Longtime American soccer executive Peter Wilt (formerly Chicago Fire and Chicago Red Stars and now with the indoor Milwaukee Wave) projects the near-term landscape of the sport in the United States, and what it may look like in 2020.

My favorite (albeit tongue-in-cheek) scenario Wilt saves for last:

“American newspapers will all have soccer beat reporters writing regular features, columns and analysis….ok, just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.  This prediction of course is a joke, because we all know that there will be no daily newspapers in ten years.”

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

The bottom line is this: The sport’s in far better shape than the moaners claim. Wilt’s key insight — and one that should become obvious to anyone watching ESPN’s ubiquitous World Cup coverage this summer — is that:

“Media and society are mainstreaming soccer at unparalleled rates. Soccer bashing media members have been replaced with soccer knowledgeable journalists. American television and the internet have provided unprecedented forums for soccer coverage and discussion.”

This is probably the most dramatic development in American soccer in the 15 years since I first began covering the sport, and this will continue to proliferate even more rapidly in the coming years.

We’ve gone from soccer still being regarded in the mainstream as an exotic, “foreign” endeavor to one that’s getting nearly daily highlight play on “SportsCenter,” just to name one example.

(Although I don’t get why no American accents are allowed on ESPN’s World Cup announcing crews. To be sure, the Worldwide Leader is trying to impress others around the globe with its presence in South Africa, but this is a significant snub.)

As Wilt says, “the world is getting smaller.” For the growing, once-isolated world of American soccer, this is a very good thing.

There’s only one place in Atlanta where soccer fans can watch Saturday’s critical World Cup qualifier between the U.S. and Honduras.

Fado Atlanta, located at 247 Buckhead Ave. (near the intersections of Peachtree and West Paces Ferry), will be that nirvana. It’s one of the city’s top soccer watering holes as it is, but for unexplained reasons, the Brewhouse Café is not showing the game on its premises in Little Five Points.

The complicated story behind the decision by the Honduran federation to sell only close-circuit availability is here, and Yahoo’s Martin Rogers doesn’t hesitate to blame American soccer marketers for letting it reach this point:

“As is always the case with bureaucratic pileups of this nature, a swathe of finger pointing and insinuation has ensued. In reality, though, the primary fault lies with U.S. Soccer and Soccer United Marketing, the subsidiary company which owns its commercial rights.”

The U.S. can qualify for the World Cup in San Pedro Sula, a four-hours’ trips from Tegucigalpa and one of the most difficult venues on the continent. And even when there’s not a political crisis like the one that has consumed Honduras in recent months.

And then there was the so-called “Soccer War” that involved Honduras.

It was Conyers native Clint Mathis who etched an indelible moment in American soccer history eight years ago in San Pedro Sula. Another Atlantan, Ricardo Clark, gets ready for his first trip.

Game time is 10 p.m. ET, but given the nature of Buckhead traffic in general, and on Saturday evening in particular, getting to Fado with plenty of lead time is highly recommended.

The teams were mediocre — lousy, even — and so was the match. Except for one crackling moment in the second half when Atlanta’s own Ricardo Clark pounced on a loose ball just outside the penalty area and thumped it in the net.

The shot by the former AFC Lightning and St. Pius X star proved to be the only goal of the game as the U.S. improved its World Cup chances Wednesday with a 1-0 win over Trinidad & Tobago.

Associated Press

If you need your player ratings fix, here you go. Clark, Landon Donovan and Tim Howard won’t get many detractors as men of the match.

The meme coming out of Port-of-Spain, and one that sums up how the Yanks look overall, is that three points are three points. Another World Cup berth is virtually in the books as the U.S. has a slim lead at the top of the CONCACAF qualifying table.

In the coming weeks and months, there will continue to be much that is written about the mediocrity of the U.S. team, and how just getting to the World Cup isn’t good enough any more. I do largely agree with this thesis, but for the time being some proper perspective is needed. Beyond accepting the reality that the Americans are who they are, and that they grow up in a country that develops players quite differently than the world powers of the sport. That is a subject for another time.

