All right, folks, in this post I'm hoisting the second spar of my argument about why Americans don't like soccer, fine-grainedness. Without further ado, off we go:
2. Fine-grainedness. A lot of distinct characteristics of soccer evince a laissez-faire inexactitude that is deeply un-American, I think. From little details like how roughly ball placements are made when taking free kicks, to big, annoying ones like the fact that time is kept by the refs on the field, in an incredibly inexact, estimated way, AND FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW MUCH TIME IS LEFT IN A GAME MOST OF THE TIME (sorry, I really hate this one). Let's start with clocks, in fact, since I can draw an interesting and clear contrast regarding them. American sports using time all employ exact, public clocking mechanisms that go down to tenths of seconds, while refs in soccer keep time on the field, with no oversight from fans or replay officials, stopping it kind of when they feel like it, and starting it again around when they feel like it.
Clock stoppages are a very important part of American sports, in that they create discrete, small portions of play that are readily analyzable and discussable. An American football game is made up of one or two hundred single plays with clear beginnings and endings, and that's part of football's great appeal: each play can be dissected and discussed scientifically (with our favorite, silly little tools like telestrators and so on), and between plays there's time for new strategizing (on the parts of the coaches AND the armchair coaches).
Now, if an American football game and its hundreds of plays can be looked at as a collection of grains of sand, soccer is the piece of glass that that sand has been melted into. It's continuous, with very few stoppages, and all the strategy happens real-time. Fascinating, often, but not lending itself to exactitude, fine-grained analysis, or scientific record-keeping and statistical dissection. (That's part of why Billy Beane, Mr. I Brought More and Better Statistics to Baseball, is now on the case, as I mentioned before.)
I'll throw in a couple more examples of soccer's lack of fine-grainedness, in case I haven't convinced you yet with timekeeping and ball placements. One that relates closely to soccer's fairness difficulties is the scoring/penalty kicks situation. The game of soccer often isn't fine-grained enough to distinguish between the play of two teams. Goals are so hard to come by that, often, one team will dominate a game, but it won't show up on the scoreboard, and will then be randomly decided by penalty kicks, which is very frustrating to would-be American soccer fans.
Finally, let's look at the fact that substitutions are only rarely allowed in soccer. Americans love the strategy involved in the frequent, minute-to-minute substitutions made in baseball (pinch-hitters and relievers), football, and basketball (in fact, teams are granted unlimited substitutions in the latter two sports). When you just throw eleven guys out there and only allow three substitutions for the entire game, that's just not as interesting to us. We want the pace of our game and the timekeeping to be fine-grained, our scoring to be fine-grained, and our players, even, to be fine-grained, for a single position to be composed of several different players, used at various discrete points.
In fact, I encourage you guys to examine Americans' favorite sports with "fine-grainedness" as a criterion; you'll be impressed and even a little scared how ridiculously fine-grained they are at every moment. Instant replay in football, of course, is a great example. Refs (and us as viewers) will watch high-resolution replays from several angles for five or ten minutes on end before coming to a decision on the outcome of a play. Or take baseball. At any given time in a baseball game, managers and players are making minute calibrations: the position of the outfielders and infielders, the types and locations of pitches to throw to this specific batter based on the inning, outs, count, historic statistical tendencies, and so on. At any point in a football game, coaches are calling extremely complex plays, and quarterbacks are analyzing the minutiae of defensive alignments and calling equally complex audibles.
Our love for fantasy football, fantasy baseball, and so on shows maybe more than anything that we love thinking about these minutiae ourselves, not just watching them be thought about. I know people who are in five different fantasy leagues who can quote you exact statistics on NFL players for the last few years. I was one of these people as a kid. Despite the stereotype of the loud, dumb, boorish (usually Southern, in the caricatures I've seen) American, Americans, more than many other cultures, are actually nerds, and those of us who don't want to be out-and-out technology geeks will be nerdy sports fans instead.
Why this geeky American love for the fine-grained, the exact, the scientific? This speaks, I think, to Americans' love for innovation, invention, technology. We want to take things apart and see how they work, including our sports. Also, I'd like to say that it relates to the fact that we're an atomistic society. We like to be able to distinguish individual plays, individual players, individual moments. We don't like an undifferentiated flow of events. Old-fashioned? Yes. Not in keeping with current, relativistic, phenomenological European society? Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our stodgy America. But our stodginess isn't all bad, I'd say, though it's done some major damage to the world (and ourselves) recently. Eh? Discuss.
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