Why America hates football (soccer)

While people from Oslo to Athens and from London to Vladivostok were avidly following the European football championship in June, Americans ignored it. In the United States, the only way to see the Greece-Portugal final, or any other match in the tournament, was to make a special, costly arrangement with a satellite broadcasting company or to find a pub that was showing one of the games. Any such pub would invariably be located in an obscure corner of a large city and filled with people speaking languages other than English. Euro 2004 was the latest episode in the long history of American indifference to the world's favourite sport, which continues despite strenuous efforts to put the game on the same footing as America's three major team games: baseball, American football and basketball. Why have these efforts failed?

One reason has to do with the existing popularity of the big three. Even in as large and wealthy a country as the United States, where the national appetite for playing, and even more so for watching, games is enormous, the cultural, economic and psychological space available for sport is limited and that space is already taken. Baseball, American football and basketball have long since put down deep roots, claimed particular seasons of the year as their own (although they now overlap) and gained the allegiance of the sports-following public.

A fourth team sport, ice hockey, is widely played across the northern tier of the country and has a professional league with teams located across the border in Canada and throughout the United States, even in cities whose climates are so benign that ice has never formed in them: indeed, the franchise in Tampa, Florida, won this year's championship. The presence of four major team sports - more than in any other country - has made the barrier to entry in the competition for the affections and the dollars of American sports fans extraordinarily high, so high that even the world's most popular game has not been able to surmount it.

One in particular of those three sports - basketball - poses a singular obstacle to the national acceptance of football. The two are too similar for them both to succeed. Each belongs to the family of games whose object is to put a ball (or similar object) in a goal.

Football and basketball are also easier to play than the other team games. They do not require elaborate equipment and satisfactory informal games can be staged without the full complement of players. And both football and basketball players can perfect their skills practising entirely alone.

Spectators see the same thing in the two games: episodes of spontaneous coordination, with players devising and implementing schemes for scoring. They see, that is, acts of creation. If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.

The two games are both played partly in the air. Basketball players spring off the floor to launch shots at the basket and soar to capture missed shots as they bounce off the rim, even as football players leap upward to intercept a kicked ball with their heads to control it, tap it to a team-mate, or redirect it into their opponents' goal. Football and basketball are therefore the team sports that most vividly evoke a common human fantasy: to leave the ground and fly through the air.

This is why, perhaps, football and basketball are the team sports with the widest global appeal. It is no surprise that each of the two has established a beachhead in the last great expanse of unoccupied sports territory, the People's Republic of China. Their marked similarities, however, also mean that the two sports duplicate each other. They provide the same satisfactions. For spectators they are, in a sense, alternatives. North Americans don't need football because they already get what it has to offer from basketball.

There is, too, the problem of the frequency with which football matches end in a draw. Americans want conclusive results from their games. Baseball and basketball have rules forbidding draws: the two teams must play until one of them wins. Draws were more common in American football until two decades ago when, responding to the national irritation with them, the managers of the sport changed the rules. Now collegiate games cannot end in draws and professional contests very rarely do.

Most American sports fans would regard the method used for deciding international championship matches that end in a draw even after extra time - the penalty shoot-out - as absurdly arbitrary and no more fitting a way to determine a winner than flipping a coin.

There is a remedy for what is, in American eyes, football's gravest defect. The game's rules could be changed to make scoring much easier, which would mean that even if the match were drawn at the end of 90 minutes, one or the other team would almost certainly score in extra time.

Altering the rules to encourage scoring is an old and well established practice in American sport. In the course of the 20th century, baseball, American football and basketball each did so several times. The changes helped to sustain, and indeed to expand, the popularity of all three, since, as one astute student of baseball put it, 'offense [scoring] is making things happen. Defense is keeping things from happening. People would much rather watch things happen.'

To do the same thing for football might well require dramatic modifications in the way the game is now played - the abolition of the offside rule, for example, or awarding points that count in the final score for corner kicks, which, as in prize fights that do not end in knockouts, would give an advantage to the side that makes the most determined efforts to score.

Why has this not happened in the US? One possible reason is that such changes would make the American version of football substantially different from the game played everywhere else, and here Americans are reluctant to be out of step with the rest of the world. If that is the case, then the failure of the world's most popular sport to gain full acceptance in the world's most sports-obsessed country suggests that there are, after all, limits to American unilateralism.

· Michael Mandelbaum is one of America's leading authorities on US foreign policy and international relations and the author of The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (Public Affairs)

When was the last time you actually heard an NFL broadcaster talk about applied leverage at the line more deeply than "you've got to get under your opponent"?

Ohh ya... and that guy that screams "GOOOOOOAAAAAAALLLL" is discussing the finer points of fake-outs.

But most people don't think a good play impacts the outcome of the game unless it results in a score. You hear it all the time in football, listen to what a home crowd does when they're team is behind and calls a run, they boo, they refuse to remember that you run the ball to setup the big pass, their team is behind and they want them to score NOW plays that setup a score on the next set of downs are not acceptable.

I'd scrap the offside rule in soccer because it's so goofy. They need to either make it clear (like hockey's offside rule) or dump it. As it stands it's almost as confusing as football's pass interference rule (which should be killed), rules like that are bad for games.

Actually I do know, it's about 10% of the audience. Most of the baseball audience doesn't care about the signs, and you don't have to care about the signs to understand the game enough to enjoy it. Which is exactly what I'm talking about, the people watching signs are probably patient enough to enjoy soccer, and they're a small minority of the baseball fan community.