It was nearly 20 years ago at the very same Hasely Crawford Stadium that a goal by Paul Caligiuri — the so-called Shot Heard ‘Round the World — ended a 40-year World Cup drought for the Americans. Clark’s goal was strikingly similiar in many ways, and perhaps years from now we’ll look at his shot as important in its own way: That it likely has kept alive a World Cup streak vital to the continued development of the game in America. Such as it is.

It sure beats what Argentinians are thinking this morning.

With Saturday’s massive World Cup qualifier in his adopted home town, former U.S. national team forward Clint Mathis went down memory lane with Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, who famously dubbed the Conyers native “Cletus” for his Southern iconoclasm. It’s a nickname that stuck as he became an American soccer folk hero for an all-too-brief spell earlier this decade.

When the Yanks meet El Salvador in Salt Lake City facing the possibility of missing out on the World Cup altogether, I’ll be thinking of the inventiveness Mathis demonstrated, his instinctive playfulness that is a virtue in soccer around the world but all too rare in the development of the game in America. It’s a quality that is glaringly missing from Bob Bradley’s current team, which features Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey and a promising attacker in Jozy Altidore but otherwise has one thinking “work rate:”

“Not since Reyna retired has an American shown his cleverness at varying the pace and direction and rhythm of possession by holding the ball as well as running with it or passing it. Calmness and patience and diversity in attack, especially against a bunkered-in opponent, is still hit-or-miss. Having a lot of the ball doesn’t guarantee a lot of success.”

If Mathis had been able to blend his innate skills with better discipline, we might not be thinking of him now as a could-have-been. He parlayed his international success into a disastrous spell with Germany’s Hannover, where he contemptuously dropped his shorts after being put into a game by a coach who rarely played him. He’s settled down now, a husband and a father, still enjoying a respectable career in Major League Soccer at the age of 32.

The memories shouldn’t haunt, but might perhaps inspire a younger generation of American players riding an exasperating roller coaster this summer. Humiliation at Costa Rica, victory over No. 1-ranked Spain, agony at the hands of Brazil after going up two goals early, leaving it late against Mexico at Azteca. And now, needing three points against lowly El Salvador to stay out of the CONCACAF danger zone.

The searing free kick goal Mathis scored in San Pedro Sula to down Honduras during this very same stage in qualifying eight years ago was one of the defining moments of recent U.S. soccer history. Then there was the goal against co-hosts South Korea in the 2002 World Cup. When asked days before the game about the unpredictability of Mathis, then-U.S. coach Bruce Arena sheepishly told reporters: “Clint could show up for the game bald for all I know.”

Cletus' finest moment, albeit a fleeting one

So Cletus went out and got himself a Mohawk instead.

In the clanging hothouse of Daegu, Mathis was cool and precise under pressure. The Americans got a vital point against a South Korean side riding the euphoria of tens of thousands of youths joyously gathering in the streets, all over the country. It was hard to tell which was louder: the deafening thundersticks in the stadiums, or the marching, chanting and viewing parties on big screen TVs in downtown Seoul.

Mathis’ goal was pure brilliance, and so was the service:

“I just remember Johnny O’Brien played a phenomenal ball. But what I’ll remember most telling my grandchildren is, you couldn’t hear anything during the game. There were 65,000 home fans screaming. You couldn’t hear each other ask for the ball. And when I scored that goal, you could hear a pin drop. It was a really cool feeling. In sports, people always like to get the crowd up and to hear your fans, but in my opinion, there’s no better feeling than to silence a crowd.”

He was maddeningly inconsistent, and he’s honest with Wahl in explaining some of his regrets. But the combination of fearlessness and free play that was crafted on hardscrabble ground in Rockdale County, and against ruthless older brothers, gave Mathis the confidence to reach an exalted place in world sports. His perspective now, offered to his successors, is both instructive and hopeful:

“You don’t need to really be peaking now. You need to qualify for the World Cup but you need to be peaking next summer . . . It’s just about the timing. Hopefully this new era of kids can withstand the pressure, because it is a lot of pressure. You’ve got a billion people watching you. I can’t think of any other sport that has that. It’s crazy to even fathom.”

What’s billed as one of the largest youth tournaments in the United States gets underway all around the metro area Saturday as the Atlanta Cup swings into action through Labor Day.

