SOCCER: America and the world

David Crow, a Mexico expert and therefore very aware of soccer, says: "I have often puzzled over why soccer isn't more popular in the United States, especially given that more children now play it than the putative national pastime, baseball. Surveys reveal that most Americans still identify baseball as their favorite sport, with (American) football and basketball both a percentage point or two behind. After the big three, the market shares of other sports fall off sharply, with soccer barely a blip on the radar screen.

Sports talk show hosts (yes, I do have a wide populist streak) commonly dismiss soccer as "boring", asserting that Americans like high-scoring sports. Boringness doesn't seem to inhere any more in soccer than it does in, say, baseball, where the thrust of recent rule changes has been to boost home run production and shorten game times. Interestingly, Major League Soccer, the recently created professional soccer league, makes major adaptations so the game will be more exciting to Americans, the chief of which is to disallow ties.

Which brings me to my explanation of why soccer hasn't caught on in the U.S.: "American exceptionalism". Americans like to think of our culture and political system as unique--and better than those of other countries. It is no accident that the three major sports in the U.S. were all created (or at least so drastically modified from their antecedents as to constitute a new sport) in this country. It may be true that, as Raśl Escalante says, Americans won't pay attention to soccer until we start "kicking butt" (an interesting phrase redolent of American militarism for me). Unfortunately, however, the U.S. women are world champions in the sport and most Americans didn't seem to notice until the women posed for a revealing team photo. Whether this lack of interest reflects a jingoistic disparagement of a sport popular in the rest of the world or domestic sexism is hard to say, however. The bright side is that American ignorance of, or disdain toward, what happens outside our country isn't likely to be as pernicious in sports as it is in international relations. For soccer fans, the Latinization of the United States--a trend which shows no signs of abating--is salutary and bodes well for the growing popularity of the sport in this country".

My comment: The last paragraph is important. The US is in danger of being the odd man out in the world, a dangerous situation.

Ronald Hilton - 6/7/02