Let’s address some of the assertions regarding the question in the OP and see if the assertions can be squared with the facts.
- Soccer isn’t popular here because it makes for poor television promotion (hard to have commercials, hard to watch, etc.)
This, of course, carries with it the assumption that baseball, American football, and basketball (hockey doesn’t count, it’s still so second class that it only airs on ESPN and fails to get equal play with the NBA) are popular because of their promotion through television. While it is true that their current popularity has resulted in large part from success on television, all three sports were popular to a large degree well before television managed to promote them successfully. American football has been the number one fall sport for over 60 years, either through the college game or the professional game. Baseball has had our collective summer attention since before radio broadcasts began on a large scale, let alone television. And I can recall watching Lakers games on TV and collecting lots of trading cards and the like in the 60’s, long before the NBA was a marketing bonanza on TV. Soccer’s lack of presence on TV is reflective of its lack of popularity, not the other way around.
- Soccer doesn’t do well here because of low scoring (or, stated otherwise, because it is “boring”).
This is, of course, nonsense. It presupposes a fundamental difference between Americans and everyone non-American. The corallary for this assertion is that non-Americans like “boring” things. It also assumes that soccer is boring, often without managing a very convincing argument of supporting evidence besides the low scores.
Americans usually find soccer “boring” at first go for the same reason many non-Americans find our form of football “boring” at first go, or baseball, for that matter: lack of familiarity with the game. Sure, there isn’t a lot of scoring, but that hardly makes a game boring by itself. Anyone who has watched one of these wonderful hockey thrillers where the game goes three or four overtimes for a 1-0 or 2-1 win will cheerfully admit that the game was anything but boring. But one has to know what to find exciting when scoring isn’t happening to find the game fun to watch. Would a person untutored in the sport of baseball find a well-turned double-play exciting? (One is perhaps reminded of the old joke about the wife who, arriving at a game late with her husband, and finding out that the score is 0-0 with both pitchers throwing no-hitters in the sixth inning, remarks on how she was right and they hadn’t missed anything…) How about all the inherent drama in a dropped pass on a post route? A fan of the game finds it exciting; a non-fan just thinks they screwed up again and looks for the channel changer.
The other reason Americans find soccer “boring” is because they are rarely emotionally invested in what they are watching. I agonize every year over the Cubs. I just was crushed when the Leafs lost in OT Tuesday night. The Packers have been my team since the Bart Starr years, when, as a kid, their banner was posted on my wall, I drank out of their glasses, and I wore their jersey while watching on black and white television. All while living in Southern California. In short, I am a FAN. Now, admit it. How many true soccer FANS are there here? How many Americans cheered to the rafters when Real Madrid won the Champions Cup two weeks ago? Who in this country dies when Inter Milan fails to take the scudetto, or when United lose to Arsenal? If you don’t think it is possible to get excited about soccer, just watch a soccer mom at tournament time when her kid’s team in in the middle of a nil-nil game with time running out. Of course, from personal experience, I can suggest you don’t watch her while wearing a black shirt and carrying a whistle with two little colored cards in your breast pocket, cause make the wrong call and she’ll eat ya for lunch…
The ultimate proof that a sport doesn’t have to have a lot of scoring to create a lot of excitement is NASCAR. Cars turning left over and over. Think about it…
- Soccer will become big when the kids playing it grow up.
Sorry, but this is not turning out to be the case. Soccer has been a wildly popular kid sport for well over a decade now. AYSO and USYSA were registering record numbers of kids at the beginning of the last decade, many of whom already have made it to the stage of being young consumers, in that VERY important early adult bracket that so many television advertisers love to market to. And they aren’t much more interested in soccer as adults than their non-soccer playing friends.
The reason for this seems to go back to some of the main difficulties with soccer here; mostly that it doesn’t create fans out of participants/watchers in the US. All those kids playing aren’t any more interested in MLS or in world class soccer players and teams than their parents were. Talk to them about the World Cup, and they shrug their shoulders and want to know if the Sox took two from the Yanks.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Bowling has the same difficulty, only it fails to convert either kids OR adults into fans.
Why, then, is soccer not popular here? The reasons are two:
A) Americans had a popular pasttime already when soccer’s popularity was exploding elsewhere (namely, baseball).
B) Soccer lost to the “Rugby” philosophy, which took over American college football.
Soccer’s world-wide popularity came about mostly through the spread of the game by English mercantile and manufacturing establishments overseas during the very late 1800’s and early 1900’s. England had a large mercantile presence in several European countries, namely Italy, Spain and Portugal (surprise, surprise that these three are among the five or six best countries consistently in Europe). It also had a lot of business in Argentina and Brazil (hmmm, do we see a trend here), not to mention Uruguay (winners of two World Cups themselves). And, of course, it had lots of connections in various parts of Africa. At the time of the spread in popularity, these countries didn’t have their own “national” sports. The working class in these countries readily adopted the sport, largely because of its simplicity and lack of expensive necessary equipment.
America, of course, didn’t have a large English mercantile establishment here in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Further, America had baseball, which experienced its own growth over virtually the same years as the growth of soccer in England and, later, the “world.” By 1901, we had two major leagues and several minor leagues of baseball. Baseball ate up our desire for a past time. Similar results occurred in Canada (hockey, Canadian football, and (gulp) curling), Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc. where baseball is king, Australasia (Aussie rules football, among other things), the Indian subcontinent (which adopted cricket from the English upper class that ruled it, but not soccer from the English middle and lower class that avoided the area when possible).
And still, soccer might have caught on here, if it wasn’t for the fact that the American colleges opted to go much the same route as “Oxbridge,” adopting the more physical version of football pioneered at Rugby School in England. Soccer was widely played in the US in the late 1800’s, and even as late as the 1930’s it was popular and we were relatively good at it (we were semifinalists at the first World Cup in 1930). But the Ivy League and, following their footsteps, the other well-known colleges chose to promote the version of the game where you could grab an opposing player and force them to give up the ball. By the time of WWII, American football was immensly popular in its collegiate form, so much so that it ended up being used as a tourism draw (bowl games). The fan base had built up through a generation of indoctrination at the “local” level.
Thus, we already had one national sport occupying our time during spring and summer, and we chose a different version of football to occupy our fall, mostly because we preferred to imitate the “highbrow” English colleges rather than the “lowbrow” working class. By the time the World Cup had helped establish the tremendous popularity of soccer in Europe and Latin America, we had no need of it in America.
There is one other factor that, in my humble opinion, plays into the lack of soccer as a national sport here: climate. In most of the parts of Europe where soccer became immensly popular, the winter climate allows the game to be played all winter long. In most of the highly populated areas of America (early 1900 demographics), winter prevents the playing of soccer because of cold and snow, and summer makes playing the sport difficult because of heat and humidity (which is why baseball is such a lazy sport most of the time). Now, of course, as soccer in such places as Russia and Nigeria shows, you can overcome these problems, but usually only because you have nothing else to fill the gap.
Anyone who wants some references can either dig out one of my many past posts on the subject, or can ask me, and I’ll supply some, in what little spare time I have as I go into practical catatonic stupor resulting from staying up to watch games the next month at 2:30 am, 5:30 am and 7:30 am.
Doug (who remembers with pride where he was July 4, 1994)
