Vital Questions
Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return. ~Stephen Webb
Via Massie
No, I don’t think Webb is joking. At least, he says he isn’t joking. An essential element of anti-soccer jeremiads–and Webb actually labels his a jeremiad to make sure you don’t miss his prophetic purpose–is the lack of experience in actually playing soccer. For that matter, if your main experience with the game is watching (or playing in) AYSO matches at the local park, you are not going to think much of it, just as Europeans would not be very impressed if they attended nothing but Little League. At the other end, Americans are usually only exposed to soccer on television during the World Cup, and the U.S. team rarely advances to the final rounds, so most Americans have no rooting interest in a match between, say, Brazil and Germany, and they don’t know who most of the players are, because almost all of them play for European clubs. Having ignored the sport for four years, we Americans find that they are out of the loop in an ongoing conversation that the rest of the world understands perfectly well. Our own continental parochialism stares back at us, and we get annoyed.
Whenever I see or hear an American holding forth on the evils of soccer, one thing that I can rely on is that the person usually has no understanding of the sport, and Webb certainly hasn’t any. The evidence for this is clear in that Webb seems to think that soccer teaches that everyone is a winner. Who on earth has ever played soccer and said, “Yes, this game is geared towards boosting self-esteem!”? That is madness. Practice slide tackling for ten minutes and then tell me this with a straight face.
This lack of understanding is the crucial part in any tiresome exercise in sports nationalism: “Our manly sport has subtlety and form, and it reflects the true nature of the universe, whereas their stupid children’s game is pointless and boring.” The Bollywood film Lagaan actually captures this quite amusingly when Aamir Khan’s character laughs at the British cricketers for playing a glorified version of gilli danda, only to discover later that he knows nothing about the game. Europeans can make the same boredom charge against baseball (and they have), we can say it about soccer or cricket (and we have), and no doubt almost everyone outside Canada has said it about curling (but not, I think, about hockey!).
Indeed, Webb dives right in with the boredom accusation, and goes from there. Ask a foreigner from somewhere other than Japan or Latin America, and he will make the same complaint about baseball–it takes so long for every pitch, and there are these huge stretches where nothing is happening! How can you stupid Americans stand the tedium? Of course, connoisseurs of baseball know that there is almost always something happening or about to happen, because they are paying attention to things that tend to escape casual notice, and they enjoy the rhythm of the game in any case. More to the point, we like it because we have learned to like it by watching and playing it our entire lives, much as football-centric sports cultures have done with their sport. Europeans also tend to find American football boring and incomprehensible, and I’m sure it seems that way to them.
The most ridiculous charge against soccer is its alleged egalitarian ethic. This is not remotely true. The importance of skill and precision in playing soccer is hard to overestimate. Even if it were egalitarian, though, it could hardly be more obsessed with equality than the vicious leveling impulse of that quintessentially American version of car racing, NASCAR. NASCAR is plainly a joke compared to international open-wheel auto racing, partly because of the built-in leveling through all of the restrictions imposed on the cars, and this egalitarian impulse artificially keeps the superior drivers with better engineers stuck in the pack for the entire race.
Formula One has its drawbacks as a spectator sport when some teams are reliably better than the rest of the field. This is the case thanks to greater funding, better technology and better drivers hired through greater funding, but that ought to be a certain kind of conservative’s favorite organization of a sport: some benefit from built-in advantages that others can’t have, and life isn’t fair. The Ferrari and McLaren teams will always tend to make mincemeat out of the other teams, and that’s just the way it is. Yankees fans will be able to appreciate this arrangement, but it is an awfully strange one for an overwhelmingly European racing league to have. Aren’t all these Europeans obsessed with egalitarianism, or is the complaint against them this week that their societies are too stratified and class conscious? Or is it both? I must check my anti-European memos more often.
Of course, sport is supposed to represent a world in which instant morality prevails and fair competition is the rule, which is why all decent human beings hate the Yankees, just as everyone got extremely tired of Schumacher’s seemingly endless string of championships. The point is this: if you spend enough time at it, you can find the flaws and virtues in every kind of competition, and you can invest this or that sport with some allegedly definitive national or cultural characteristics that embody vitality or decadence. If done as a kind of light-hearted ribbing, it can be quite fun, but when offered as some kind of deadly serious cultural criticism it is dreadful.
Truly baffling. Do you suppose he is serious? Really, truly serious? I can’t believe that he is….
Sounds like he’s a great dad. “My kids’ hobbies bore me, but instead of trying to care, I’m going to write about how I’m justified on the grounds of…uh…let’s see here….patriotism!”
