With the World Cup coming up this summer, you’ll be reading a lot about it. And half those stories will be why it garners absolutely no interest in the United States.
Everyone knows that Soccer is the #1 sport in America for those 10 and under. However, after age 10, it ranks somewhere below broomball and above nose picking in youth sports. But no one can agree why. So instead of sports writers, we get essayists to tackle the subject.
The author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers, wrote an essay in an upcoming book, “The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup”, on why he thinks Americans will never get Futbol. His first reason is that we didn’t invent it and we like our sport home-grown.
The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of diving. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers. There are few examples of American sports where diving is part of the game, much less accepted as such.But diving in soccer is a problem. It is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging and cheating, an unappealing mix. The theatricality of diving is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds… American sports are, for better or worse, built upon transparency, or the appearance of transparency, and on the grind-it-out work ethic.
In my opinion, the real reason that everyone abandons soccer is that no one wants to be a loser. Eggers touches upon it in his essay but it’s really Chuck Klosterman who gets it right. Soccer is so popular for kids because they are forced to play it. Parents want their kids to do some physical activity and soccer is the easiest way to accomplish that.
The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. No other sport can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four co-ordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.
So basically, if you have even an inkling of athletic ability, you’ll look around by age 11 and see how much of a loser the rest of your teammates are. (Coincidentally, this is the same time that parents of the hopelessly uncoordinated just give up.) Since no one wants to be associated with a sport full of losers, these athletic kids gravitate to cooler sports like baseball, basketball and football. Sure, some kids stick it out and we have good soccer programs in prep schools and colleges but most just can’t be bothered. Why play a sport no one will watch on TV when you can imitate the plays you see on Sportscenter.
Until we get a “Tiger Woods” of soccer, it’ll always take a backseat in the United States, even to hockey.
Links:
[The Observer]: ‘American sports are played with the hands. Using your feet is for commies’
[Fox Sports]: Even soccer fans are sick of diving.
