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.