer is not wanted or when will you know that soccer is ripe for the main magazine?

We do regular polls of readers. Every few weeks. They tell us how much of the magazine they have read, how much time they spent with each story, did they like the story, did they like the cover. We get a really good sense, as far as you can from a poll, what readers like and don’t and what they want. There is not a widespread soccer fan base who reads Sports Illustrated. There is a hardcore fan base that we hear from when we do soccer stories. “Thank god; thank you for doing soccer.” SI is supposed to be this big tent that covers all this stuff. You know the cover story we did on Beckham when he arrived to the Galaxy was a big get for us.

Grant Wahl’s story with the red carpet cover?

Yeah. It was a big coup for Grant to get sit-down time with Beckham. It was a big deal. We got the exclusive—he agreed not to do other media in the U.S. until our cover came out. And then we did the reader survey and it was not a well-received issue.

What were the newsstands sales for that issue compared to other covers?

Not special. Soccer does not move the needle on the newsstands. The NFL does, which is why we put it on the cover in June.

Or maybe another “Chosen One?”

This last one was baseball, which does well as a sport for us; basketball doesn’t do that well. The NFL rules and college football too. Sports Illustrated you come to realize is really a football readership.

Which goes along with the TV ratings.

That is true. We have, because of our tradition, been able to devote time to a certain kind of story, a feature on soccer like with Tim Howard, but the bread and butter is the NFL. I think we did a survey where 86 percent of our readers call themselves NFL fans. Maybe 60 percent for baseball and 40 basketball, and soccer was down there with tennis and horse racing around 15 or 20 percent.

Hockey in between those?

Hockey is down there too, but we have a tradition of covering hockey and within the magazine a strong hockey sense. Our former managing editor was from Boston and a hockey writer, so we covered a lot of hockey for a while. The stance that guys like Grant Wahl take, who are outside the magazine and don’t see the mix of stories every week, is that if soccer is there with horse racing and tennis, than why can’t we do as much soccer as those sports? And I don’t know. Hopefully we will get to that point, but again our past managing editors have been a hockey guy and a former junior tennis champion. So we did a lot of hockey and tennis. Terry McDonell, the managing editor now, played college football.

How do you go about selling the soccer stories to those editors?

I pitched a story when the Champions League was setting up, once we knew the four semifinalists. I set it up as “As you all well know, the biggest sporting event on the planet in May is not Yankees-Red Sox; it’s not the NBA finals; it’s not the Stanley Cup; it’s the Champions League.” I gave them story angles that could work depending on who made it in. If it was an all English final it could be about the international money flowing into the EPL. Is that good for soccer? Is that flow of money to one league good for the sport? That is a tough sell.

Yet a story I would love to read.

Yeah, if you took the time and resources to get into these shady Russian oligarchs and guys from the Middle East. It’s fascinating. I mean, what if the NFL had no salary cap now, what would it look like? Ok, so we could do that, or if Manchester United and Barcelona make it to the final we could set it up around the two best players in the world playing against each other. It’s Kobe v. Lebron for the rest of the world, Ronaldo v Messi. You have the prima donna and the little quiet kid brother or something. And that is the story we did. It was going to be a feature, and if Grant had been here it would have been easier to do as a feature story, but it ended up as a big preview in a column (Grant Wahl is finishing up a book sabatical in South Africa). I pitched it as, “This is what the American sports fan would like to see. It’s what is happening in the NBA but on a much bigger scale—everybody in the world will be watching.”

And if you are going to watch one soccer game every year…

Yes, this is the one you want to watch. What we had in the story that didn’t end up in the magazine because we had to trim it was the comparison of the two teams—the owners, the sponsors. When you broke it down like that there were some interesting aspects. You had AIG v Unicef. A hated American owner versus a club that gave some control to their fans. I wish that had run. But you try to tie it to the vernacular of the American sports fan. The Demerit story was this kid from Green Bay who had to claw his way to professional sports, which is a story that occurs in any sport and something American readers gravitate to.

The World Cup is not such a hard sell. It’s bigger than the Olympics in my opinion, and it’s understood we will be covering it. We do a fairly decent-sized preview and follow stories and personalities that that we can pick up as the games approach or ones that show up once they start. I think some eyes were really opened during the last World Cup when the numbers were just through the roof on the website. It’s funny, because SI.com is pretty well respected as a soccer website. There is a whole different thing going on there—soccer is viewed as any other sport and focused on readers who are already fans. In the magazine we are always asking, “Ok, how much does the reader know, what do we have to explain? Do we have to explain the World Cup qualifying process?”

Does the website’s success hurt soccer’s inclusion in the magazine—the thought being that, “Well, let’s just put it on the website where people can find it” as opposed to potentially shoving it down the throats of the print readers?

I don’t think so. I think it plays off fairly well. We would not likely do a really in depth profile-type piece on the website. The magazine still has better resources than the website does to travel to Europe to do a Jozy Altidore story or something. That would go in the magazine, because at the moment at least, the magazine still has the financial resources to do a big story like that. Travel for the website is often done in conjunction with what the magazine is doing in order to share costs. For the USA-Honduras game, for instance, Jonah Friedman will file for the website occasionally from Chicago and then write a column about the game for the print magazine. During the World Cups that is the case as well. All the writers will write for the web on top of their print assignments. We try to exploit the resources and talent as much as we can, which goes for any sport.

