Hello, Emment! Hello, Horst!

The next best thing to invention is discovery. Americans have given the sporting world the benefit of their inventive genius (baseball, basketball); now they are about to be repaid. They may even get a boot out of it. Professional soccer, the most popular spectator sport in the world, outside of girl watching, is coming to the U.S. in a big way. And if the TV moneybags have guessed right, the likes of Emment Kapengwe and Horst Szymaniak will shortly assume heroic stances alongside Willie Mays and Johnny Unitas.

This summer, the U.S. will get not just one but two professional soccer leagues: the ten-city National Professional Soccer League, which makes its debut April 16, and the United Soccer Association, a 12-city league that will start off with exhibition games between imported clubs this year, field its own teams next season. The United Association is headed by Dick Walsh, a former executive of baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers, and is accredited by the Federation Internationale de Football.

Ken Macker, a public relations expert, is commissioner of the National League, which has no accreditation; he is expected to give the "outlaw" league a respectable image. If nothing else, the outlaws have the loot: $1,000,000 from CBS, which intends to telecast one game every week for 21 weeks from April through August, predicts a weekly audience of 7,000,000.

No Place to Hide. The prediction may not be all that far fetched. A crowd of 41,598 turned out at Yankee Stadium last September to watch Santos of Brazil play an exhibition against Inter of Milan, and 10 million Americans tuned into the Telstar broadcast last July of England's victory over Germany for the World Cup. What's more, soccer should be a natural for TV. Baseball fields are all the wrong shape, and the action is too slow; a good pro football quarterback can hide the ball from the TV camera as well as from his opponents. Soccer's rectangular field is perfect for the TV screen, the action is continuous (except, of course, for commercial breaks), the fat, 27-in. ball is easy to follow, and the rules are few and uncomplicated.

The only hitch is players. Although there are 500 college and club teams in the U.S., few Americans are of professional caliber. As a result, the National League has been forced to woo players and coaches away from foreign teams with salaries up to $35,000. The Los Angeles Toros boast 15 players from 13 countries. Which creates still another problem: language. On the theory that "Pass me the ball!" in Spanish just might be fighting words in Swahili, most National League teams have adopted English as their "official" language, and the Pittsburgh Phantoms have temporarily farmed out their players to Berlitz.

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