Post-World Cup, Whither Soccer In America?

Now that the World Cup is over (and congratulations to Spain on their first ever championship), I’m faced with a dilemma as an American who’s come to enjoy soccer – what next? I’d like to continue following the sport somewhat regularly, but there’s no natural outlet for my budding interest. I know some American fans have taken to following a team in the English Premier League, La Liga, Seria A, or the other high-level European leagues, but for me at least, investing time and energy in a professional sports team requires an emotional bond of some sort, and it’s hard for me to really get interested in any club that’s not part of a community to which I belong. The Eagles, Phillies, Flyers, and 76ers were all apart of my childhood and adolescence, and no matter where in the world I go, my fondness for them helps me to retain a connection to my hometown and to my core identity as a Philadelphian. I feel no such bond to the communities of Manchester or Rome or Barcelona (heck, I’ve never even been to the first two), and as such deciding to root for their soccer teams feels silly and arbitrary to me. Philadelphia has just this year finally gotten a professional soccer team of their own – the Union – but as Major League Soccer is a decidedly inferior quality league deciding to follow them feels to me like deciding to follow the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs or the Sioux Falls Skyforce - i.e., not worth the trouble. Plus they’re an expansion team which hasn’t even played its first full season yet, and I’m not living in Philadelphia at the moment.

As a result, I find that despite my newfound appreciation for soccer, my interest is capable of deepening only so far at the moment. I’ve become a fan on the intellectual and aesthetic levels, appreciating the strategies of the game and the beauty of a great passing game like Spain’s or the individual brilliance of a transcendent talent like Lionel Messi, but on the deepest and most important level, that of emotional identification, I remain barren. I wonder if I’m not alone, and this phenomenon on a widespread scale this isn’t one of the issues facing the sport at this moment in its growth in the United States. Americans have proven that they will watch a high quality competition like the World Cup, even if the U.S. isn’t playing, and Landon Donovan’s dramatic stoppage time goal against Algeria provided the kind of memorable moment that’s capable of galvanizing genuine interest in any sport (as well as a permanent and irrefutable piece of counterevidence to the oft-leveled “soccer is boring” critique). But aside from the U.S. national team, we have no high quality, high stakes rooting interests for whom to cheer.

Contrary to those who argue otherwise, I think there is room in the American sports calendar for soccer – baseball is the only sport actively contested during the summer here, and it’s a slow, languid game that doesn’t demand full attention from its fans, so a league that runs its season from spring through late summer like MLS could in my opinion establish itself as a fifth major team sport in this country. Assuming my theory is correct, the quality of the product needs to be improved to do so, however, and that’s going to require a few more superstar arrivals on the American professional soccer scene like that of David Beckham with the Los Angeles Galaxy a few years back. Bringing in big name, big game players, even if they’re on downside of their careers, will give the league the cache it needs to generate more widespread fan interest, but getting them will require that MLS spend a bit more money, and a leap of faith on the part of the people who run it that their league is ready to take that financial step. To this point, they’ve been prudent in the way they’ve brought the fledgling league along, not over-expanding and taking care to make sure that the league’s underlying financial model remains sustainable. The result has been slow, steady growth, albeit with a few hiccups, and at this point it seems unlikely that the league will fail anytime soon. The question is, when will they decide that it’s time to take the risks necessary to see if it can really succeed rather than just survive and grow?

The Stupidity Of Hidebound Conservatism, FIFA Edition

If there's one thing that the 2010 World Cup has become known for, it is, shall we say, "controversial" refereeing decisions. In the group stage, there were several iffy red cards handed out, not to mention the goal that for unknown reasons wasn't a goal. Now that the elimination round has commenced, the refs have upped the ante, counting goals that shouldn't count and not counting ones that should. It's an ongoing and embarrassing display of officiating incompetence from an organization that claims to be the global arbiter of the sport, and unsurprisingly fans aren't happy and demand for the use of instant replay and other technological solutions has increased.

