There’s something fundamentally wrong with a nation that doesn’t appreciate soccer
Soccer is by far the most important sport on the globe, yet the average American not only is disinterested, but actually finds it repulsive. The inherent beauty of the game is not only missed, it’s cursed, with the word soccer rarely spoken without the being given the emphasis of a slur.
And there’s literally no reason. You can’t point to the NFL and say Americans love tough, physical sports, while the ratings for the NBA stay solid. And you can’t say that Americans love high-scoring games like basketball when everyone can appreciate a 1-0 or 2-1 game in baseball.
Soccer is a fast-paced game, and when played well is a joy to watch as subtle strategy combines with superior athleticism. There is creativity on the pitch that can make Kobe Bryant and LeBron James appear pedestrian. But Americans - most who will readily agree that American football should be WAY more popular around the world - won’t give soccer a chance and deride it as weak.
Because they’ve allowed the love of the game to be bred out of them. Face it, this nation was built by those that love soccer*. My grandfather enjoyed the game, as, like many of his day and prior, was from Europe, born in Germany.
The simple fact seems to me that soccer died in the U.S. with the birth of television. Advertising driven, television had no use for a game that 45 minutes of action, followed by a brief intermission and 45 more non-stop minutes of play.
Why bother with a sport like that when you have baseball’s endless mini-intermissions between half-innings. Or football’s interminable strategy sessions. Boxing thrived with its one-minute between-round intervals.
So soccer died on television, and then died as a sport anyone was interested in. And now, Americans seem to have decided that it’s un-American to like soccer, something to be mocked.
Of course, we shouldn’t lump in all Americans. There is a smallish-sized group of hardliners that see everything in soccer that their European, South American, Asian, Central American and Australian brethren see. They’ll be the ones enjoying two magnificent today, deciding games in Europe’s Champions League tournament, as Manchester United plays Roma, and Chelsea battle Valencia in what should be dramatic and thrilling games.
Most Americans, however, aren’t at all aware of either of those games, even though they will likely be aired via one of ESPN’s numerous channels. Because these days, it seems as though television would welcome soccer back into the fold, as there have been multiple advancements of how to combine advertising in soccer, with everything from uniforms to the pitch itself serving as a billboard.
But now, Americans want nothing to do with soccer. It’s the American soccer fan’s endless campaign - promoting a game that has been drained from the national DNA. Because American television executives created an evolution of their own by not promoting soccer, and now the average American just isn’t going to give it a chance.
It will be interesting to see if Major League Soccer’s acquisition of David Beckham will help accelerate soccer’s growth in the U.S., but it still feels unlikely. Soccer has some room for growth left in the U.S., but at this point, it would take several soccer-friendly generations to come in the future for the game to vault into the category of the NFL or NBA**.
Which is a shame. Because I know I’ll be truly enjoying myself watching the some of the best play the world’s most popular game today. And it’s strange to know that a majority of Americans don’t care, because they were taught not to by television.
–WKW
*The word soccer was derived from the word “association,” as what the world calls football, others like the U.S. took to calling it “association football,” and the name through the years morphed into “soccer.”
**Both the NBA and NFL have Websites that are their acronyms., ie, www.nfl.com. To show Major League Soccer’s lack of ambition, going to the site: www.mls.com takes you to “Multiple Listing Services,” America’s Real Estate Portal.” The MLS can be found at the embarrassing web.mlsnet.com.
Crossposted at Shakesville
April 13th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Yo Wolf,
I didn’t get disinterested in soccer because of TV, although that is definitely a reason why (American) football is so popular for sure. In my hood, all the kids played soccer in 1st and 2nd grade. I grew disinterested because I never got to touch the damn ball. I became a hockey goalie instead, where the puck flew at me all game.
I think hockey has a better shot at being mainstream again because there is more scoring. Olympic hockey is simply awesome to watch too. Beckham can’t change how boring soccer is to Americans. He won’t touch the ball enough.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Of course it is unAmerican to like soccer. What is there to like about it? Soccer is like watching grass grow — only slower and more tedious.
About soccer being “bred out” of Americans. Ever hear of Darwin? Bred out is a good thing, just what you’d expect from an evolving creature.
Soccer is improbable because it’s impossible to play in most of the country most of the time: in the European soccer season, much of the US is blanketed in snow, ice and freezing temps. In the summer, much of the country is too hot to play a game that involves lots of running around and no water breaks. It’s also only going on on the weekends for the most part; most of our sports are all the time, and don’t leave any dull spots in the week.
Soccer is also a terrible game to play if you are no good at it. What can the uncoordinated kid do? He’ll be stationed way on the outside, never get a pass or a rebound, never be allowed to throw it in, and so forth, because defense is ridiculously easy, especially against a kid who has little talent. Even a fat kid can pick up a basketball and make a contribution with a good pass once in a while, and clog the lane a little on defense. Who would dream of playing soccer if they were without skills? So there’s no interest coming to it that way.
Soccer fans keep telling me about the subtlety and the beauty of the game. All of this leads to no scoring, of course, because the reality is that play is mostly lethargic. Guys run like they are stuck in waist deep much the majority of the time, perhaps because of the limitation on substitutions, perhaps because they are preening.
Someone pointed out that soccer players are supposedly the fittest athletes in the world, after all, they run 8 miles a game.
Excuse me, but 8 miles in 90 minutes (not including the break) works out to 5.33 MPH — about the same as a middle-aged deskworker on a treadmill at the gym (who is watching the business channel at the time). Or about three times as fast as — GOLFERS.