I think he doesn’t very much like having to attend his daughters’ soccer matches, and he wanted to tie this dislike to some bigger idea. He seems to have evaluated soccer largely on his experience as the soccer dad of three girls, which I would suggest may not be the most representative or complete experience.
The funny thing is that I played soccer as a kid and didn’t like it very much at the time, but I think a large part of that was that I didn’t really understand the game. I usually played fullback and didn’t have a good grasp on what that position was supposed to do. At the time, I thought the fullback’s job was to kick the ball randomly down the field as far as possible. The idea of *directed* passing down the field was a mystery to me. The coach sometimes moved me to halfback, but I was a lazy kid and didn’t want to run that much. Ironic that I ended up doing cross country for six years later on! (I wonder if long distance running is also a degraded and low sport that involves only one’s feet?)
I am 45 and I played soccer in junior high (as well as basketball and football–but I always sucked at baseball…) I can fully understand people who are just not into soccer–I’m not into it as an adult, really. But it seems bizarre that people would have such a lack of understanding of the game. Am I wrong in assuming that most people have played soccer once or twice in their lives? Did they feel that the goal was for everyone to win? Or did they, like kids playing any other game (whether kickball, volleyball, dodgeball–or as we called it, “kill”–or even ultimate frisbee), compete like little demons to beat the other kids. I know I did.
I love your point about NASCAR/America vs. F1/Europe. I wonder if this is a case of Europeans being more interested in pure “sport” versus entertainment. Or maybe it’s because NASCAR is more interested in pleasing sponsors, and F1 sees them as a necessary evil.
RWB, I think soccer “suffers” from being the easiest sports for parents to play. Soccer can be played virtually anywhere with a decent amount of open space and any number of people, with minimal outlay for equipment. Football, hockey, and baseball all require lots of equipment and specific amounts of people. Basketball is more comparable, but still requires hoops.
Since soccer requires minimal expense and effort on the parents’ end, they think it’s great for kids, but are also entirely free to disdain it – social psychology demonstrates how the more effort or investment people have in something, the more they convince themselves of its quality or import.
Like most other sports, kids’ leagues encourage that you play the game “for fun.” This is hardly controversial, but if it’s the only access someone has to a sport, they’re going to interpret it as being unserious, or even feminine.
I’ve found that most sports have a rhythm or a language that, once understood, helps the audience realize when things are going well and when they aren’t. Knowing the rhythm of baseball – which is primarily in the pitcher-batter duel – makes that sport interesting. I have no idea how to read that in cricket, but that doesn’t make me declare that, for example, cricket’s popularity in South Asia makes it the sport of religious extremists.
Regarding NASCAR, I am not a fan, but I think the idea of “equal” cars is meant to pit driver versus driver, as opposed to machine versus machine. That is, someone riding Secretariat or driving Schumacher’s car has a distinct advantage. Ostensibly, Jeff Gordon does not. As such, frequent wins identify HIM as the holder of the skill. Not some engineer.
And as for bias against soccer, doesn’t the desire for distinct “communities” argue for this kind of bias? That is, don’t people who love “place” want to engage in this kind of… jeremiad? I mean, is there really a way to say, objectively, that Texas BBQ is better than Kansas City? Or that our national song is better than there national song? Or whatever?
But isn’t that what we want to do on our front porches?
…which is why all decent human beings hate the Yankees…
I know you needed to add in all the soccer stuff to make your poiont, but the real meat of the post is right there…
And as for bias against soccer, doesn’t the desire for distinct “communities†argue for this kind of bias? That is, don’t people who love “place†want to engage in this kind of… jeremiad? I mean, is there really a way to say, objectively, that Texas BBQ is better than Kansas City? Or that our national song is better than there national song? Or whatever?
I don’t think having a strong emotional attachment to the place you’re from, and preferring the sports, traditions, etc., of that place, requires you to sneer at other people’s homes, sports and traditions. Actually the opposite may be the case. If you’re happy to let everyone do their own thing then what difference does it make if people in Amsterdam love soccer and people in Boston love baseball? But if you’re angling for a unified global culture where efficiency is maximized and everyone shares a common experience, you might be more interested in getting people to stop liking “bad” or unpopular sports and get on the same page with the people who like the “right” pastimes.
By the way, Webb’s brand of anti-soccer diatribe is a great unintentional parody of American exceptionalism, in that the theme is always, “Soccer is obviously and in all ways inferior to the three iconic American sports, but Americans are the only people who know this, because Americans are smart and good, while the rest of the world suffers from a mental and moral deficiency.”