FIFA head/dinosaur-in-chief Sepp Blatter has responded to the controversy in the time-honored manner of sclerotic European bureaucracies from Portugal to Poland, waiving off objections like so many a disallowed goal. Egregious ineptitude in enforcing the rules of the game? "Part of the human nature of our sport", according to Blatter. Seeing a tightly contested match decided by a blown call? Merely spice for post-game analysis as something fans will "love to debate".

These sorts of arguments are patently absurd. It's not necessarily the referee's fault if he can't enforce the rules correctly - there are twenty-two players and a lot of field to cover, and only one of him (which is part of the problem). But given that technology that would allow him to do his job better is readily available and could be implemented tomorrow, one cannot help but conclude that FIFA is an organization that is not only utterly incompetent in its stated mission (enforcing the rules of the game fairly), but unapologetically and even defiantly so. Would we accept this logic in any other walk of life? Should we tell pilots they're not allowed to use radar to help them safely land their planes, since human error is part of the nature of aviation? Should we tell brain surgeons they shouldn't use precision, laser-guided instruments in performing their operations since human error is part of medicine? (On second thought, that might not be a bad idea if Blatter were the patient - we'd give him a chance to live out his philosophy in another arena of life, and as somebody who's already functionally brain-dead he wouldn't stand to lose much).

I follow several other sports that employ technology to help the officials do their jobs (ice hockey, football, basketball, etc.). While stoppages in the game in order for the referees to review a close play are sometimes annoying, I don't think they've ruined the game, and I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone I know who does. Most fans want to see the outcome decided fairly, by the actions of the players, and if we have to wait a few minutes while the referees go to the tape to make sure that happens, so be it. Blatter and his fellow do-nothings may wish to continue living in the Stone Age, but most soccer fans do not. Conservatism - whether in a serious sphere like politics or religion, or in the realm of a trivial entertainment like sports - should be about seeing that necessary changes to traditional structures are undertaken slowly and carefully, not about clinging to outdated ideas for the sake of tradition, no matter how stupid the advancement of knowledge reveals them to be. But for Blatter and far too many people like him, the latter is exactly what conservatism is. For FIFA, a World Cup final decided on a missed call to change things. But what about for our governments, our schools, our institutions of knowledge and research?

Curious Logic, That

People have a habit of attempting to turn anything and everything that happens in the world into "evidence" of the truth of their preferred ideology, but even given that it's hard to see how right-wing Italian politician Roberto Calderoli can fault immigrants for the dismal World Cup performance of the Azzurri, given that, near as I can tell, the Italian roster has nary an ethnic non-Italian on it. The logic seems particularly strained given that the similarly underperforming French, whose roster includes players from the country's large Arab and black African immigrant populations in addition to white Frenchmen, have also caused a spate of national hand-wringing over the questions of immigration and cultural assimilation with their ignominious exit from the tournament. If a team composed of 100% born-and-bred Italians crashes out of the World Cup, it's the fault of immigrants because too many of them are playing in Italian youth leagues and the supply of talented young Italian players is as a result being choked off (never mind that playing against better competition growing up would presumably make developing native players better, not worse, but whatever). And if a multi-ethnic French team crashes out, it's the fault of immigrants because the players are "hooligans" who, in the words of French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, "only know the morals of the mafia". In other words, if a highly rated European side plays like crap, no matter what it's the fault of non-Europeans.

I find all these efforts to make the performance of a sports team into a cultural bellwether overblown and absurd. From my vantage point, the French disappointed for the same reasons many talented-but-disappointing sports teams do - they had poor team chemistry, and a flaky, overmatched coach who was widely disliked by his players. As for the Italians, after winning it all in 2006 they made the same mistake that many championship teams do, succumbing to nostalgia and trying to recreate lost glory by bringing back an aging, declining nucleus of players for another go-around rather than seeking to replenish their roster with younger talent. They were one of the oldest teams in the tournament and looked it against younger, livelier sides like Slovakia, whose 3-2 victory at their expense knocked the Italians out of the tournament. Presumably in 2014 both France and Italy will be back, the French with a new coach and the Italians with a younger, more dynamic group of players, and if they both progress deep into the tournament as they usually do this year's poor showings will be forgotten. No doubt at that point people like Alain Finkielkraut and Roberto Calderoli will find some other way to complain that immigrants are ruining their societies.