Maybe years ago most people kept their own stats, not anymore. When I was going to games a lot in the 80s my dad was the only person I could see (my line of sight covered about 2 total sections) that was keeping stats. And even then baseball fans were the most stats addicted of all the sports fans.

Again, I'm not saying they don't get the subtlety, I'm saying they aren't interested in the subtlety. I'm sure they could get it if they want, American football is one of the most complicated (though unsubtle) sports in the world, American fans can grock that fine, I'm sure they could grock soccer and hockey, but they don't want to.

Baseball, when played in a way that's exciting, works a lot like soccer. It's a tight defensive game that any at bat can win. Soccer, like all other sports, is only boring if you refuse to learn anything about the game. when you declare soccer boring you tell me a lot about yourself, and say absolutely nothing about the game itself.

Euro 2004 was the latest episode in the long history of American indifference to the world's favourite sport, which continues despite strenuous efforts to put the game on the same footing as America's three major team games: baseball, American football and basketball. Why have these efforts failed?

Quite simply, soccer is equated with girliemen in the minds of many men.

That and 'Soccermoms' in minivans.

Every rule in soccer appears to have been created to make sure that nobody scores. The off-sides rule must be the dumbest thing in sports. Could you imagine if every time someone started a fast break in basketball the ref would blow the whistle? That's what off-sides does for soccer. They should have basketball announcers calling soccer games and pointing out how 90% of possessions end in turnovers, 9% end in really crappy shots on goal that don't come even close to getting in, and only 1% actually end in a potentially exciting play.

Before the guy screamed "goal" he probably spent 5 minutes talking about the finer points of fake-outs. Before the NFL announcer talked about getting under the opponent he probably didn't even mention the battle at the line of scrimage during the entire game. What happens in the trenches in football is only discussed like 2 minutes a game, you know why? It's too subtle, most fans don't want to hear about it, they want to see that great catch the receiver made over and over, but don't bore them with the blocking scheme that allowed the QB to stand in the pocket for 6 seconds waiting for the receiver to get open.

Soccer, basically without a rule change for well over 120 years is just plain mind numbing.
Even more so now with modern physical conditioning allowing for ceaseless defending, lowering scores and coming up with scores of one, two or even three goals.
By watching Football, I can observe some of the greatest athletes in action ranging from a sprinter, to defender some with enormous power and strength. I can see real men with real muscles involved in attempts to gain on defense or offense. Scores can be high or at the low end. None of those all defending soccer affairs without scores.
To name skills, or lack of it as a soccer prerequisite is just plain snobbery.

Have you ever actually PLAYED basketball? One of my favorite moves, as I was a guard, was to see a pick being set for me, faking as if I was going to use it, then driving toward the defensive player's side of the screen. Why? Because 90 percent of the time the guy on D was expecting me to dribble TOWARD the screen, and move to get around it. I was pretty quick, so I always had an advantage because my man was basically giving me an open lane on the ball side where I could drive and pass off when the help came. This only worked because I had already used other screens earlier in the game. How is that any different than what you describe in soccer?

The problem with soccer isn't having fun playing with it. I can drive to any high school field near my home on a weekend and find dozens of kids playing soccer. Remember the term "soccer mom"? There are tons of them. But those kids and their parents don't want to watch soccer. There are plenty of players in the US but few watchers. I think that suggests where the problem is.

I'm the son of a former Major Leaguer, and I never grasped the post-season atmosphere (in person) before last year.

At times it gets to a point where your heart is literally in your gut. It becomes excruciating as a fan, hanging on every pitch.

I still disagree that there is a greater knowledge of the "subtleties" of the game in soccer or any other game, than in baseball.

Fans are fans.

It's the game itself that you don't want to discuss, which is the reason the article is being lambasted - because it's the GAME that has the flaws, not us sports fans.

Before the NFL announcer talked about getting under the opponent he probably didn't even mention the battle at the line of scrimage during the entire game. What happens in the trenches in football is only discussed like 2 minutes a game, you know why? It's too subtle

I guess you should be listening to Gino Cappelletti and Gil Santos.

I guess when you're announcers for a Bill Belichick team, the subtlety is the story.

Even Madden - between inanities - tries to peel away the onion.

Because the two games are similar, they have the same kind of appeal. Both are easy to follow; you can immediately understand the point of each one. The rules and strategies of cricket, baseball, rugby and American football, by contrast, are less straightforward. The action of a basketball game and of a football match are easier to follow than that of other team sports as well because the ball is larger than in cricket and baseball and is never hidden in a tangle of bodies or a scrum, as it is in American football and rugby.

No comment.

Soccer, by contrast, frequently does not require knowledge of rules at all. If an opposing player has control of the ball, you can trip him up, elbow him, or knock him over. Once he's down, you can trample him. To buy time, you can kick the ball out of bounds, feign an injury caused by the opposing team, and haggle with the referee. In fact, these sorts of incidents tend to happen more frequently than an organized offense or defense, much less a goal.

In the last month, Major League Soccer has received

- $4,000,000 from the sale of Bobby Convey and DaMarcus Beasley, could be more depending on incentives.
- $20,000,000 in expansion fees from Utah and Chivas USA
- $15,000,000 from Chivas for playing in Los Angeles
- 3 new stadium announcements within 6 months

This equates to around $40 million dollars for MLS in a month time period.

Hmm.

http://www.mlsnet.com/MLS/index.jsp

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Are you ready for real football?!