Once again Americans have been forced to sit through those endless hours of athletic ennui called "the World Cup."

As the American team advanced through the nail-biting excitement of games with scores such as 1-0, 1-1, and (hold onto your hats) even 2-0, American media moguls thought they saw possible big bucks in the offing. When the Americans reached the quarterfinals, ABC even considered pre-empting Good Morning, America to show the game. Good old Yankee pragmatism prevailed as the suits studied the over-nights more closely and realized that a big part of the "American" audience was in fact, um, of Hispanic heritage, and how many of such persons drive Lexuses or, for that matter, even know what designer water is. Or so, one imagines, went the thinking in corporate media suites in New York and Los Angeles.

Still, as the numbers for the global audience climb into the TEN-figure range (we're talking BILLIONS here, Binky), our advertising tastemakers have to be wondering how to get the American market involved.

Magellan's Log to the rescue, guys. We have the solution and, on the following two pages, proof of the solution.

It's very simple really. In two words: skin sells.

Consider, please, the colorful but minimal soccer uniform: a shirt, shorts, socks, cleated shoes, and that's it.

We would call your attention to three facts:

1. No padding, no concealment. The human being outfitted for a round of soccer excitement is already displaying LOTS of square inches of skin.

2. The shorts in question are really shorts. Not those homebody half-pants like the NBA affects. These are short shorts.

3. Under these shorts, male players don athletic supporters. But, on the evidence, some players take the field entirely supporterless.

Are you paying attention, media guys? Think what we have here: hunks fitted out tiny uniforms who indulge in 90 minutes of running around a huge field in accordance with the most obscure rules imaginanble. On occasion, on not-infrequent occasion in fact, all these running feet and flailing limbs result in inadvertant ADDED square inches of REVEALED skin.

Now. Given the masterful way that the American media cover major sporting evens (what was it--something like 128 cameras focused on the action at the last Super Bowl?), you may be sure that NOTHING that happens on a soccer field would escape the all-seeing eye of proper American television coverage.

On the following two pages we've assembled a few STILL photographs from various thrilling soccer matches. Imagine what the Fox commentators could do with endless instant replays of the moments captured here: "Zbegomorski is down! No, no, he's not down, his shorts are down! Look at the equipment! Let's see that one more time from four different angles!"

What we're talking here, guys, is PERFECTLY LEGAL SOFT-CORE being delivered to the mass market in REAL-TIME! If millions are willing to find their way through passwords and filters and levels and levels of sub-directories to get to stuff like this, just think what size audience we're looking at here where the skin is served up fresh, moment to moment!

You still don't get it? OK, just check out the next two pages.

Gender-based aside: ALl the photos are of men simply because we couldn't find any of women, but we assume that that's because nobody's taking women's soccer seriously enough yet to take a lot of pictures. Obviously, once the word gets around about what the  "futbol" guys are up to every Sunday on ESPN, the the gals won't be far behind!

Page 1 of How to Make Soccer Really Popular on American TV.

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