The Future Of Soccer In America

As I blogged a few days ago, I am a recent convert to real soccer fandom. This gives me, as someone who didn't grow up playing or watching it, but has come to genuinely enjoy doing both as an adult, what I suppose is a somewhat unique take on the ongoing debate about the game's future in America.

If you take the media's word for it, Americans are divided into two camps on the question of soccer -anti-soccer nativists and pro-soccer xenophiles. The nativists are the people who complain that soccer is boring, that nothing happens, that it's too low-scoring and that too much of the action consists of kicking the ball back and forth in the midfield. They insist that it will never take off in America because American sports, with their higher scoring and greater highlight potential, are more suited to American cultural sensibilities. If they're childish, they'll say that soccer sucks and that people who enjoy it are dorks. They may insist that soccer fans are trying to "ram the game down Americans' throats". Often, there is an overlap between disdain for soccer and political and cultural conservatism, though not always - anti-soccer sentiment can be found even among otherwise true-blue cosmopolitan liberal elite types. The xenophiles, conversely, are disproportionately represented among left-leaning demographics (the young, urbanites, immigrants), and supposedly embrace soccer for the same reasons they embrace salsa dancing, sushi, and yoga - it's hip, it's cool, it's multicultural. Though they are still somewhat uncommon, their numbers are growing, and they insist to anyone who will listen that soccer is the sport of the future, and that if Americans don't love it the way the rest of the world does it's because they don't yet understand it.

I find myself somewhere in the no man's land between these two camps. Until I lived abroad and was exposed to the game as played on its highest level, I was not much of a fan, and I do think that there is some merit to the American skeptic's charge that soccer is too unimaginative and low-scoring - played conservatively by technically-lacking sides whose best chance for a result is to go into a defensive shell and play for a draw (and maybe a 1-0 victory if they're lucky enough to score on a counterattack), soccer can be very tedious. Unfortunately, such tactics are distressingly common even on the game's highest level - for every Brazil or Barcelona, who move the ball around fluidly and attack with verve and imagination, there's a team like Italy or Arsenal who methodically grinds out results with suffocating (and suffocatingly dull) defense. On the other hand, I find charges that the game is slow and lacks action absurd coming from people who enthusiastically embrace baseball, a sport in which a single game can easily last four hours, only a few minutes of which are actual game action, the rest consisting of minute-long intervals of players stretching, adjusting their equipment, knocking dirt off their spikes, and scratching themselves. If I hadn't grown up with baseball and learned to appreciate the game's slow rhythms as part of its charm from a young age, I suspect I'd find it excruciatingly dull, just as many people from outside the baseball-playing world do when exposed to it as adults. It's pretty clear that cultural conditioning matters a great deal in what we find compelling in athletic competition.

Viewed through this lens, soccer's role as a (excuse the pun) political/cultural football in the American debate makes a lot more sense. Though enough American kids play soccer that there's an entire sociopolitical category named after their parents, it's not a sport with any connection to the American sense of self-identity. It's not the "national pasttime" the way baseball is, and its best young players aren't feted in the media as "All-Americans" the way those in basketball and football are. Such as it is associated with any sort of cultural identity in American discourse, that identity tends to be either a.)Latin American, or b.)European. For the Cro-Magnon right, there's no two groups more antithetical to "the real America" than immigrants and socialists, who happen to come, in this group's imagination, from, respectively, Latin America and Europe. Rejecting soccer is thus a handy shorthand gesture for any sort of cultural influence from these areas of the globe. It is hard to express with sufficient force my contempt for this kind of attitude. It's one thing to just not particularly care for the sport, but when somebody like Glenn Beck says, without even taking into consideration the merits or flaws of the game itself, that he hates the World Cup just because the rest of the world loves it, he's essentially declaring himself an ignorant, narrow-minded boor and proud of it. On the other hand, liberals who lionize soccer for its multicultural cache and egalitarianism are pretty thoroughly deluded, ignoring as they do the fact the game's European fans can express some pretty unenlightened cultural attitudes at times, and that the economic structure of the game in Europe much more closely resembles the haves-and-have-nots setup of MLB than the more socialistic models of the NFL, NBA, and NHL.