Soccer players really should be able to move a little more than that.
About those half inning intermissions and “non-stop” play: I’ll have you know that in World Cup soccer, the typical time of possession for both teams was just 60 minutes — that’s right, one third of the clock ran off while the ball was dead, such as being chased out of bounds or while a penalty kick was being set up.
Most of the rest of the time was absorbed by punts or other aimless kicks that ping-pong the ball up and downfield pointlessly. So this business about there being too many delays in other sports for them to be intriguing is just garbage.
The reality is that with regards to flow of the game, soccer proceeds apace with NFL football, except its easier to recognize the set up time (ie, the huddles) in the NFL, and also easier to know exactly when to get up to use the toilet too.
Most soccer teams around the world are pretty gutless, attacking with no more than two or three players who manage no more than three or four reasonably good scoring chances, and act virtually indifferently to the fact that the clock is running out even when they are not just stalling. Such an approach makes it as surpising to them as to us if they score as many as three a game.
This explains why most soccer leagues don’t publish meaningful statistics, like “shots on goal” in boxscores and instead push vague data, like “shots,” (ie, attempts vaguely in the direction of the net that might or might not be scores if untouched) that don’t indicate what threats (really the absence of them) there were in a given contest. Because action is so rare, it makes no sense to publicize that fact.
Rougly a third of all soocer games end in ties, frequently scoreless, so there’s plenty of time to yawn at outcomes. And 80% of the time, the team that scores first wins, so you can safely leave at that point, with little chance there will be a surprise ending.
Where’s Yogi Berra (”it ain’t over ’til it’s over”) when you really need him?
A see-saw battle? Fuhgetaboutit. Come back from two down to win? Maybe once in a hundred or more such games involving closely matched teams. 6-5? Never, never, never.
In fact, few teams take any offensive risks even when behind, because in league standings or in those crazy two game playoffs, a goal against is usually much more painful than a goal for is beneficial. So it is common to see both teams stalling at various points, and that, naturally, makes for a terrible game.
In other words, every soccer game ever played looks just like every other one ever played, without the slightest thing to remember a given contest for. Games do not assume a personality of their own, ever. This makes it a good game for betting on, and I think that is one of the real attractions to soccer — that and drinking at the game. After all, who would watch something as dull as grass growing unless there was some money on it or a reason to lift a few?
When something is actually happening, players take swan dives and otherwise act like gutless wimps half the time. Intimidating or psyching out opponents does not exist. There is no such thing as a situation in soccer, like 3rd and two or men on second and third, so there is no brain teasing element to it. There’s no mano-a-mano element either. It’s not like coaches are directing strategy from the bench, either, such as “run play number 2.” The players are too far away to hear or even get signals.
Dull, duller, dullest.
Paul Gardner, a soccer author wrote “The Simplest Game: The Intelligent Fan’s Guide to the World of Soccer.” Interestingly, only one or two sections of his book even had to do with the on-the-field game; the rest was about the tournaments and the league structures.
Point taken.
In fact, all the lovely “creativity” that is so beloved by soccer fans really means that teams have not rehearsed any offensive plays (like the give-and-go of basketball) and typically have no clue how to attack one another’s weaknesses, and it looks like it even to casual observers. You don’t see any blind passes; no “drop” passes, etc. When players have to look up to pass (as they always do in soccer) it tells me that there is no plan, no scheme, not even a rudimentary style of play going on out there, and that is typical even for the best leagues and the all-star format tournaments. Of course, a 3 on 9 attack does that to you.
For some reason, the German World Cup team coach ran the club from Los Angeles, which tells a lot about how teams really function.
Indeed, many commentators made a huge deal lauding the 23-pass goal someone scored during the World Cup, as though this was the epitome of attack soccer. To me, it was the epitome of the Chinese fire drill. No one on either team had the slightest idea what to do next, and with nothing really significant happening until 8 people on one side finally drifted north of midfield, and then finally someone broke ranks and actually rushed the goal.
Then there are the referees who are usually provocatively bad — which is why there are riots and stabbings. The rules are impossible to enforce because most of them involve judgment calls that have to made from horrible angles by the single referee who is usually 50 or 60 yards away from the action. Yet the rules themselves invoke hypocrisy by asserting that a ref’s judgment or an assessment of intent of the players has no role whatever.
And, ultimately, as we saw with the Zidane situation where the gruesome foul was not seen by the actual game referee and was called from the press box, keeping to the rules is usually the exception.
Oh. Here’s to the guy who thinks soccer players reveal the moves of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James “pedestrian.” If a soccer player makes one or two good moves a game, and finishes once with a score, he’s a hero, larger than life. If Kobe, or LeBron, or Jason Kidd or Dwayne Wade failed to fake or maneuver an opponent out of his jock strap on the way to a score 30 or 40 times a game, opponents who cover him inches away and can generally touch him anywhere and use their long arms as well as their legs, and who study them for hours and hours and hours on tape and play them half a dozen or more times a year, they’d be goats. Pro basketball play is a hundred times more intense than soccer because the ball is in possession, not being punted aimlessly back and forth most of the time, with passes and rebounds flying because of the 6th defender — the shot clock. Players who don’t run the court sit. It’s that simple and that complex.
Unless and until soccer allows some substitution (so the game has some element of exertion to it) and/or physical contact, it will just be watching grass grow, just duller.
June 5th, 2007 at 10:54 am
While I obviously disagree with many of your points, Baseball Fan, let me just say that was one impressive rant.
–WKW