The ratings for this World Cup are really impressive. Its pretty safe to forecast an incremental bump.

After watchingng all the hype leading up to this year's tournament and the breadth of coverage the tournament has received, I think we're seeing a turning point for the sport in the USA. Hopefully MLS and the domestic game can really capitalize on the interest it generates, but from here on out the World Cup will be a big deal.

But the surest sign that soccer has hit the big time in the States?  Matt Drudge thinks so.

Matt Drudge and the Future of Soccer

I wish they'd compared it to traffic during the Olympics.

Today’s Web traffic has been classified as “Heavy” for the better part of the day, according to measurements by Akamai. At its peak, traffic for News sites globally started a steady climb about 6 am ET and peaked six hours later, at Noon ET, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors per minute.

World Cup Fever sends Internet usage to record levels

With the World Cup barely a year away, there's a packed slate of results I'll be watching this week.  Will the US continue its relatively straightforward qualification to another appearance?  Can Bolivia maintain the slimmest hopes of qualifying alive?

Via the Sports Economist, found a link to this article in the Wall Street Journal about the high demand for World Cup tickets for the USA [subscribers only].  I can't read the article, but its safe to assume its a mainstream journalist just catching wind of the difficulties those of us who want to follow our team to Germany encountered, what, 2 months ago?  I'm not sure why he ends his post

According to the US Soccer site, the private sale for tickets to the National Team's matches at this year's World Cup Finals in Germany ends today. Not sure when exactly they'll inform the lucky folks who get tickets.

The World Cup draw is tomorrow! The US barely missed being one of the eight seeded teams (but rival Mexico was seeded), chiefly because of the poor showing at the 1998 Cup. The FIFA rankings have a long memory, unfortunately. On the flip side, another strong run in Germany would go a long ways towards beeing seeded in 2010.

If you're considering going to the World Cup in Germany next year, it appears that tickets will have an embedded RFID chip linked to your passport. While this is meant to make it more difficult to resell tickets, it also means you have to plan very carefully what games you are going to and who you are going with. I hope that this really does keep ticket prices down enogh to outweight the the potential inconveniences that this may cause.

At the annual retreat for work, one of the sessions involved presenting about organizations we found interesting or good models. Finally, all my knowledge and time spent on BigSoccer and MLSNet paid off. Not all of us were tagged to present, and I felt really bad for eveyone else who actually spent some time researching and preparing for their presentations.

Who else was awake with us at 2am one year ago today to witness this? Once the US won this game, we knew it was going to be a special world cup.

US Soccer has a retrospective.