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Morrisania (On Everything): On Soccer
Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: David Wangerin, football, NPR, Pollux, soccer, sports, Sting, Timothy Sexton, World Cup
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.
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Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.
Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.
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Other writing by Emily Gordon
- Reviews: theater writing (for Time Out Chicago)
- Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World)
- Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, bon vivant, New Yorker founding father (for Print)
- Slide show: the Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for NYCgo.com)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Homage: Celebrating lindy-hop legend Frankie Manning (for NYCgo.com)
- Inquiry: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
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Comments
Solution: they should make “Bend it like a Houston Dynamo ” where Sandra Bullock takes in Cristiano Ronaldo and love blossoms on and off the field in a small southern town. I think that would make Soccer popular for at least six months, seven with musical numbers and small European bathing suits. Good Article!
The reason why soccer is not as popular in the states as opposed to the rest of the world is simple. Americans are obsessed with instant gratification. They want it now. They don’t have the attention span and patience for soccer. Americans need to watch someone score every minute or so to stay involved in that sport. They need results and statistics. Basketball and american football have just that. What I don’t understand is why people in this country hate soccer so much. To me, there is nothing more exciting than the buildup and the anticipation of that elusive goal, literally. I love soccer!