Paul Daugherty

pdaugherty@enquirer.com

On a great-weather night in mid-April, Futbol Club Cincinnati outdrew the Cincinnati Reds. A minor-league soccer team in its second season hosted more fans than a major-league team around since 1876. That’s astounding, at first glance.

What’s equally astounding is, it wasn’t a big deal.

The difference was tiny. FC Cincinnati attracted 15,227 fans Wednesday night, the Reds 15.083. But the significance was compelling, and suggested a potential sea-shift in sports tastes the Reds and all of Major League Baseball would be wise to acknowledge.

Ten years ago, the notion that a soccer team would outdraw the Reds any time would be squinted at, its author’s sanity questioned. Now?

Tastes evolve. Fifty and 60 years ago, boxing was a spotlight. Now it’s two guys in a dim corner yelling at each other, hoping to be heard. Horse racing is the first Saturday in May, mostly. Track and field is once every four years.

As the world gets smaller, its disparate sporting passions begin to merge. The NFL in Europe, baseball in Australia. Professional soccer here. It has taken awhile. That’s because we’ve needed more than one generation to prop it up. We have two generations now. Maybe three.

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It’s not the Saturday morning kids asking their parents to take them to a Columbus Crew game anymore. The parents of these kids used to be these kids. Today, they want to take their children to FC Cincinnati games as much as their kids want to go. This is how baseball used to be.

“Soccer mom’’ entered the lexicon a long time ago. It was a term to describe mothers enduring the suburban bargain of running around like crazy, catering to their kids. It’s accepted now. Every mom is a soccer mom, in one way or another.

It’s obvious why FCC is holding its own. Tickets are cheaper. You can get a season futbol pass for $125, about the same as you’d pay for four seats to one Reds game in the Moon Deck.

FCC games are festive and fast. While MLB seeks ways to speed up, soccer is already on running time. Younger fans raised on immediacy aren’t thrilled with 190-minute baseball games. Not when they can send up colored smoke bombs in The Bailey and be back at the bar in two hours.

“Way more fun than watching a 26-pitch Joey Votto at-bat with your grandpa," as one reader explained it to me, via e-mail. I know more than a few folks now who spend Saturday mornings in front of the television with their kids, watching English Premier League games.

It’s not an entirely apples to apples comparison. Fans have 81 chances to see baseball, 12 to cheer futbol. The Reds are not an “event" the way FCC and the Bengals are. They’re a six-month comfort.

They’re also young. The club’s list of popular players and fan favorites begins and ends with Joey Votto and Billy Hamilton. Fans have endured a mass exodus of players they came to see: Phillips, Frazier, Cueto, Bruce, Chapman. Over time, some of the newbies will generate a following. It’s hard not to like the futures of Adam Duvall and Amir Garrett.

Once school is out, the Reds will routinely outdraw FCC. That doesn’t change the perception that baseball is Then and soccer is Now.

The two organizations don’t see it as a competition. At least not now. If FC Cincinnati earns an MLS bid, it will go head-to-head with the Reds over suite sales. That prospect is several years away. For now, the attitude is the more the merrier.

“Hand in glove," says Karen Forgus, Reds senior vice president of business operations. “Soccer is a healthy addition to the overall vitality" of the region. “If I go to (an FC Cincinnati game) I see a lot of the same people up there I see down here."

Says Jeff Smith FC Cincinnati’s veep of sales and ticketing, “I don’t think we pull from the Reds and I don’t think they pull from us.’’ The two organizations have collaborated on scheduling, hoping to minimize conflicts. They play at home on the same day eight times this year, just three times simultaneously. Forgus did say the Reds soon will begin analyzing the FCC fan base. She predicts the soccer club will skew younger. Maybe much younger.

As Smith puts it, “My kids (ages 13 and almost 4) don’t talk about playing tee ball or volleyball. It’s soccer for them."

The trend is deepening. Wallets of discretionary income are not. A crossroads looms. Which road are you on?