All Together Now, Click: MLS Soccer Fans in Cyberspace

This paper examines Internet discussion boards devoted to Major League Soccer, the leading United States professional soccer league, on BigSoccer.com, a U.S.-based website. MLS fans use discussion boards to build virtual communities around a league and teams lacking strong identities and traditions. MLS exists in sports landscape characterized by a fragmented soccer culture, domination by more established sports and limited coverage by traditional English-language media. The tenuous nature of MLS as a business enterprise strongly influ-ences the discussions on BigSoccer. While most BigSoccer threads deal with field-of-play topics, business and cultural issues permeate much of the discourse. These include 1) the soccer consumer’s experience, 2) soccer’s place in American sport, 3) the status of the U.S. in world soccer and 4) the role of Latinos in U.S. soccer. It remains to be seen whether soccer boards will promote or discourage the development a more unified soccer culture in the U.S.