Soccer vs. American Sports The question in the article reproduced below, "How can the most popular sport in the world be so insignificant and secondary in the United States?" is asked by many people these days. However, it is the wrong question. Soccer, while it has the sort of appeal that gymnastics does, sheer athleticism and a sort of gracefulness in action, has major drawbacks. Chief among them is low scoring, with 1-0 and 2-1 games the norm, not the exception, a factor that strikes Americans as ludicrous, as if a huge factory only produced one or two Chevrolets per day. But there is one other structural deficiency of soccer. Ball control is the worst of any major sport you can name. That is, "possession" of the ball is almost a joke. No wonder that there are so few points scored. Compared with hands, feet simply cannot direct a ball as well. Therefore the game is terribly imprecise, with loss of control VERY common. Indeed, maybe 2/3rds of every game features no team in control of the ball. At least not in control for more than 10 or 15 seconds. Americans value control and precision not only in sports, but also in industry and the much else in life. And just what is wrong with such values ? Answer, nothing is wrong , the opposite is the case. Not that, for a man, women's soccer doesn't have a certain appeal. But not so much because of the game, because it is an opportunity to see young women run to and fro with much vigor and animation. For the men's game, to repeat the point, if you like gymnastics then soccer has a sort of fascination of its own, even if, compared to baseball or real football, etc, even compared to track and field events, it just doesn't have an "electricity" factor. Think of soccer as ballet for men who are jocks, serious machismo types, rough hombres, and all of that, but ballet nonetheless. Soccer compares with another sport that has almost no following in the USA, bull fighting. Almost no Americans see the point of it. Yes, a matador looks great, and yes it is dangerous and requires real courage, but it is what it is, a form of dance. America sports are about points scored, and, with exceptions, the more points, the better. Points measure success, points measure achievement. Valuing points is akin to valuing mathematics or science. Yes, there can be defensive struggles, some of which are extremely exciting, but always against a backdrop of potential for a lot of points at almost any time. Baseball, 0 - 0 in the bottom of the 9th. Bases loaded and a batter hits one out of the park. Suddenly the score in 4 - 0. For that matter a scoreless game could see the visiting team score 7 runs in the top of the 9th, followed by an 8 run rally in the bottom of the inning. Football games can be blown open in the 4th quarter after being close for the first 3 quarters, with a final score of 44-21, where it had been 23-21 at the end of the 3rd quarter. And basketball games are typically in the 80 - 70 range. And there are many ways to score, vs soccer, where, essentially, there is only one. Different ways to score reflects ingenuity and the value in accomplishment via alternative pathways when other avenues are closed. Even hockey , which can be more-or-less compared to soccer, while there are no such things as high baseball scores, regardless often enough has final tallies in the 3-2 or 4-3 range, with an occasional 5-1. Plus hockey has its own kind of variety, since a team may have one or two players in the penalty box or emotions may boil over and, as the joke has it, "I went to the fights last night and a hockey game broke out." Plus hockey is extremely fast, with skaters zooming along as fast as horses can run at Churchill Downs. And Americans also value speed. In other words, the Right Question to Ask is this : What hasn't the rest of the world followed America's lead in sports preferences ? And there is another question, besides, why does the rest of the world think soccer
is a superior sport ? It isn't, it is an OK sport, but that is the best anyone can say objectively. The attitude of soccer fans is also a consideration. Although American fans can be very unruly following championships, and go on rampages in the streets, after all other games people simply leave the stadium and go home or visit a local bar. That's it, no reason to take matters further, it would be foolish to do so. Not how many soccer fans think, rather for them it makes really good sense to riot, injure people, and maybe even cause such mayhem that people get killed. Which, objectively, is insane. Then there is the Olympic Committee. Recently, after a trial period, baseball and softball were dropped as Olympic sports. Why ? Because many non-American sports enthusiasts are sports bigots. There is no other word for it, they are prejudiced, biased, and stridently anti-American the way that other people ( in cases the same people ) are anti-Semitic. About baseball and its close cousin, softball, these sports are played in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, all of Latin America , plus Canada and, at a minor league level, Israel. Yet the relevant Olympic committee saw fit the drop the sport -while retaining such non-sports as gymnastics with colored cloth twirling, and synchronized swimming. Neither of which, by any reasonable definition, are actual sports. That is, Europeans don't get it. No problem with their enjoyment of ballet. As a Classical music buff, some days I can't get enough Delibes or Stravinsky. But ballet is not a sport. Nor, really, are equestrian events. Chariot racing Ben Hur style, with contestants trying to knock others out of their chariots as they race might qualify, and you can make a case for polo ( which also is quite exciting ), but otherwise equestrian events are not sports. They are well worth fan support, but they are as out of place as holding ( human ) track events at the Kentucky Derby. Soccer is gradually finding a place in sports in the United States. It is doing so despite a major difficulty. All US sports are seasonal. Where do you place soccer in the schedule ? Baseball = Summer. Football = Autumn Hockey = Winter Basketball = Spring. Wherever anyone tries to insert soccer there is enormous competition from other sports. Yet, Americans are trying. Some day there will assuredly be a niche for soccer. It is the American way to be as inclusive