Why America Doesn't Like Soccer

In the oncoming month, you will learn more about soccer than you probably ever wanted to. This is because of the arrival of the World Cup, but more accurately, it’s because the World Cup is on ESPN. In other words, every NBA playoff highlight, every baseball score, and every NFL camp rumor will be preceded by speculation about Croatia’s chances in Group F. Suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that bars everywhere are full of people watching soccer, because that’s what’s on television.

Look, I like soccer. It’s great every couple of years, and I enjoy nothing more than a reason to drink in public at ten in the morning. However, I would guess I also share most Americans’ approach to soccer, which is that it’s on par with the Olympics – something to watch out of convenience once in a long while that makes you swell with nationalistic pride, and then you can go months on end without even the slightest desire to think about it.

This isn’t to say that soccer isn’t cool – it is, by any account, fun to watch, which is more than can be said about most televised baseball games. At the same time, though, I’m tired of the international community forcing it down America’s throat with the same condescending sneer every four years. Apparently because we don’t like soccer, we’re uncultured rubes, too shallow to pay attention to a game that doesn’t involve a violent collision every twenty seconds or 200 points per game. Other countries see America’s failure to embrace the game as crass and symbolic of our short attention span. But really, we just have too much other stuff on our plate, to the point that it’s impossible to cram one more sport into our waking hours.

It’s hard to claim that soccer is ever going to become a truly major American sport. We’ve been hearing this since the NASL was around in the 1970s, and American soccer’s foothold is still limited primarily to two groups: first- and second-generation immigrants and kids younger than 12. NCAA soccer has always been a relatively popular niche sport, but there still isn’t a widespread desire to watch it on TV.

Advertisers are trying hard, though. If you’ve been watching ESPN at all over the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen Gatorade’s “Whole New Ballgame” commercial, which shows the American soccer team walking into overseas stadiums around the world, to a chorus of boos and signs reading “Yankees Go Home.” The spot does an excellent job of stirring up some much-needed patriotism behind the U.S. soccer team, which, you may not know, is actually pretty good. I’ll admit that yes, this commercial makes me want to watch soccer. Still, the ads aren’t anywhere near approaching the level of NBA playoff commercials, where just watching Ben Wallace bench press in black and white makes me want to go outside and play some 3-on-3.

On the other hand, though, we have the other ads, which lead us to believe that soccer is an international language of peace – the driving force behind unity in Cote d’Ivoire and civil rights in Saudi Arabia. This is true only on the most superficial level, in that the sport is played the world over. What soccer really does, though, is give people an athletic reminder of a country’s political and social history. Not that this is bad – it’s just that a more honest assessment of the soccer’s sociopolitical influence involves massive, pre-organized brawls between Polish and German hooligans, English chants like “Ten German Bombers” (look it up), and Spanish fans making monkey noises at black English players Ashley Cole and Shaun Wright-Phillips. Soccer is the international language the same way that guns are – they’re both everywhere, but that doesn’t exactly resolve any conflicts.

So soccer is both the global uniter and the great divider, for better or worse. Meanwhile, the likelihood of America developing a culture of fanatical hooliganism surrounding soccer seems unlikely. There are some solid reasons for this:

1) We’ve got other stuff to do. American soccer will never have the kind of insane pipe-wielding fans that England has, mostly due to the fact that as long as the Philadelphia Eagles and Oakland Raiders are around, they’ll have that market cornered. American goons just already have other outlets, and they seem happy enough the way things are.

2) We don’t like losing. The United States is the (literal) Yankees of the international sports world. Americans are so used to dominating every sporting event that it’s a national tragedy when we come in second at anything, which is why we have no interest in paying attention to a sport where we field, at best, a high Tier 2 team.

3) We’re impatient. Not only are the other sports in America really popular, they’re also not at all like soccer. We generally don’t have the patience for sports that operate outside an organized structure. Basketball and football are great because we can easily quantify how one team dominates another – points, stats, and individual achievements. Soccer statistics give us only the barest understanding of what went on during a match, and there isn’t even a guarantee that the team that dominates every statistical category will win. Highlights do a miserably inadequate job of summing up a match, so it’s impossible to get a good feel for the game without planting yourself on the couch and watching the full 90 minutes.

4) We’re not Communists. Soccer doesn’t pander to our capitalist sensibilities. Baseball and basketball are all about individual achievement within the context of the team, whereas in soccer even the most brilliant run by a single player usually doesn’t produce anything. Soccer is much more fundamentally a team game than any popular American sport. The sense of accomplishment is only collective; the individual superstar’s heroic effort can easily be overlooked in a game where one goal is often all that matters.

5) We don’t want to be like Europe. We like our athletes to be manly on and off the field. Part of the enjoyment of watching sports is conflating athletes’ successes with your own, and when those athletes do everything in their power to look like the cast of Queer Eye, this becomes distasteful. I realize the coolest thing in London and Paris is David Beckham’s preening androgyny, but there’s something incredibly irritating about seeing a striker score a spectacular goal and then strut around like a cockatoo doing a mating dance. The overly dramatic flops don’t help either. Soccer is more reliant on artistry and creativity than, say, baseball, which makes it susceptible to the occasional well-placed acting job. This is a problem in lots of sports where there are grey areas concerning fouls (see: Tim Duncan) but international soccer takes it to another level. Watching last year’s elimination-round game between the United States and Mexico was like watching the “agony of defeat” montage from ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

This doesn’t mean soccer will never become popular in the United States – it just means that it’s an uphill struggle. The first step is winning, and, as the American soccer team proved in 2002, that’s closer than we think. As Jamie Chisholm said in last issue, we should watch the World Cup. We should be cutting out of work and spending our June afternoons in sports bars with a beer, watching Landon Donovan and Brian McBride. But we probably won’t.