“I don’t think having a strong emotional attachment to the place you’re from, and preferring the sports, traditions, etc., of that place, requires you to sneer at other people’s homes, sports and traditions.”
I kind of think it does require that.
When the visiting team come over from Johnsonville, the good folks in the stands in Smithville don’t shout cheers that say, “We like ourselves! But we respect you! Our differences are minimal!” The cheers are typically demeaning putdowns. About the other team’s mascot, sure. But also about the other town’s culture. Our cross-county rivals had a paper millin their town. We felt quite superior to them, as our town did not stink. So we sneered at them and felt superior. Other towns sneered at us for other reasons.
Look, there’s not real reason for a person to prefer a french baguette to a Tuscan country loaf. Or one white wine to another. Or very liuttle reason, except for the very few people who have developed advanced pallates and such. Mostly, we prefer things because they are what we know. What we grew up with. Traditions.
America has a tradition of playing football. And hating soccer. It is a motivating, unifying force. And we like motivating, unifying forces, no? The idea that we should step back as sporting men and assess these pasttimes rationally seems rather… libertarian, no?
I mean, is there a REASON to tip your hat to a lady? No. Except that’s what you do.
And in the end, I think that’s what motivates the anti-soccer minions. They feel like playing soccer is kind of… rude.
Every year, by the way, I ask my composition students to name the two most controversial, divisive topics in America today. They guess abortion. War. Etc. I let them go for a while until I say, “Soccer. And WalMart.” They sit there stunned for a second. Then one person opens his mouth and… BOOM.
It has almost come to fisticuffs. Twice.
Your disdain for your cross-county high school rivals might be a better example of the narcissism of small differences than it is of disdain for other cultures. In that sense it supports my point. That town didn’t need to be full of espresso-drinking, Italian-speaking, Ferrari-driving soccer players to earn your contempt–it just had to be a town other than your own. No amount of cosmopolitanism is going to erase that instinct from humanity, so there’s no reason to think a typical cosmopolitan is less likely to sneer at other people’s homes and traditions than a typical localist.
“Your disdain for your cross-county high school rivals might be a better example of the narcissism of small differences than it is of disdain for other cultures.”
Maybe, but I can say that there was certainly a lot of cultural baggage in the rivalry between my school, the largest private prep school in town, and the cross-town Catholic high school. We were overwhelmingly secular and politically liberal, and mostly white, and St. Pius was obviously a Catholic school with many more Hispanic kids. For the most part these differences were subsumed by simple school rivalry and were mostly expressed in and through competitions, but the hostility was real and based in more than coming from different schools.
On the question of sneering, it is my general rule that one of the key differences between patriotism and nationalism or between loyalty and pride/arrogance is the willingness to respect that the other man’s love of his country and customs is as natural and good as yours, and that your country and customs are not served or respected by having contempt for his. However, nationalism and pride are viscerally satisfying because they feed our self-importance.
Cosmopolitans, so called, on the other hand tend to sneer at anything and everything different from their own personal experience, which they have already taken to be the standard of enlightened and civilized behavior. Their horizons are paradoxically much more constricted and limited than the “provincials” with their local attachments. The worst are the people who come from a “provincial” background and succeed in metropolitan society, as these folks often seem to feel obliged to have disdain for the places and people they came from.
“one of the key differences between patriotism and nationalism or between loyalty and pride/arrogance is the willingness to respect that the other man’s love of his country and customs is as natural and good as yours”
That’s a good standard, perhaps, but one that’s almost impossible to maintain. We are not talking about mathematics here, or other pursuits in which “rightness” can be measured. We are talking a preference for creole versus cajun, or Italian wine versus French. Since there is no “reason” to prefer one to the other, you sort of have to take it on faith that you are correct. Meaning that the other people are wrong.
I come from an Italian family. One of the basic rules of etiquette is to offer people homemade wine when they come to your house. And to take some with you when you visit other homes. To tell them how great theirs is. And when they leave, to snicker about how terrible it really was, and how that probably stems form the fact that their family has always been lousy at making wine and growing tomatoes and working, etc. That is, to protect our own stuff, we sneer at the stuff of others. To say, “Yours is great, too,” and to actually mean it, is to call into question your own way of gdoing things.
If their wine really was just as good, we could make ours that way. Which would mean we had been doing something wrong.
It’s why Big 10 football is Big 10 football. (Good football.) Versus WAC football. (Football so bad, so fruity, that it borders on the feminine.)