Here’s the complete schedule of games, venues, teams and other information. More than 600 youth teams will be in action, as well as a handful of women’s teams in the first year that the Atlanta Cup has been open to adult teams.

In addition to being the biggest fundraiser for Georgia Soccer, the Atlanta Cup is an integral part of Atlanta’s bid for a World Cup venue. One of the factors examined by the U.S. Soccer Federation is community support.

Georgia Soccer executive director Rick Skirvin said petitions in support of Atlanta’s bid will be available at the Atlanta Cup venues. Players, parents and fans will be encouraged to make videos, among other things, to show their support. Atlanta is one of 27 remaining cities in the mix for inclusion in the USSF’s bid to play host to the World Cup in either 2018 or 2022.

“These efforts will be going on beyond this weekend,” Skirvin said. “It’s a chance to see how strong the local interest is. What is clear is that Atlanta is capable of handling major sporting events. What is unclear is how big a soccer community we have and how far our reach is.”

Georgia Soccer was involved in promotional efforts for the AC Milan-Club América World Football Challenge match at the Georgia Dome that drew 50,000 spectators in July. Like a June match, also at the Dome, that featured Mexico and Venezuela, spectators came from around the state and the Southeast.

Jürgen Maika of the USA Bid Committee said he got “a very good feel and understanding of the city” when visiting during the World Football Challenge, but spoke in general terms about what prospective bidding cities needed to do to show community support. Atlanta’s experience during the so-called “Summer of Soccer” in North America, he said, was not uncommon.

“What we saw in Atlanta is a clear example of what we have seen around the nation,” he said. “There is a passion for the game, greater than what people might imagine. There’s a sense of soccer being elevated to having a much stronger social consciousness in the States. It gives us a sense of relief that we know how to host large events. Our cities are well-prepared for this.”

Maika said another trip to Atlanta is not scheduled before the bid committee pares down its list of potential venues to 18 cities by the end of the year because visits to other sites still need to be made.

The U.S. Soccer Federation has whittled down its working list of cities and venues bidding for World Cup venues for 2018 or 2022, and Atlanta is among the 27 cities and 32 venues reaching the next phase of the process.

Among those bidders from the Southeast not making the cut: Birmingham, Fayetteville, Knoxville, New Orleans.

Still in the picture: Charlotte, Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami, Nashville, Tampa.

The USSF ultimately will submit around a dozen finalists when it formalizes its proposal to FIFA next May.

Here’s one soccer blogger’s rundown of the field. He puts Atlanta in the “near-lock” category.

But not everyone in Atlanta is working for a successful U.S. bid. An Atlanta-based consultancy, Helios Partners, has been hired to help craft Russia’s bid for the World Cup, also for either 2018 or 2022.

But a caveat here: Helios worked with Russia for its winning bid for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

Even before he confidently predicted victory in a place the U.S. national team has never won (more on that in a moment) Ricardo Clark was priming for what figures to be the biggest game of his budding soccer career.

When the Americans take on Mexico Wednesday at the forbidding Estadio Azteca in a colossal World Cup qualifying match (4 p.m., mun2, Telemundo) the former AFC Lightning club and St. Pius X standout is a likely candidate to be in Bob Bradley’s starting squad.

After numerous fits and starts that have included injuries and disciplinary issues (including a red card in the Confederations Cup), Clark has recovered nicely this summer to raise his game and his profile.

His play in South Africa, filling in at defensive midfield for an injured Maurice Edu, earned him some interest overseas, including an offer from Livorno of Italy’s Serie A that he may accept by the end of the year.

And Clark’s form is cresting for Major League Soccer powerhouse Houston Dynamo, as he scored his first goal of the season over the weekend.

With the U.S. needing three points to virtually seal another trip to the World Cup — and potentially slay the aspirations of its fiercest rival — Clark sounded quite ready for the challenge when he proclaimed: “It’ll be a great experience, and it’ll be nice to beat Mexico on their soil.”

No pressure at all, mate.

