Hundreds of soccer fans cram under the only covered section at ONE Spokane Stadium as hail pounds down around them.
It’s the Spokane Zephyr’s last game of the season. The women’s club started in 2024 as the city’s first top tier professional sports team.
“I love soccer. I love watching it,” said Jennifer Richwood, one of the fans trying to stay dry. “But if you're not really into soccer, you just have to go to a game with a good crowd and then you can people watch.”
Plenty of Spokanites are, as Richwood says, not really into soccer. That’s why this isn’t just the last game of the Zephyr season. The team is shutting down because it wasn’t selling enough tickets.
That’s not uncommon for soccer teams across the country. The most viewed sport in the U.S. is American football and the biggest sporting event is the Superbowl. The NFL says it typically draws around 130 million viewers.
Internationally however, soccer wins the match. FIFA says the World Cup draws billions of viewers, making it the globe’s biggest sporting event.
This year, it’s coming to North America. Seattle will host six matches, and cities across the region will host fan zones and watch parties. With all the local action, some might be paying attention to soccer for the first time.
But how can you get into soccer if you’re brand new to the sport?
What to watch for in a soccer game
If you’re used to watching games where points quickly reach double digits, you might find soccer a bit boring. A high scoring game might only have two or three goals.
Nicole Lukic, head coach of the Zephyr, said it can be exciting to just watch for good touches. That’s when a player expertly maneuvers the ball straight from the air onto the ground.
“Maybe you as a person can go outside in your backyard and try to take the soccer ball down out of the air with it not bouncing away from you,” she said. “Then maybe you'll have a deeper appreciation about what these players can do with their touches.”
Zephyr midfielder Emma Jaskaniec said it’s pretty simple to be casually entertained by the game.
“Anybody can know if a goalkeeper makes a crazy save. Like, how did they do that?” she said. “Or a defender makes this crazy side tackle, or this forward takes somebody on and beats three defenders.”
Who watches soccer?
In his new book “How To Watch Soccer Like a Genius,” Bay-area journalist Nick Greene addresses the stereotype that soccer is not an ‘American’ sport.
“If you think about why the places where soccer is not huge — places like the United States, India, Australia — you'll notice a common theme there that these were all former British colonies,” Greene said. “There is some truth to the idea that as former colonies, these countries wanted to pursue their own sports to set themselves apart.”
Americans may not have gotten as far away from soccer as they thought.
“American football evolved from the very same games that soccer evolved from,” Greene said. “It just happened to do so in a different timeline and a different path.”
If you’re watching soccer for the first time, you may notice that something feels foreign about it: there’s barely any stoppage for commercials or corporate sponsors.
“Soccer is a game — and I mean this as a huge compliment — that can never be invented today,” he said. “There's no stoppages except for halftime. The second the ball gets kicked, you have at least the minimum of 45 minutes of action.”
Could that uninterrupted view of the pitch have deeper psychological effects?
In his research, Greene discovered ancient Romans who lived in cities would meditate on emeralds or other green jewels to give them the sensation of being in a field or forest.
“I think soccer, if you're a little romantic, you kind of serve the same purpose,” Greene said. “I grew up in downtown Chicago. It was the closest I got to nature, it felt like.”
Why watch soccer?
Zephyr forward Ginger Fontenot said soccer is also appealing to anyone who loves drama.
“Everybody who plays soccer is a drama queen, don't let them tell you different,” she said.
A deeply polarizing soccer tactic is diving, also called flopping. It’s when a player dramatically fakes an injury to try to get a foul called.
Greene went so far as to talk to a philosopher about the ethics of diving.
“He was far more permissible towards it than I would have imagined — although he's a Real Madrid fan, so that might explain some of that,” Greene said.
Real Madrid is notorious for especially dramatic antics, but Greene makes the case that it can make the game more entertaining.
“If you look at diving as a piece of spontaneous choreography, you might start, if not to appreciate it or like it, understand its place in the game,” Greene said.
But even young fans know there’s one moment in soccer that’s better than any other.
At the end of Zephyr’s final game, seven-year-old Leighton said it best: “I like to watch when they get goals.”