It’s why “The Hind Tit” complains about jazz and bemoans the loss of the barn dances. It’s not just that the Barn Dances were good. Jazz was terrible. It had to be. Otherwise, how could you justify caring about the barn dance?
Masochists have always loved watching soccer for the obvious reason that standing in the cold waiting for someone, anyone, to score a goal is exquisitely humiliating. Soccer also fulfills the need for a non-contact sport that obese children can play. I suppose the negligible expense of fielding teams compared to Football is a boon to schools. Soccer is the kudzu of sport, a foreign inport that has spread too far to eradicate. BTW, I’ve read attacks on Soccer using the same points in British publications, so this Isn’t just an American complaint.
Nascar is idiotic compared to Formula 1. What is the point of watching an assemblage of identical cars, plastered with advertising make endless left hand turns until one of them crashes?
The most ridiculous charge against soccer is its alleged egalitarian ethic
That is not a ridiculous charge in the US. Webb’s not wrong about the role of soccer in the US. Certainly it is still a competitive sport, even in the US, but it does seem to appeal to upper class parents who don’t like the stark “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” mentality of football. Europeans and Europhiles seem unable to understand that soccer plays a completely different role in American culture than it does in Europe. I know my Russian friends can’t even conceive of girls playing futbol, it’s perceived as such a macho sport in Russia. But in America soccer is the sport of girls and dread-locked white guys who aren’t tough enough for “real” sports.
Also there is no reason for Americans to admit that soccer is “as good” as our football, basketball or baseball. Soccer is a sport for the poor – it’s great for favela kids who can’t afford more than a ratty ball and an empty abandoned lot. But we Americans are rich, and it makes sense that we cast off embarrassing reminders of our poor immigrant past and turn to games of affluence. That the upper class has returned to soccer is just slumming – “stuff white people like” to prove they can still keep it real.
Oh, and I just read Sam M’s post. I agree. A lot of anti-soccer virulence, mine anyway, is motivated by the fact that so many US pro-soccer fans seem to have adopted soccer to show that they’re “better” than their fellow Americans. They wear their Barca shirt or natter about the weaknesses of Man U’s midfield to show how cosmopolitan they are.
@vanya
I think you possibly just ignored the whole crux of Daniel’s post; making sweeping statements about other cultures on the basis of sport. And you are factually incorrect; it’s hard imagine the large wave of European immigrants of the early 1900′s throwing off the “shackles” of soccer since most of them didn’t play it. After all, soccer’s spread internationally didn’t really take effect until the era most immigrants were leaving, and certainly not on a serious fan cheering level until the 30′s and 40′s.
And the psycho-babble is just annoying. I don’t think that most parents are signing up for soccer because its for effete boys. But because its often the only game that hasn’t devolved into a ridiculous mini-training ground for professionals. One can only look at the scandals around age’s in the Little League World Series and the “importing” of ethnic players from other countries. And try out’s? Really? All my friends did was pick up a bat and hit the local park mound. The closest kids can get to that today is watching The Sandlot.
Gordanius, “Soccer also fulfills the need for a non-contact sport that obese children can play” — really? I’ve been around a lot of recreational sports, and I can definitely say that baseball and football teams boast a ton more “obese” kids than any soccer team… and that, opinions of the sport aside, an obese kid who chooses to join one of them will almost certainly lose more weight on the soccer field (prolonged, unbroken periods of running, running, running) than in the baseball dugout or waiting for their 10 seconds per play, on only one side of the ball, in football.
Regardless, I just don’t know why so many people give a damn one way or the other what sport someone else’s kids (or some other grown person) plays.
(BTW, this is former high school soccer player who currently follows only professional American football.)
I love how ignorant some people are about the sport itself.
“Soccer also fulfills the need for a non-contact sport that obese children can play.”
Everyone I know who has played soccer as well as other typically “tough” sports (football/basketball/hockey) on a relatively competitive level can attest to how intense and demanding soccer is as a sport. You don’t know how much courage and intensity you have to have to play well- for challenging headers in the air, for pushing yourself for 90 minutes, fighting for every ball and getting beat up in the process because you aren’t wearing any protection. I’ve played pick up soccer for years, and every day we leave the field hurting and totally worn out. Its way tougher than you think, but hey go back to thinking baseball is somehow more physically demanding and tough. Most of the world is laughing at you.
Soccer is the fastest growing sport in America. It gets more and more coverage on TV every single day. Hell, you only need to walk around for a few minutes and the chances are you’ll see someone wearing a soccer jersey. Its a game that belongs to a younger generation of Americans, and quite frankly the old farts who are out of the loop are going to be left in the dust soon enough.