The Americans will probably be soaking up pressure everywhere with El Tricolor coming off a 5-0 thrashing of the U.S. “B” team in the finals of the CONCACAF Gold Cup. A re-energized Mexican attack features the young, free-flowing Giovani dos Santos, who scored during the team’s June win over Venezuela in the Georgia Dome. As one of the first lines of defense, Clark’s going to be fiercely tested.

But will it be any more intense than the consecutive games against Spain and Brazil in the Confederations Cup? If the Americans can’t draw from their experiences in those games, then they may never claim Mexico’s scalp in this “House of Horrors.”

There’s certainly going to be plenty of scrutiny paid to Landon Donovan, whose skill, leadership and brio will be crucial for the Americans to end their winless drought.

From our little parochial corner of the American soccer universe, this game represents Clark’s best chance not only to solidify a place on the U.S. team, but also to help write no small piece of American soccer history.

Despite the recent euphoria from soccer’s boosters, bloggers, executives and others, how much progress has the sport really made in the public imagination in this ballyhooed “Summer of Soccer?”

Not much, according to Jonathan Zopf of the Gainesville Times, who speaks to soccer aficionadoes local and beyond in painting a gloomier picture than what’s been touted elsewhere.

Indeed, to most Americans, soccer remains “a beautiful bore,” and National Soccer Hall of Fame historian Roger Allaway sums it up thusly:

“People talk about ‘have we turned the corner.’ In my mind, there is no corner; it’s a curve and we keep going further around it.”

Zopf examines the American player development system — youth associations organized unlike anywhere else in the world — as a source of the problem, and this is not a new suggestion.

Neither is the problem of getting Americans to watch their own domestic leagues when the most glamorous club teams and national teams are criss-crossing our shores. Says Woodstock soccer fan Travis Dexter:

“I don’t even watch the MLS and I live in this country. I’d rather watch the overseas clubs. Soccer is never going to grow where we watch the MLS.”

There are other critics of the “Summer of Soccer” meme as well.

And here’s a sobering fact about the Rose Bowl throng of 93,137 that watched Barcelona defeat the Los Angeles Galaxy 2-1 in a friendly on Friday night: Not only is it the biggest soccer crowd in America since the 1994 World Cup, it also had more far more people watching than the other six MLS weekend games combined.

Would a greater eye toward style help?

In addition to writing about the Atlanta soccer scene here, I round up and comment on news and views from the world of soccer on Beyond The Touchline. I’ve included the latest posts from that site on the sidebar here on Atlanta Soccer News.

Here’s what I wrote today about an amazing summer for American soccer fans — and how it’s just getting warmed up. There’s also a roundup of latest transfer news and its implications for soccer economics and finance, the travails of Bobby Convey and Landon Donovan’s harsh assessment of David Beckham’s impact on the Los Angeles Galaxy and Major League Soccer.

Enjoy these links, and I’ll be back next week with fresh news about the latest soccer developments in the Atlanta area.

Happy Independence Day!

When the U.S. soccer team reached the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, I experienced first-hand some good cheer from a most unlikely source: The dean of a generally sour British press corps.

The same bitter lot whose reigning “sportswriter of the year” later dubbed the final match between Brazil and Germany as The Boys from Ipanema vs. the 22nd Waffen SS Panzer Division. Or something like that. And this was penned in one of the “quality” broadsheet papers, not a tabloid.

I met World Soccer magazine columnist and veteran soccer journalist Brian Glanville at the media center in Seoul the day after the Americans’ scintillating second-round win over Mexico. Groggy from a lack of sleep on a midnight train from Jeonju (they should write a song about that!), I was unprepared to shake hands with someone I had read for a number of years and regarded as a world-class curmudgeon. In a good way.

So when Glanville said to me upon our introduction, “It’s fantastic, the States doing that,” I did a double take. He wasn’t being facetious in the least. It was genuine admiration for what a soccer minnow had accomplished on the biggest stage of the sport, with literally the whole world watching. The way the Americans played in losing to Germany in the quarterfinals was even more impressive. Without Oliver Kahn in the nets, that imaginary arm coming out of Gregg Berhalter’s forehead and Torsten Frings’ impression of the Venus de Milo, Rudi Völler’s boys might have been busted down to regular Wehrmacht.