as possible. And the American way to try and master every sport, hence US ( near )dominance at most Olympic Games. And Team USA showed it can play soccer at World Cup levels Unfortunately much of the rest of the world has a long way to go to rival the United States in many, many categories of life. But it can be done. USA basketball remains superior but the difference between the best American teams and the best teams of Latin America or Europe are less and less each year. Even baseball now has a youthful following in Iraq. About sports, it isn't that Americans are mostly unenthusiastic about soccer, the problem is the lack of appreciation of a large portion of the world, especially the European snobocracy, with American sports values. No-one needs Euro-centric sports bigotry, either, which is what many soccer people are actually all about, beneath the surface. The rest of the world needs to get in step with America. Not the other way around. Billy Rojas ========================================================== World Cup dreaming Although soccer is the most popular sport around the world, in the U.S. it's far down the list. But our population is changing, and our view of ourselves may also change. By Ariel Dorfman LATimes July 4, 2010 How can the most popular sport in the world be so insignificant and secondary in the United States? It is a bizarre phenomenon that, due to personal reasons, has particularly disconcerted me over the years, as my addiction to soccer is inextricably linked to U.S. history. Indeed, I became entranced by the game thanks to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist witch hunt. Had he not persecuted my left-wing dad, an Argentine functionary at the United Nations, and forced our family to flee New York for Chile in 1954, I would probably still prefer today the sports I practiced during my 10 childhood years as a Yank: baseball, basketball, American football. Instead, I was given the chance to fall in love with the Spanish language, with the Chilean revolution, with one woman in particular and, of course, with "el fútbol." As I awkwardly tried, at the age of 12, to compete on the fields of Santiago with classmates who had been playing since they were babes, I can remember resenting the utter absence of the game at my schools in New York. That will change, I told myself, that must change someday. Americans, with their prowess in so many other athletic endeavors, cannot forever turn their back on something so precise and unpredictable, such a gloriously fierce ballet of bodies. So it was encouraging to find a less dismal situation when, the victim of a new exile — this time from Chile — I settled back in the States in the 1980s. Professional soccer, enhanced by Pele's participation in New York's Cosmos club in 1977, had raised the sport's profile, while millions of youngsters across the land, both male and female, were now playing the game. For two seasons I even coached the junior soccer team of my youngest son, Joaquín — in Durham, N.C., of all places! And then the U.S. women won the World Championship in 1991, and in 1994 the men's World Cup was held in nine fervent U.S. cities. By 2002 the Yankee team had advanced to the quarter finals and hopes kept rising that soon soccer would be as ubiquitous here as it was globally. That illusion — bolstered in the current World Cup by Landon Donovan's last-minute "miracle" goal against Algeria — quickly dissipated. After losing to Ghana in overtime in the next match, the Americans headed home, leaving in their wake the same desolate question about the irrelevance of soccer in the United States that haunted me over half a century ago. Many reasons have conspired, I believe, to create this bleak state of affairs. Americans have perennially seen themselves as pioneers, constantly reinventing themselves. Their most popular sports have appropriated traditional games and drastically modified the rules: Cricket became baseball, rugby turned into American football, and even basketball can be considered a variation on indigenous native American activities. But how do you take the "foreign" game of soccer and make it into something other than ... well, soccer? The predominance and head start of those more "American" games has not allowed soccer the space to develop at the collegiate and professional level and, perhaps most crucially, is not massively dreamed of as a path to grandeur by athletically endowed children mired in poverty. American kids have the same talent as youngsters in the favelas of Rio or the shantytowns of Nigeria, but it is siphoned off at an early age in search of more lucrative venues. Nor do children in the United States get to watch much soccer on television. This last point may be an insoluble problem for the sport's advancement because it concerns the structure of the game itself. Major U.S. sports events have timeouts and interludes during which ads can be breathlessly crammed in, but one of the essential attractions of soccer is the dramatic relentlessness of the contest once it has begun. You literally cannot stop the clock. This is such a sacred rule of the game that its organizers have resisted the clamor to allow video replays, even when the referee has made a flagrantly erroneous call that can cost a team victory. Do all these circumstances mean that soccer in the U.S. is doomed to a minor status forever? There are several reasons for tentative optimism. The first is that the United States, despite the increasing stridency of its anti-immigrant nativists, continues to import millions of citizens from the rest of the world. These men and women and children smuggle their love for soccer across the border along with their frequently illegal bodies. The second reason is that we are living a moment in history when the very notion of American exceptionalism is under siege. If the United States were indeed to abandon the idea that it has been chosen by God to save the world, if its citizens were to really entertain the notion that they are just the same as humans all over the globe and not uniquely endowed with shining virtue, could they not someday join the rest of the species in celebrating the most beautiful sport of our time? Would it then be inconceivable that a few decades from now the U.S. could win the World Cup? -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
