Drinking from the World Cup

I was mad, again, after the last US World Cup performance. I say “again” because I’ve felt this way before about US soccer before but even more so about the game of soccer as it continues to take root in US—I almost said “American,” as if we had a monopoly on that term—soil.

I think I’m well-positioned to discuss US views of soccer for a couple of reasons. I cut my teeth on baseball as a young child, fell in love with basketball as an adolescent, and feel religious charisma about football as an adult. However, I also played soccer in high school. For four years. Without learning how to make a move with the soccer ball. They put me in goal with my hand-sports background, but I didn’t really understand that position either.

Then in college, I went to England and regularly watched the BBC’s Match of the Day where I regularly saw people do things with soccer balls that I had never imagined, running and contorting with the ball dancing on their toes, orchestrating passes I couldn’t imagine, (I’m mixing sporting terms) and shooting pin-point lasers past goalies launched Spiderman-like through midair. It truly could be a beautiful game. So I understand what the game can look like though I am by no means a connoisseur.

I also understand what the average American fan does not see in the sport. This skeptical attitude is typified by the recent commentary I heard from the disembodied egos that sally forth on talk radio. One of these males caught in permanent adolescence mentioned how he wouldn’t cross the street for an MLS game, but he could appreciate the fair weather fan support of the World Cup; how soccer couldn’t hold a candle to NFL football, but it was a feel good event akin to the Olympics. I thought these statements were true as far as they went but also typical of a certain American-centrism or even arrogance.

But perhaps I’m being a bit unfair still. What is it culturally, I wonder, that prevents soccer from being passionately embraced in the US like it is in much of the world? What is it about American—sorry, US—soil that produces such putrid soccer plants?

The lack of scoring is no doubt an issue, especially for my generation (X) and younger. We like scoring and a lot of it. We have the NBA to blame here generally and Michael Jordan specifically. I remember when Jordan went off for 63 against Boston, for example, but try to forget that the Bulls as a team lost that game and the series, that it wasn’t really even close, because the Bulls were the far inferior team. Besides, eventually Jordan made the Bulls a champion with his scoring (This is a lie). Today, too, the biggest stars are the scorers, the players that can take over a game, the players who don’t seem to need a team: Kobe, Lebron, D-Wade. (Note: Kobe has won championships on near-All Star teams; D-Wade barely won one when he had Shaquille O’Neal and a significant supporting cast who were summarily sold off after they won, and Lebron hasn’t come close with his supporting cast of pick-up players). Still, the scoring—and the scorers—are what we want.

Yes, soccer, too, focuses on the stars, and the best players can weave and dance through the lines of defenders and then celebrate their own genius. However, the supporting cast invariably gives rise to those goals, with the fullbacks and defenders doing we-know-not-what in the back row, passing the ball across the field and back across the field and then up to the midfielders and back, like an incredibly slow and lethargic foosball game. But if the so-called stars in soccer can go entire games without scoring, are they really stars? Consider Wayne Rooney in the current World Cup. Proof enough that soccer is not dependent on individuals, on momentary, shooting stars.

In the background of this issue of stars and scoring, though, is control. We Americans like control bordering on dominance. Note that the three major sports are all hand sports where the ball is held or controlled closely in the hands. In football, “turnovers” including “fumbles” and “interceptions” are the most cataclysmic events and the ones that can get you benched the quickest. Of the three, baseball depends on loose balls perhaps the most, and even then the ball is held for most of the game and the best pitchers have the most “control.”

By comparison the control in soccer is much more haphazard. Yes, the best players seem to have the ball “tied to their toes,” but any game that celebrates “a good touch” is not predicated on control. Pin-point pitches in baseball are by necessity more precise than fifty-yard passes in soccer because they’re hand-based and not foot-based.