Up until that moment, the Yanks had generated more headlines for the heavy security detail that followed the team everywhere just a few months removed from Sept. 11. And for the team’s visit to the DMZ. It was refreshing to write about what the U.S. was doing on the field, and not the larger context of Americans in the world in the newly-coined Age of Terror.

That run for the U.S. in Korea was eventually regarded as a fluke, given the disastrous World Cup cycle that ended in three-and-out ignominy in Germany.

But looking back on that time now, in the wake of the shocking U.S. upset of Spain in the Confederations Cup semifinals, I’m not so sure. Perhaps what has worked against the Americans’ efforts to develop on a consistent basis is timing and alternating levels of expectations.

In recent years, the U.S. seems to have played better with the pressure off. In 1994, the Americans did respectably well under the duress of being hosts, getting to the second round before falling to Brazil. In 1998, with aspirations of matching that performance, they fell flat, finishing dead last among the 32 teams in France. When Bruce Arena took his team to Korea, we weren’t expecting much, again, but a win over Portugal and a draw with the co-hosts South Korea had the U.S. on the verge of advancing. That it lost the only game it was expected to win, the group finale against Poland, was telling.

Going into Germany, the American public had been told that budding young stars like Landon Donovan and experienced hands like Kasey Keller in goal comprised the best U.S. team ever put together. Aside from that bizarre draw against eventual champion Italy, there wasn’t much to back that up.

Now we have a U.S. team that a little more than a week ago was being savaged by the tiny American soccer press contingent. There were plenty of calls for the head of coach Bob Bradley. The style of play and player development that is unique to the States was once again called into question. Also facing the heat were players like Donovan, who at times has shrunk in big games, and Atlanta’s own Ricardo Clark, whose red card in the opening loss to Italy set the tone for what appeared to be another miserable FIFA tournament. After the 3-0 drubbing by Brazil, American soccer bloggers howled in humiliation. Surely this coach can’t go on, and this team must be broken up.

That same coach, and those same players, were pitted in the finals against the new Boys from Ipanema again. After stunning the five-time World Cup winners by taking an early 2-0 lead, the U.S. could not withstand the barrage and fell 3-2. It was still the best finish ever for the Americans in an official FIFA event.

The most impressive aspect of the U.S. win over Spain was that it was so comprehensive, from first to final whistle, from one end of the field to another. There was no fluke here, no fortuitous own goal or late penalty kick to sink the Spanish Armada. It was the Americans taking out the talented Xavi Hernandez, in my mind the best midfielder in the world right now, from his playmaking role. It was stranding the prolific David Villa and Fernando Torres as a result. It was bagging two goals past the fabulous Iker Casillas, who hadn’t conceded even one.

It was a dominant performance, even as Spain peppered Tim Howard’s goal. Donovan has been an absolute lion out there. The central defense has been superb. Jozy Altidore is showing just a glimpse of his marvelous potential. Yet they haven’t gone into convulsions about it, which is a healthy sign. Clark’s perspective strikes a nice balance.

This showing also comes less than a year before the World Cup in South Africa, which means there will be greater attention placed on the U.S. than ever before. There’s still work done to get there, and how the Americans play in the upcoming CONCACAF Gold Cup ought to be scrutinized just as intensely as the Confederations Cup.

So should their massive qualifier at Mexico on Aug 12. Right after Mexico had defeated Venezuela in a Wednesday friendly at the Georgia Dome, Mexico coach Javier Aguirre was asked about the U.S.-Spain match earlier that day. He and his El Tricolor were watching intently as their continental nemesis scored one of the biggest upsets of recent international soccer history. Mexico is fighting like hell to finish in the top three of CONCACAF qualifying and avoid a playoff against a South American team. They understand very clearly how the stakes have been heightened by what happened in Bloemfontein.

More importantly, the Americans are making the rest of soccer world take notice as World Cup qualifying hits its climax all over the planet. This is what’s different about the place the U.S. finds itself in. The Yanks won’t be able to vanish into a post-World Cup lull for a year or three, until the next World Cup reveals them. They’ve revealed all of themselves in South Africa, the good and the ugly, at one of the most critical stages a team can draw back the curtain.

There are permanently raised expectations now for U.S. soccer, and that’s a very good thing.