Pollux writes:

Yesterday, I was listening to NPR and heard an interesting factoid: more Americans purchased tickets to see the Soccer World Cup than any other nationality apart from South Africans.

Has America finally fallen in love with soccer? Well, it’s complicated.

As David Wangerin points out in his book Soccer in a Football World, the United States may be a soccer-playing nation but we’re not a soccer nation. “Certainly the game has not managed to permeate popular culture,” Wangerin writes, ” - office conversations, school playgrounds, radio phone-ins and so forth - the way the major sports do, and it seems a long way from doing so.”

The United States may go to war for many reasons, but not for soccer. Our archives aren’t filled with blood-soaked, possibly spurious histories about the origins of soccer involving medieval peasants chopping off the heads of Vikings (actual Vikings, not the American football team) and kicking them around (“And thus the game of football was born”).

Timothy Sexton attributed the lack of popularity of soccer in America to the fact that the sport isn’t hand-based. “We still have the memory of our pioneer genesis close to the surface of our society,” Sexton remarks. “This country was literally built from the ground up. We love to do things with our hands. In soccer, you don’t use their hands all that much. It’s a foot-based sport and somewhere deep inside our pioneer psyche, I think we just don’t care for that.”

Why should we care that many of us don’t care about soccer? Does loving soccer finally allow us entry into a Soccer Security Council or a G-5 of Goals? Should we get into fist fights at bars over the merits of the New York Red Bulls versus the Columbus Crew? Should armor-plated policemen charge our soccer fields when riots explode after a terrible 13-0 loss suffered by the New England Revolution?

Why is soccer’s lack of popularity in the United States considered a national defect and a source of wonder and bewilderment? Wind power’s lack of popularity in the United States is more of a problem.

America’s relationship with soccer is like our relationship with Sting’s music: we’re familiar with it, we know that it’s both English and international, that it buys villas in Italy -but who is going to the stadium? Mostly people who grew up listening to Sting’s music.