Foreign (very often European, but not exclusively so) folk theories about why Americans don't like soccer pretty predictably fall into one of a few related categories (and I've checked with my resident Englishman to confirm and add to these theories, lest you think I'm just making this stuff up):
1. Americans only like simple sports. Soccer is too intricate for them to appreciate.
2. Americans only like sports with lots of exciting commercials/ads to break up the action. Soccer has fewer commercials, so Americans don't like it. (Or, American advertisers are actively preventing soccer from being shown in America, because it doesn't provide them with enough advertising opportunities.)
3. Americans just don't have the attention span to watch a game for 45 straight minutes at a time without a break.
4. Americans like sports with lots of scoring. Soccer doesn't have much scoring, so Americans don't like it.
5. Americans are self-obsessed to the point of ignoring the rest of the world. So they don't understand how meaningful soccer is to European, South American, Central American, etc. nations, and thus underappreciate it.
The string running through all these arguments is that Americans are boorish, blindered, uncultured, or just plain dumb. But I'll take each theory in turn:
1. Probably the most obviously untrue of all the arguments. The most popular American sports are incredibly complex and intricate. Have you seen an American football playbook? Not to mention that baseball, more than any other sport, has high-level statistical analysis ingrained in its culture (there's a whole statistical field devoted to the study of baseball, sabermetrics). In fact, far from being overwhelmed by soccer's intricacy, Americans are working to add more science to the study of soccer: Billy Beane and other people who have helped bring the statistical revolution to baseball are now trying to bring it to soccer, which still operates on old-school subjective measurements. Go to any serious baseball fan blog, or football fan blog, and you'll see educated, nuanced thought and argument (check out, for instance, www.athleticsnation.com, where you'll see discussions of VORP, WHIP, PECOTA, and so on, statistical analyses foreign to the relatively simple sport of soccer). Americans love dissecting their sports, and their favorite sports are often ones rich and complex enough to permit endless dissection.
2. There's a lot to be said for having regular breaks in the action of a sport (beer runs! Potty breaks!), but Americans love a lot of sports that don't have regular commercial breaks. Take golf (an example that I'll bring up again and again, since it's a very popular televised, and played, sport in America, but in most ways is more "boring" than soccer). There are very long periods without commercials, and Americans are perfectly happy to sit through them. As for the "advertiser conspiracy" argument, I just don't buy it. There are all kinds of television events that are "commercial-free" in America (not to mention the extremely popular Tivo/DVR commercial-skipping possibilities which Americans have embraced); with these events, corporate America can still get its collective jollies by "sponsoring" them or inserting other subtle advertisements. Plus, soccer provides companies with great advertising opportunities--almost too great. Soccer players are forced to wear large corporate advertisements on their jerseys, something that even our supposedly slavish commercial society hasn't done to our baseball or football or basketball players. Advertisers in America would salivate at the thought of that kind of exposure; the New York Red Bulls not only have Red Bull jerseys, but Red Bull as the name of their team, for God's sake.
3. The attention span argument I don't buy either, for similar reasons to the advertising argument above. Americans are perfectly happy to watch four-hour baseball games, four-hour football games, extremely long golf events, NASCAR events, and so on. A soccer game only takes about two hours. Yes, these long American games have breaks in them, but often there will be significant periods without breaks. Baseball half-innings, to name one example, can take an hour or longer if a team scores a lot of runs. In short, there are many times where television coverage will stick with a game for a long time without a break; those are often times when Americans are glued to their screens, rather than getting bored and looking for something else to watch.
4. Quickly dismissed: Americans love golf, which doesn't have "scoring" so much as "tracking". Americans love NASCAR, where there is no "scoring" until the very end of the race, when each car comes in first, second, third, and so on. Americans have recently embraced cage-fighting, where there isn't "scoring" until someone is pinned. Americans are more than happy to watch a tight, exciting, 1-0 baseball game. Scoring ain't the issue. It's more futility and carelessness that gets to them, but that's a topic for the third soccer post.
5. Yeah, Americans are self-obsessed. We have a huge country that is complicated enough to take up all of our attention sometimes. But we've adopted and fallen in love with many sports that aren't natively American: golf (I told you, it's a great argument against soccer snobs who deride Americans as too infantile to like a slow, elegant game), boxing/fighting, baseball (debatable, but it is largely based on cricket), and so on. We even got excited about curling during the last couple Winter Olympics. In short, it's very possible for a non-"American" sport to gain our attention; soccer just hasn't done it in a huge way.
What lie above are specific arguments. But I give to you, readers, free of charge, the most powerful general argument against any of these theories about why Americans don't like soccer:
The Canadian Rebuttal.
Any time a European tries to tell you why you and your uncultured American ilk don't like soccer, just proceed as follows:
Frenchman (twirling his mustache): You see, Americans do not like football because they must have their action, their brutality, their bells and whistles and explosions and commercials.
American (twirling his testicles): So Canadians must have their action, their brutality, their bells and whistles and explosions and commercials? Because they hate soccer more than we do. Barely anyone in Canada plays soccer or watches soccer.
Frenchman: Umm...well, no, Canadians are very cultured compared to Americans, but...umm...I must go and eat some cheese.
In other words, there are all kinds of very populous places in the world that haven't embraced soccer in a feverish way (America, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, and so on). Japanese people love American baseball far more than soccer--does that make them boorish? Canadians love ice hockey more than any other sport--is that because they need violence and speed, and can't stand more refined sports like soccer? Australian people love their own Australian Rules Football--because they have short attention spans and can't stomach the slower elegance of soccer? It's dumb to blanket all of these countries with the label of "uncultured". They're plenty cultured, just in a non-European way.
So the thing I hope you're now thinking, when considering America and the rest of the non-soccer-loving nations, is that there are very specific regional reasons why countries have adopted certain sports, and not others, as national pastimes, and it's ridiculous and borderline racist to claim that the only reasons lie with the minds or physical makeups of the people in those countries. It's like when Republicans were claiming that the problem with "winning the peace" in Iraq was that Iraqis are just crazy, when the actual reasons for the Iraqi insurgence are complex and local cultures and histories. Those kind of facile arguments only seem to work when foreigners are talking about America, because of the prevailing, simplistic world opinion about America these days, where anything sufficiently general and negative will be accepted with a knowing nod by fellow members of the extra-American elite.
So there. If you think my arguments are weak, saw away and I shall counter-saw. Prepare yourself for Post the Second, where I'll examine how foreign opinions about Americans and soccer reveal more about foreigners than Americans.
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