by Michael Rosenberg

Uh, there is ALREADY a men's professional league.

Oh. Right.

We have been hearing that soccer is on the rise in America for almost 40 years, and as the U.S. team vaulted toward the Confederations Cup final, I could hear those voices rising again. The conversation always goes the same way: some soccer nut insists that soccer is about to challenge baseball, football and narcissism as our national pastimes, some soccer hater says that's the dumbest comment since Americans invented the English language, and the conversation just gets worse from there.

I am not one of those jingoistic American sportswriters who thinks soccer is stupid because you can't use your hands and baseball is an extraordinary intellectual pursuit. I kind of like soccer. But I think it's time we all agree on what soccer is in this country: a growing niche sport that other countries take more seriously, and probably always will.

Pele was supposed to make soccer a mainstream spectator sport in America. Didn't happen. His New York Cosmos career, like Studio 54, seems more like a '70s moment than a harbinger of things to come. More recently, the 1999 U.S. Women's World Cup team was supposed to usher in a new era. It spawned a women's pro league, but that didn't last.

Then the Los Angeles Galaxy signed David Beckham, and maybe you know somebody who tuned in to his first few games, but I don't.

Beckham's arrival in L.A. was supposed to be a monumental event. Heard anything about him lately? (Stephen Dunn / Getty Images)

That is one failure after another, relative to expectations: they were supposed to change the way we look at soccer, and they didn't. But they obscure the fact that soccer IS getting more popular in the United States.

A lot of Americans care about soccer, but it's in the way they care about England's refusal to adopt the euro as currency or Silvio Berlusconi's latest bimbo eruption. They have an interest in what is happening somewhere else in the world. They don't give much thought about it happening here.

Major League Soccer has done a very nice job of building its niche brand. The problem with MLS is that it is not the best soccer in the world. The Beckham signing felt like a marketing ploy, which it was. Most serious American adult soccer fans are not going to trick themselves into caring whether the Kansas City, uh, Nicknames can beat the Miami, um ... (they do have a team in Miami, don't they?). In the age of 200 channels of HDTV, TiVo and Slingbox, fans can watch what they want to watch, not just what a few network execs allow them to watch.

A lot of serious fans would rather follow games played six time zones away than attend a lesser game nearby.

Is that MLS's fault? Of course not. It is not possible for an upstart league to compete with the most popular leagues on the planet. It would be like a start-up computer company challenging Microsoft — harder, even, because at least start-up companies can innovate. MLS is playing the same game as everybody else.

Real Madrid just paid $131 million to acquire Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United, then (according to The Associated Press) committed another $102 million in salary over six years. That means Real Madrid paid almost as much to have Ronaldo for six years as the Texas Rangers paid to have Alex Rodriguez for 10.

There was a time when the U.S. economy was so strong that one could imagine the best soccer players in the world coming here for the money. I don't know if you've read the news in the last nine months, but this is not that time.

Americans enjoy all sorts of entertainment in fits and spurts, but we don't fall in love with a sporting spectacle unless we have watched it forever or think it is the best of its kind in the world. Soccer is a growing niche sport here. Nothing more and nothing less. And if anybody tells you otherwise, do what my favorite soccer fans do: walk away and head to a pub.