I went to this game, and I hope it goes down in USA footballing history as the day club football started. Many of the 67,000 people at the game that weren't Brittish ex-pats or on holiday, or the 5,000 that go to all the Red Bull New York games, had never seen a live professional football match before, and I hope that a lot of them come back.
On the 20 minute bus ride from the city out to the swamps where the stadium is I had a conversation with a Suprs supporting family on holiday, and the mother asked why everyone had their picinics set up. I explained that in America, are stadiums for the most part are all out in the suburbs and people have to drive to get to them, and there isn't much around in terms of places to buy food/beer so people bring it with them, and turn the game into an all day event/party. This is mostly for American football, as well as NASCAR and the big horse races and is known as "tailgating." Another observation they made was all the kids running aroud having their own football matches in the parking lot, which is just another extension of the tailgate, because you need something to do other than just grill burgers and drink beer (or do you
) (unfortunatly we saw a lot of people throwing around American footballs for the sAccer tailgate) But overall I think I would be safe in saying American sports are also a lot more family attended than in England, where it is not your dad taking you to an occasional game, but either for american football your whole family has season tickets and you go with mom, dad, and your sister to nearly all the games growing up, or in the case of how footy works in this country with more kids playing it than any other sport and almost all the adults knowing nothing about it, the kids are the ones dragging their parents to the game or going with their entire youth team on a group discount. As you can probably tell, this creates for a MUCH different atmosphere (which you probably already knew existed) that makes it less appealing to go to as well as watch on telle (not to mention the fact that the broadcasts are up there with the worst productions in sports history and the quality of the play is 
) Other contributing factors are the fact that Americans love to sit down and eat thier nachos and drink their soda and get up in the middle of the game to get refils of either 
and singing is somehow absolutly lost in our sports culuture. When I was growing up, and saw old sports movies where the whole crowd would sing the national anthem I thought it was weird. Bill Simmons, an espn journo that I normally despise, wrote this after last years world cup:American sports have been ravaged by TV timeouts, ticket price hikes and Jumbotrons that pretty much order fans how to act. Just look at what happened in the NBA playoffs. Miami fans were urged to wear all white like a bunch of outpatients from a psych ward; the Detroit announcer screamed, "Let's give it up!" and "Lemme HEAR YOU!" as the crowd responded like a bunch of trained seals; Clippers fans weren't able to stand and cheer after an outrageous Shaun Livingston dunk in the Denver series because disco music was blaring at deafening levels. And it's not just basketball. During Angels games in baseball, the crowd waits to make noise until a monkey appears on the scoreboard. You can't attend an NHL game without hearing the opening to "Welcome to the Jungle" 90 times. Even our NFL games have slipped -- you cheer when the players run out, cheer on third downs, cheer on scores and sit the rest of the time. It's a crying shame.
Not to pull a Madonna on you, but European soccer stands out because of the superhuman energy of its fans -- the chants and songs, the nonstop cheering, the utter jubilation whenever anything good happens, how the games seem to double as life-or-death experiences -- and I can't help but wonder if that same trait has been sucked out of our own sports for reasons beyond our control. And no, that same energy hasn't completely disappeared; you can see a similar energy on display at Fenway, Yankee Stadium, Lambeau, MSG (if the Knicks and/or Rangers are good, a big "if" these days) and any other city with enough history and passion to override the evils of the Jumbotron Era. Still, these are aberrations. By pricing out most of the common fans and overwhelming the ones who remained, professional sports leagues in this country made a conscious decision: We'd rather hear artificially created noise than genuine noise. That's the biggest problem with sports in America right now. And there's no real way to solve it.
One more note on this: I watch old Celtics games from time to time and always think how the Bird Era could never be recreated -- not the team itself, but its connection with the Boston Garden and the passion of the fans attending those games. We didn't need a Jumbotron or musical prompts to tell us what to do. When the Celts were introduced, we screamed for every starter and saved one extra decibel level for Bird. When we needed a defensive stop, we stood and shouted at the top of our lungs. When Bird found a wide-open cutter for one of his gorgeous no-looks, we were cheering even as the pass was being delivered -- that's how attuned we were to his passing skills and how they spilled over to everyone else on the team. The best moments happened when the C's would blow someone off the floor and force a timeout, and the roof would practically come off, and we'd keep cheering and cheering -- all the way through the timeout, no organ music, no other noise, nothing. That's how we judged the level of excellence, by how long everyone felt obligated to cheer. If we made it all the way through the timeout, the horn would sound, which only made us cheer louder because we had lasted so long. I'm telling you, there was nothing quite like it. And this happened all the time.
I hope we can turn this culture around but it doesn't seem possible because things are only becoming more commericial by the year, and without any history of standing terraces or songs, it would seem impossible for it to come out of nowhere
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