As the 2006 World Cup blasts away into the history books, everybody’s talking about him. Well, a lot of people are talking about him. A bit. And most of them are foreigners. Yet there is a sense that, for a few shining moments, most people in America know who Zinedine Zidane is, that bald French guy who finished his soccer career by head butting an Italian square in the chest. “This is one Frenchie who doesn’t surrender!” Quite. Of course, now it’s all over, and the brief and unusual connection to the rest of the world’s reality has been immediately replaced with all of the arguments of why they don’t like football/soccer here anyway. My eyes were led to an article on the front of USA Today, that acme of journalism (or is it acne?), entitled “Why the United States doesn’t take to soccer.”
The usual arguments are bandied about – not enough scoring, not enough strategy, and what’s the deal with those ties? We want winners! While many Americans – usually of immigrant stock – follow the World Cup with a passion (if no other tournament), most are unimpressed, preferring to stick with what they know. Yet the article threw up other factors for the lack of American interest in the Beautiful Game: “Soccer has roots in Britain,” it states, “which exported the game to its colonies some 150 years ago. Little surprise we just said no.” Even though American Football has its origins in the rules of Rugby Union that came from, yup, Britain (source 1, 2). Another myth that the Brits for one love to uphold is that ‘soccer’ is an Americanism, yet it originated in the English press at the end of the last century as a shortening of ‘association football’, to prevent confusion with the pick-the-ball-up variety. The century-and-a-half argument between the hand and foot versions of the ball game did assert itself, when a sports pundit remarked that soccer lacked proficiency, and what skills are displayed are as irrelevant as plate-spinning: “God didn’t intend us to use our feet and our heads,” although I suspect he was actually referring to the sport of sitting in front of mind-numbingly bad TV.
‘Un-American’, ‘Not in our DNA’; let’s face it, footy, the US is Just Not That Into You. But I get the feeling that headlines like this are more of an attempt to reassure worried Americans that their traditional culture base is not under threat from the Sport of the Foreigner. Completely bypassing Budweiser-commercial irony, it is even suggested by one supposed academic that the sport might be accepted if they make some American-friendly changes, such as getting rid of those pesky goalkeepers. But it really does come down to what football does best, and that is simple tribal loyalty – you stick to what you grew up with. As long as the media paints soccer as ‘new to America’ and as the sport of the foreigner, people will never have the same attachments to it as their own sports, with their own long histories. History is important to this tribal loyalty, and many Americans don’t realize that their own country’s World Cup history stretches further back than England, and even current champions Italy. The US came joint-third in the first World Cup, and in England’s first ever appearance, in 1950, they lost – yes, lost – to the Americans.
Does the world even want America to be that good at football though? I get the impression outside of the US that football is better off without the ‘American touch’, and that too much American interest could damage the game and turn it into a soulless, corporate-suckling mega-financial madhouse where dollars talk more than loyalty and players care more for massive sponsorships than for trophies (whereas, what we have now, um… ). So why does America always tell itself that it’s on a planet outside the soccer world? It could be because of isolationist issues, let the world do their thing and we’ll do our thing; on the other hand it could be that they secretly want to be on the team, but feel nervous about their chances, not wanting to be the last kid left against the school-yard wall. Before the First World War, the US was not really a player globally, it preferred to be out there on its own. The twentieth century saw America take a centre-stage politically, before ultimately becoming the Brazil of global affairs. If the US takes the same initiatives on the football field as they have on the battlefield, they could dominate (though they’d probably score a lot more own-goals, and you wouldn’t want to be sent off against them, or you may be sent to an off-shore holding camp for ‘red-carded combatants’ ). This, I feel, may be an analogy too far (though I know there’s a joke in there about handing out green cards). Let’s just say for now that you watch football, I watch football, let’s call the whole thing off.
