The FIFA bribery scandal was an above-the-fold story in almost every major newspaper worldwide on Thursday, one day after seven officials were arrested in Switzerland in what promises to be the beginning of a lengthy ordeal that might ultimately bring down far more many members of soccer’s international leadership and change the way the sport does business forever.

While this story will stay huge news in Europe, where soccer is king, will it have continue to have legs in America? How long will a country that does its best to ignore soccer stay interested in the scandals of Europeans who everyone figured were shady anyway?

(EPA)

In this argument, let’s set aside the issue of the slave labor being used to build the stadiums in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, a horrific situation and one that has existed in parts of the Middle East long before FIFA sunk its claws into the oil-rich country on the Persian Gulf. The modern slave state is an issue far more important and vastly different than some crooked men taking bribes and the frivolities resulting from that, including $6,000 per month apartments for cats. The shining of a light upon this practice should be the most important thing to come out of this scandal and hopefully will result in the biggest reforms.

But what of the rest of the scandal — the soccer part — which, as of now, has transcended sport and is a national news story that has reached people who couldn’t tell Ronaldo from Waldo.

Will America continue to care or will the story fade away like so many before it?

We’re a nation that loves scandal, whether it be political, celebrity, relationship, sport or an ABC drama starring Nnamdi Asomugha’s wife. Witness the ongoing obsession with Deflategate, a relatively minor cheating episode on par with a Major League Baseball pitcher placing a foreign substance on his wrist. But Tom Brady, the Wells Report, Roger Goodell and the ongoing appeal have kept sports fans titillated for four months and shows no signs of slowing down.

That’s football, however, the undisputed king of American sports and television. Everything that happens in football is magnified by a factor of 10. That doesn’t happen in the other football, which is essentially like an Olympic sport in America. People rally around the flag every four years to watch Team USA compete against the world and the sports landscape is dominated for one month by those playing the beautiful game. But then, in the same way swimming and track fall off the map for 207 of every 208 weeks, soccer mostly disappears from popular culture after the World Cup. There are millions of soccer fans in America, to be sure, but at it’s heart, it’s basically hockey. They’re both niche sports that don’t capture the imagination of the general public, except when national pride is at stake.

(AP)

With that in mind, expect the FIFA scandal to disappear from the radar fairly quickly, even if it eventually brings down Sepp Blatter or if/when there are more revelations about the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in Russia and Qatar, respectively. The press will still care and doggedly report the story because it’s important, but in the end, this will be like the IOC scandal from Salt Lake City or all the years of baseball and cycling steroid drama: The media coverage will far outweigh overall interest.

It’s just hard to get worked up about an organization that was probably most well-known in America for its graft and suspected penchant for bribery anyway. Few truly care about the arrests of faceless officials they’ve never heard of. The steroid scandal ensnared some of the biggest names in sports and even then people were sick of it quickly, ignoring the stories despite ESPN practically standing for Everyday Steroid Piece Network for a number of years.

(Getty Images)

But there were moments in that scandal that did capture the attention of America, such as the release of the Mitchell Report and A-Rod’s bizarre, purple-lipped interview with Peter Gammons. How could the FIFA scandal command such attention? The biggest way, obviously, would be for FIFA to strip the 2022 World Cup from Qatar and bring it to the United States, an unlikely scenario given the organization’s stubbornness, but still a feasible possibility. People also might start to get upset at the waste of U.S. resources for a decidedly un-American problem. And everyone will laugh at the ridiculous stories that come out (such as the cat apartment mentioned above). Ultimately though, this will be like every other news story — dropped from the news cycle in a matter of days and forgotten in a matter of weeks.

Soccer just doesn’t matter enough here and the arrests of some guys from a smattering of countries won’t hold the interest of a public that still has deflated footballs to worry about.