Is there a situation where the website becomes the dump for stories assigned for the magazine that for whatever reason don’t run?

It happens, but the website obviously doesn’t want to be the dump. Frankly there used to be a lot more stuff we assigned for the magazine that didn’t get in. We’ve been a lot more selective because we have to due to budget restraints, so that doesn’t happen as much anymore. It’s more a sharing of resources than it is a secondary outlet.

How do you balance that need to have someone on the ground and the costs it requires. With technological advances and dwindling financial resources for news outlets, that seems to be a big question, especially for sports journalism.

It’s hard. Obviously you would always like someone on the ground. If Jonah Friedman had not been at the USA-Honduras we probably wouldn’t do anything on it. But to be on the scene for the magazines purposes, you need someone who can report on that scene and teach us something about the game or atmosphere. And hopefully you get some good quotes before or after the game that you had to be there to get and that readers would not have otherwise gotten.

That color to add to a story.

Yeah, but it is tough. We still send people to the big events, but we don’t send as many. Instead of people going to Australia for four weeks to cover the Australian Open, maybe we send one person to the final. We are not sending someone to the World Track Championships for the first time this year. There is no question the content and readers suffer, but you have to pick and choose as wisely as you can to serve the widest number of readers.

One of my football writers has gotten to know Larry Fitzgerald pretty well over the years, and it’s almost an SI tradition that the star of the Super Bowl, whether from the winning or losing team, is featured in the off-season. We did it with Hines Ward when he went to Korea. It was a really nice story—discovering his roots there with his mom. So Larry Fitzgerald was going to Africa for like three weeks. It would be pretty cool to tag along with Larry through Africa, but we ran the numbers, and in the end we couldn’t justify it in this economic climate. Hopefully things turn around for those kind of stories. We still do the long think pieces in SI.

That was my next question. We talked previously about how blogs sort of took from the magazine front of book section, in your case “Scorecard,” and ran with it on the internet. Not the content, but the idea about what those sections provide to readers. Given that and the fact that SI has a stable of well-connected and talented writers, does that give you more energy to concentrate on those longer features and maybe give them more space in the magazine? Or is it still a matter of “people don’t want to read long stories?”

It’s a huge debate, and has been a big debate at SI since the advent of television. How much we covered as compared to what is on TV, ESPN, SportsCenter, and now what’s online. I’d like to think there is a place for SI’s kind of journalism where cultivating a relationship with an athlete means something in order to have them open up for those sort of stories. It’s not about “We’re friends with Larry Fitzgerald and you are not.” There is value in spending time and having a background of 20 years covering a beat and being around players. And I read Deadspin and Big Soccer and love all of those things, but there is a foundation for all of those websites based on what is happening on the ground at newspapers and magazines. That still drives a lot of the discussion, and there is still a place for that kind of reportage.

But we still do the front of the magazine which is funny and interesting, and polled readers love charts and graphs and lots of bits of interesting information. But those quick takes on things, the funny and snarky impressions are everywhere now. I think a substantial number of writers at the magazine would rather tell stories, so we should write more stories. But the magazine shrunk. We were doing a 112-page magazine and now it is 80 and 84 and 70 pages depending on the amount of ads we get in. When the pages are shrinking the question is, where is the strength of Sports Illustrated? It’s always been in this sort of storytelling and pictures, and we have to devote the space to them. It’s definitely a tough balancing act.

There are internet threads devoted to “what’s wrong with SI” and “I cant believe they are doing this.” Half the people say they don’t want any of it and half say they want more of it. That’s what we learn in the polls as well. Some people don’t want us covering a game that happened on Sunday if they aren’t reading about it until Thursday. And the other half complain when it is not there. “The Jets played the Bills on Sunday. Where is that story?” There is still the reader who wants the validation. It’s like the Jerry Seinfeld joke: why do people read the sports page if they saw the game? You just want to be able to say, “Yeah I saw that too.”

What’s the one soccer story you’d like to see?

One we’re working on… well, we’ve been bitten in the past by sort of “this is the next big guy in American soccer.” Clint Mathis was on the cover before the 2002 World Cup. We touted Eddie Johnson, who had an interesting story, a black kid from football country in Florida finds his way to the national team—why is he playing soccer? It’s a good story but he ended up washing out. Freddy Adu. But now we have Jozy to pin all of our hopes on! Like I said, the younger reporters are pitching stories and someone is pitching a Jozy Altidore story. And there is Giuseppe Rossi, who has an interesting story, and plays for the same club as Jozy—if Jozy goes back and actually plays for Villarreal. So we might do something on both of them as one story. I think the story of two Jersey boys could be a good one, together in Spain but playing for different national teams.

There is a bigger picture story about why Americans have yet to develop a world class player. That is the one thing—and I don’t know if you could answer it. Barcelona has a guy from Iceland. Manchester United has a Korean starting the Champions League final. Where’s our guy? Is it the instruction? The coaching? The competitiveness? I don’t know if there is a story there, but that is the question I have. Why hasn’t there been a world class player come from the U.S., and will there be one sometime soon? It’s impossible to answer but really curious.

I’ve been trying to find that answer for years now.

It’s impossible.

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