My take? To the extent that there is there is one - the fragmentation of the entertainment world and the ever-proliferating number of sports options dilute the meaning of the term - soccer is a good candidate for the title of "sport of the future", though not for the reasons its advocates often cite. I think it will continue to gain in popularity in the United States, though primarily because of demographic and technological trends rather than ideological appeal. First, the demographic groups that tend to like soccer (immigrants, Latinos, college-educated hipsters, etc.) are increasingly large slices of the American population, whereas those that don't (older people and cultural irredentists who conceive of American identity as primarily white, Christian, and suburban or rural) are increasingly small slices. Second, the arrival of the internet and satellite TV means that Americans (who, after all, only want to watch the best of anything), can now much more easily follow elite foreign teams and leagues, rather than settling for a second-rate product like Major League Soccer. The globalization of sports means more than Kobe Bryant jerseys on the streets of Beijing, regular-season NFL games in London, and droves of foreigners arriving to play in the MLB, NBA, and NHL - it also means people in New York waking up in Saturday morning and heading to their local English-style pub to catch the matchup of the week in the English Premier League. I agree with Daniel Drezner's contention that soccer won't really take off until the U.S. fields a team that genuinely contend for the title of the world's best, and with Matt Yglesias' point that growth in the sport's popularity is unlikely to come at the expense of one of the current major American sports. But it will come.

World Cup Fever - A Casualty Report

Four years ago, when I was living in South Korea during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, I wrote an email to my friends and family describing the experience of being part of a huge crowd gathered at Seoul City Hall Plaza to watch the home side's opening match on a massive screen on the side of a nearby building which had been commandeered to publicly show the game. As clearly as I can recall it (it was a very memorable experience), there is a marked difference in my attitude toward the current tournament and the attitude toward the 2006 edition I expressed in the email. I wrote that the experience of being part of a passionate World Cup crowd had turned me into a fan of the World Cup as an event, the mix of ardent fandom, patriotism, and collective emotional experience being an intoxicating (and volatile) cocktail, but that I still "didn't get" the sport itself.

I get it now. This year, I find myself not only excited by the buzz created by the World Cup, but also by the chance to watch some of the world's most brilliant players strut their stuff for their national teams. Three years of playing pickup and team soccer alongside friends who have the game in their blood - Englishmen, Scots, and South Africans among my fellow expatriate English teachers mostly, but a smattering of Germans and Frenchmen as well - have converted me into a full fan of the sport itself. Playing in real games, with players who know what they're doing, has given me a greater appreciation of a brilliant midfield possession game, a perfect form tackle, and a beautifully placed cross into the box than I used to have, and - most surprising to me of all - I no longer consider a scoreless draw by definition a boring contest. Though there are poorly contested matches, soccer well played presents as much excitement as hockey (my preferred "goal" sport as an American), even if balls more rarely end up in the net than pucks do, and a lot of the joy of watching it comes from seeing a play develop as the ball is advanced down the pitch, with the thrill provided by the possibility of a shot on goal (more likely to result in a goal than in hockey) being produced rather than only coming with an actual shot. This was something that only came once I'd acquired some firsthand familiarity (and only a little, at that!) with how the game is played.

I am psyched to see how the likes of Messi, Rooney, Kaka, and all the rest perform in this tournament. I'm excited about the U.S. team, and rooting hard for Japan, Korea, England, and whichever of the tournament's underdogs emerges from the group stage as well. And I'm going to watch as many of the games as I can manage, and block out time on July 11th to watch the final. I've become a full-fledged fan of the game, if still a relative neophyte in it (something about which my English friends will no doubt continue to needle me). I still love my "American" sports as much as the next guy. But there's always room for one more fantastic game in a true sports fan's schedule, and soccer, I've more and more realized, is a fantastic game.