Soccer and America, Part III, Sub-Part I

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.

Soccer and America, Part I.

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.

Okay, first subject: soccer and America.

What, too trivial a first investigation, you say? I disagree. I think it's a great jumping-off point: a surprisingly rich topic that has been preoccupying me for a while. In examining commonly held world opinions about Americans' not liking soccer very much, then looking at what are, in my opinion, the real reasons Americans don't like soccer very much (if, in fact, that is the case, which I think is more debatable than many commentators would have us believe), I'll tilt a specific example at the massive windmill that is the general "culture of America versus that of the rest of the world" issue--suffice it to say, a very popular opposed pairing these days.

This is kind of a fascinating subject for me (like I said, I'm fucking obsess...I mean, preoccupied), so I'm breaking my blog posts up into palatable portions. In Posts the First and Second, I'll claim that foreigners' attempts to explain Americans' diffident attitude towards soccer reveal more about foreigners than Americans themselves. In short, the foreign folk theories are completely false, but through them you can see foreign insecurities and foreign posturing against the American juggernaut. At the same time (I'll say in Post the Third), the more I think about why Americans actually haven't embraced soccer, the more I see that there are some interesting and particularly American reasons that we haven't, reasons that do set Americans apart from much of the rest of the world. They're just not the reasons foreigners would like to think we have.

So here's my general outline:

Post the First: Foreign folk theories about why Americans don't like soccer, and how they're wrong. Including such rhetorical gems as The Canadian Rebuttal, which I permit you to use next time a boorish European tries to lecture you about soccer.

Post the Second: What the foreign folk theories about Americans and soccer reveal about foreigners themselves. Including such revelations as The Inherent Contradiction in the European Mindset.

Post the Third: My own theories about the reasons Americans haven't embraced soccer, and how those reasons are peculiarly American. Including such war-horses as The Persistence of Puritanical Thinking in America.

Sound good? Post the First shall appear forthwith.