… but not Canadians, Australians, or the Irish? I never hear about doubt-filled, self-loathing Canadians who ask themselves “Why isn’t soccer in Canada as popular as hockey? The rest of the world seems to enjoy it. Maybe it’s because it’s not violent enough for us.” I never hear about Europeans that call Australians “unsophisticated” for preferring Aussie Rules and cricket to soccer.
Meanwhile, Americans get called to task all the time for not incorporating soccer into their lineup of preferred sports. “Americans have short attention spans, and can’t appreciate the subtlety and dance that takes place on the soccer field.” “Americans only like sports where teams can score a lot and accumulate a large number of points.” “Americans are all, yes, how you say, stupid, and they can’t appreciate a sport of brains like soccer, rather than a sport of brawn, no? Pick up ze merde of my poodle? No! Zat ezz for zee North Africans to do!” There’s a legion of books on the topic, and no shortage of sportswriters that try to answer the question.
So, what’s the deal? Why don’t Canadians, Aussies, the Irish, and other nationalities that are not collectively known for being soccer fanatics get called on it as well? Why just Americans?
Are you begging the question here? I assume you’re not Canadian–are there any True North folks here who’ve caught shit for assuming football = game with oblong inflated thing played wearing shoulder pads?
Because for years the United States was unassailable in baseball and basketball, competitive in hockey and the only people in the world that played football.
Therefore, soccer became the perfect foil to attack the pathetic United States for their inability to compete on the world stage and their apathy for the world’s game.
IMO, I think it’s due to a mismatch of interest in the world’s most popular sport with shared global televisual spectacle.
The US is the biggest (population-wise) and loudest (media-wise) country in your list, globally, and since things like the World Cup are such vast global media events, it seems a shame that the media champions of the world largely turn their back on the world’s biggest sporting event (and regularly most viewed broadcast sporting event in history, I believe).
Worse, the US was given the privilege of hosting the World Cup one year, and the majority of the domestic population ignored something that is, to the majority of the rest of the world, exceptionally significant.
Thirdly, the other countries are pretty insignificant really in terms of population; given the US’s talent pool and wealth, if you turned your hand to football you would whip everyone’s arses. It’s therefore a disappointment that the US don’t give a shit and therefore don’t give anyone another opportunity to diss the US even more.
(Error in the OP, though: the Irish are, by the way, football fanatics - they watch English Premier League mainly, and everyone seems to support Machester United - but they have their own national league too which is very well supported, and when they play[ed] in the World Cup, the entire country went officially insane.)
Americans are generally assholes about it in my experience. I’ve never seen people from any of the other countries mentioned actively disparage soccer in the same way that Americans often do.
We have our own national sports (http://gaa.ie/) and rugby is also very popular but even most people cross over between sport. Most bars etc. will show games and LOTS of people have satelite or cable just for Sky Sports. It’s British teams most follow although Celtic is also very popular.
I don’t know how you got the impression that it wasn’t so.
In our defense, there is nothing more strident than a foreign-born soccer fan and his snide comments about “armoured wankball” and how the NFL is not “football” and real football is not “soccer”.
Is it any wonder that soccer elicits that kind of reaction under those circumstances?
If you’re a Brit and you go live in Australia you deal with the exact same conflict US/World does about football (soccer). But since ‘Aussie Rules’ is already quite a common phrase, being confused about what sport is being discussed does not happen so often. And they wear less armour and kick the ball more often than in American football so they’re cut a bit of slack. (it seems more logical to call their game football than the American game I suppose)
They would also find your fanny being sore from rooting for your team for hours quite amusing.
Yes. Not only did the US embrace it, World Cup '94 lead directly to the creation of Major League Soccer and a resurgence in youth participation, which has translated into a considerable influx of United States players into European football leagues. A good number of the cities in MLS have built soccer-only stadiums and they fill them quite adequately.
Will soccer ever be as popular in the US as it is elsewhere? Probably not. But then again, hockey, baseball and American football aren’t hugely popular in other countries, so that’s not really a strike against it.
Absolutely. I remember people watching the World Cup who otherwise wouldn’t cross the street to watch soccer live. There was a great deal more interest in it than I thought there would be.
Was it as big a deal as the Super Bowl or the World Series? No, but we were far from apathetic.
On top of that, I can tell you how much interest Olympic soccer drummed up in 1996, as I was a UGA student at the time & living in Athens, GA. A lot of folks I know were very fired up about that.
Heck I WENT to the World Cup in '94, and I haven’t seen a soccer game since, oh, the last World Cup.
I guess I’ve been raised too much on “American” sports, but those melee sports just don’t make me want to watch. I’m fine playing them (more-so), but I can’t spot the plays, and it looks like semi-random pummeling of a ball or puck. A basketball doesn’t flit from spot to spot and from team to team as much, and is under better control. I believe that the players actually meant for that to happen more often.
I don’t really know how often “Americans” get “so much shit” for not liking soccer. I hear so much about how soccer fans annoy by proselytizing their sport. Is this really true? Or is this one of those things that people say over and over again so many times that people just believe it? Like the “Al Gore invented the internet” thing.
Soccer is pretty popular in this country. As popular as football, basketball, or baseball? Of course not. Much more popular than the Conventional Wisdom makes it out to be? Of course. I don’t know why it so hard to believe there is a middle ground.
There is no conversation more removed from reality than “Do Americans Hate Soccer?”
I think that soccer has done pretty well in the US, as a participation sport. Go to any suburb on a Saturday morning, and see how full the fields are with kids (and some adults, too) playing.
As a spectator sport, either in person or on TV, it’s still a niche sport – as you say, it’s certainly below the big three of football, baseball, and basketball, and, in the northern half of the country, maybe not as big as hockey, either.
Yeah, that whole “popular as a participation sport, not popular as a spectator sport” is another great cliche.
Maybe true in the seventies, with the NASL and the emergence of the sport as a suburban phenomenon, but these days, with the amount of soccer on television, the huge crowds top level clubs attract when they play in this country, and the fact that the last World Cup final outdrew that years’ World Series on TV, I think its hard to say that soccer doesn’t draw as a spectator sport in this country. Again, not the Big Three, but not niche either.
What people mean to say is MLS doesn’t draw as a spectator sport, which is entirely true. MLS is entirely niche. (And I say that a the biggest supporter of my local MLS side) But that’s like saying that no one watches Conference USA, so therefore college football isn’t popular in this country. The problem MLS faces is not that soccer isn’t popular in this country. It’s that American-based soccer isn’t popular in this country, which is a lovely chicken-egg problem.
It’s really that there are a certain subset of Americans, particularly rabid sports fans, who feel the need to disparage ANY other sport that other people feel strongly about that they don’t. Don’t feel bad about dismissing football/soccer as a Euro-obsession; the most bileful put-downs of the game of baseball I’ve ever heard have come from Americans who just don’t get why football isn’t “America’s Pastime” already. Or Northeasterners talking giving the usual speech about how mystified they are that NASCAR racing gets equal billing on ESPNNEWS as football or basketball, or how professional hockey shouldn’t be played further south Washington DC or even Philadelphia.*
Of course jerks like this are to be found throughout the world, but only American jerks feel like they’re the target demographic of all humanity and therefore have a bigger soapbox to stand on.
*Note: I am myself a Northeastern American and may or may not be guilty of a similar rant at some point, especially when lubricated with rum or scotch.
(it seems more logical to call their game football than the American game I suppose)