Sorry for the delay on this one, folks. I should mention that Operation Condor is mysterious, involving intricate manipulations of global banking systems, commodities markets, and the cultural zeitgeist, and will disappear and reappear at odd intervals, like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. In any case, let's talk about Americans and their feelings towards soccer. I'm going to split this big post up, in order to make the portions more palatable. I realize I've been giving you perhaps too massive chunks of blabbery. In this post, I'll make a general outline, and cover the first, and maybe most salient, reason I think Americans don't like soccer.
I should mention that all these reasons I'm about to list are simply subjectively felt to be true, by me as a sports-loving American who talks to a lot of sports-loving Americans due to my bar. I'm not sure they can be objectively proven. If they're right, you'll probably intuitively sense they are as Americans yourselves. If you don't feel they're right, post a comment with your thoughts.
So, Why Americans Don't Like Soccer:
1. Americans want their sports to be fair.
2. Americans like their sports to be fine-grained, scientific, and exact.
3. Americans like their athletes to be strong, manly, honest, and sportsmanlike.
In my discussion of each of these three general topics, I'll mention a popular American sport that is loved in large part because it has the quality we like, then in what ways soccer often wantonly lacks this quality, with discussions of everyone's hated specific soccer rules and features along the way (penalty kicks, flopping, and so on). I'll finally make a suggestion as to what particularly American cultural backgrounds cause us to feel as we do.
1. Fairness. Golf, one of our favorite sports, is fairness metastasized. The ball goes in the hole, or not. There's no room for judgment calls by referees. Baseball, our "national pastime," contains similarly few opportunities for cheating, fouling, bad calls, and so on. The pitcher throws the ball, the batter swings at it or doesn't, and a fielder either catches the ball, throws the runner out, or not, in almost always a very clear-cut play. Yes, there are ball and strike calls, but these are normally straightforward, and are usually gotten right by the umpires even in borderline cases. (A fascinating fact unbeknownst to many is that umpires are now held accountable after each game by comparing their calls to those a strike zone-sensing computer makes, and ones whose calls don't match the computers enough of the time are in danger of losing their jobs.) Plus, a single ball or strike call is very unlikely to influence the outcome of an entire game. There are also borderline calls on the bases and so on, but again, these are often moot, and are few and far between compared to sports like soccer or basketball, where players are almost always fouling each other in one way or another, and it's entirely up to a referee to call something or not, any time he feels like it (the number one problem with the NBA currently, and a problem realized increasingly by the league).
Though American football has some more persistent trouble with fairness (holding calls and pass interference penalties are problematic), instant replay in football is worth noting here. Americans have embraced instant replay in their most popular sport in recent years, despite the fact that it slows down the game significantly. In other words, Americans would rather have their sports fair than fast.
I can't bring up fairness without bringing up steroids/drugs in American sports as a possible counterargument. If we love fairness so much, why were our baseball players juiced for so long? My response is that Americans have always hated performance-enhancing drugs, we've just been naive (a stereotype, but, in my opinion, definitely one with some truth), and ignorant of the fact that our heroes were using them for a long time. Athletes very often, for better or worse, have different values than Americans at large, but Americans love to think that their athletes share their values, and that can blind us to all the craziness that goes on behind the scenes amongst athletes. In any case, the instant the drug problem in baseball was revealed, it went all the way to a Congressional investigation--that's how seriously Americans take fairness in sports. (Geez, just look at how reviled Barry Bonds is, and how everyone wants to saddle him with that famous asterisk).
Whereas look at soccer: there was recently a huge match-fixing scandal in Italy that was way more far-reaching than any in American sports since the Black Sox scandal, and while there was an initial public reaction, it's basically been dealt with in a cursory way, swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. If that had happened in America, imagine the reaction. Which leads me to other types of unfairness endemic to soccer, which are nonetheless tolerated in the generally permissive culture that has become prevalent in contemporary Europe and elsewhere:
Massively Unfair Things about Soccer
1. Deciding a tied game on penalty kicks is a sham. This is a commonly mentioned one, so I don't think I need to say much more. I'll just say that penalty kicks bear so little relation to soccer as a game that they might as fairly end a soccer game by picking five players from each team to play three minutes of basketball against each other. The whole point of soccer is teamwork, is getting a player in a position to score easily through intricate, lengthy machinations. When you just put a guy right in front of the goal with the ball and only a goalie to defend, that's KICKING, not SOCCER. At that point, you're essentially randomly selecting a winning team.
2. The importance of referee calls in soccer is far too great. A referee can (and often does) essentially award a team a goal by giving them a penalty kick, or force a team to play one man down for an entire game by giving a red card. And this is a game that is often decided by a single goal. No referee in any American sport has such power. In basketball, refs can award free throws, but in a game where teams score over a hundred points, a couple of free throws are usually inconsequential. In football, a ref can award a team a near-touchdown on a pass interference call on a long bomb, but there's a fair amount of scoring in football, so these calls often don't matter, or balance themselves out with other pass-interference calls. And, yes, American refs can always eject players, but it's far, far less common in American sports than in soccer, and ejected players are always allowed to be replaced, unlike soccer.
3. Soccer referees are very often wrong, but there's no instant replay or oversight. In watching soccer, it's typical to see several egregious missed calls during a game (a foul call that wasn't a foul, or someone getting mugged and the ref not noticing). I don't blame the refs themselves (though there have been accusations of crooked refereeing in soccer), but a system which asks just a few refs to make constant calls (without the benefit of any time stoppage or review) all over a huge field during a very fast-moving game. Nevertheless, to Americans, all those missed calls are infuriating and unacceptable.
So, why this American obsession with fairness? I hate to bring up the old saw, but we are a religious and Puritan country in many ways compared to others. We may not be holding witch trials any more, but we care deeply that our sports are fair, that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and that cheaters never prosper. But feel free to play cultural doctor yourselves and give me a diagnosis.
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