And so we come back to my consternation with the US soccer team’s last performance where they seemed out of control, discombobulated, and uninspired. It wasn’t just that they didn’t score; it was that for most of the game they seemed unworthy of scoring. They didn’t play well enough as a team which didn’t give rise to chances for individual scores. There were too few chances. It was as if Kobe Bryant didn’t take a shot in the championship game.

This led to a feeling that I, as an American, loathe: a sense of fate or predestiny, a sense that one individual could not overcome the forces facing them. I knew Landon Donovan could not suddenly break loose for five goals, and this angered me. Above all it is this sense of fate, I want to argue, that makes soccer repugnant to the average American fan.

An equal but opposite sense of fate exists in any given soccer match when one team outplays the other but for one mistake, when the worse team scores a goal or the referee makes one poor call and the better team loses. Again, this adds a sense of unpredictability about soccer, a democratic element to soccer, that we in the US really can’t stand.

This democratic element is really an interesting one. American football, some have said, is the ultimate team sport, where each player must do his part to achieve the end goal of a play. Each player must know all the plays and his small part in each of them, but the division of labor is clearly drawn between the “skilled” players, those who handle the ball, and the “unskilled” players, who almost never handle the ball, and also extreme specialists who only get on the field only for a couple of plays a game.

By contrast, soccer is much more democratic. All the players, including the goalie, although he does have specialized skills, must have a similar package of skills. There are no “unskilled” players and no absolute specialists. The players must play as a unit, as one organism all the time or suffer breakdowns that can mean goals and therefore losses.

The supposed “team” element of football continues onto the sidelines, with umpteen coaches and specialists, and up into the press box, with more coaches watching cameras and analyzing statistics. It’s a technological sport, dependent on dead time between plays for slow motion replays from several angles, and aslo dependent on instant replay for its most important officiating calls, which offer more dead time for replays and, most importantly, commercials. In short, soccer is not dependent enough on technology, on commercials.

Finally, there’s the military implications of soccer. I’m tempted to say that we want the same thing from our sports teams that we want for our army, our government: control, dominance, shock and awe. Remember the first “Dream Team” of USA basketball? The All Star team that decimated the likes of Angola, reasserting our dominance in our own sport? It was a moment in Olympic sport, I think, when the average American fan, the forty-year old in extended adolescence, breathed a collective sigh of relief.

It was a moment not unakin, I want to suggest, to the first Gulf War, when we could track the progress of the US army into Baghdad throughout an evening telecast and watch as our smart bombs were guided, video game-like, into key military sights of the Iraqi capital. Very rewarding.

We’re not interested in soccer, I’m saying, because it’s not our sport. We didn’t think it up, we don’t own it, we can’t dominate it. It’s an establishment sport, played by the original colonizers in countries with often deeper, richer histories than our own; it’s a guerrilla sport, played by the colonies in countries much more impoverished than our own, where any street kid could conceivably kick a ball around and become the leading player in the world.

But still, US fans stick around to watch the US in the World Cup just in case we would rise to world dominance. That is what the average fan is interested in: transcendence. Then, when the US falls apart against Ghana, the average adolescent fan gets angry, wonders why soccer is such a stupid sport.

After 9/11, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek called the United States to truly join the world community. He claimed that US shock that something like 9/11 could happen here, to us, was exactly the point: that we had spent too much of our time in recent history insulating ourselves from the world, pretending like we were immune to world problems, had not been active enough throughout the world trying to make sure that something like 9/11 would not happen anywhere rather than just trying to make sure it didn’t happen here. In some ways Zizek’s essay, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” tried to do the same thing in politics that Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac did in ecology: try to move us from “conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”

I’m not sure that the World Cup doesn’t give us the same opportunity in sport. This year, we came to the table of the world’s sport with a worthy offering, equaling the result of several global soccer powers including England. The fact that we bowed out of the round of sixteen with little resistance should not make us so much mad about our lack of success as it should make us humble before the game, humble before the powers that must coincide to achieve success at the game, and simply grateful to be a member at the table.