One Of The World's Biggest Sporting Events-- Page 9 Of Sports Section

I have to admit to not following soccer very much at all, although I loved to play as a little kid. I went to two different camps both of which employed a huge array of foreign camp counselors from places like Germany,Brazil,Mexico, Italy, Ghana,Senegal, Spain Haiti,Poland and Greece all of whom seemed to be intimately familiar with a soccer ball. Soccer is a world sport but one would never know that by reading Pittsburgh's two main papers.

Pittsblog has a nice post about that.

"Neither is Pittsburgh xenophobic, despite occasional evidence to the contrary. Rather, the major institutions that shape Pittsburgh's public sphere often seem to be completely unaware of the fact that there are large constituencies of people here who don't care about hockey, or the future of Downtown, or the Allegheny Conference's celebration of Pittsburgh's 250th birthday. There is an international population in Pittsburgh and a population of people here who are deeply involved in international business, culture, and even sport. And much of the time, they are invisible in the broad public portraits of the region that we watch and read in the media.

Soccer coverage in the Post-Gazette, in other words, is a symptom rather than a problem in itself. With the Internet, cable TV, and other newspapers, I can find all the soccer news I want in other places; it's absence from the local paper just gives me another reason to ignore the irrelevance of most of the PG."