Posted on 08/03/2004 3:12:33 PM PDT by swilhelm73
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.
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.
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)
I agree with you about the soccer bashing...I just dont get why some people have such a hatred for it..its JUST a SPORT.
The author of this article has obviously never watched a English Premiere League game in NYC...every pub showing a live game will be PACKED and they are NOT in "obscure" or "out of the way places". What a dufus.
"And why does the winner of the superbowl or world series become a "world" champion? That is just absurd to me. They don't play anyone outside of America."
My English boyfriend agrees with you..lol.
I understand what youre saying but game time is game time. There are hours of pre-game and post-game and mid-week shows where Jaworski or Jimmy Johnson or any of the old players show formations that bombed and plays that worked. They run through it like its film day Saturday morning in high school. That is when you get to see the strategy of the teams.
No, most fans don't understand that stuff, and they don't care. And the reason football is so successful is that it's a perfectly enjoyable game without understanding that stuff.
Most of the fans of popular sports don't grow up playing the sport. This can be seen just by how the female demographic numbers have been climbing lately, this is especially true in football which is having it's audience grow across the board.
As a fans knowledge of the game grows they start appreciating the little things, but notice the coverage is still geared largely to people that have no knowledge of the game, and the coverage doesn't do much of anything to help you learn the game.
You can tell what the average fan of a sport is interested in by watching one regular season game and paying attention to what the color commentator talks about (playoffs get an audience of people that watch very little of the sport so coverage gets dumbed down, so it's not a good judging tool). That color commentator is geared towards the average fan, he's supposed to talk about stuff the average fan probably didn't notice but actually cares about. We know from how the game is filmed that the average fan didn't notice how the receiver ran his route, he wasn't on camera during the play until the ball got to him so they couldn't possibly have noticed, and yet they don't talk about it. That tells you everything you need to know, the average football fan doesn't care what the receiver did to get some room from the corner so he could make the catch. Now in soccer and hockey that same kind of movement and trickery is the heart of the coverage, it's always talked about, anytime there's a good scoring chance. In all three sports it's a very subtle thing, involving head bobs, shoulder fakes, and occasional taps on the defender to try to make him think you're going in a direction you're not. One group of fans is interested in that, one isn't. Neither is better than the other, they simply are what they are.
That really is the best way to watch soccer, find somewhere that Brits are watching the game, find a group, buy them a round, and learn. Chance are this place has better beer than the average American mass market filth too, so you'll also get to learn about good beer while you're there.
Yeah and the pre-game shows get less than half the ratings of the games, and they still revolve mostly around interview pieces to get to know the players as people and injury reports. The post game shows are hilight packages with very little education. It's only the mid-week shows where they really dig into the X's and O's, and they only get about 1/20 of the ratings of the games. The numbers tell you what the audience is interested in, most folks don't care about how a well run crossing pattern allows you to setup a pick without getting a pass interference call (because you make the defenders pick each other, perfectly legal). And the reason football is so popular is that you never have to learn that to enjoy the game.
The only reason I know this is because my bf is English...I know more about the the EPL then I ever wanted to know...thankfully I dont retain much of it ;) Watching a live game at a pub with friends IS fun though.
darn! how 'bout letting them use sticks too?
Motion? I'm referring to the subtle chess match that goes on behind the scenes at every baseball game. It is far more sophisticated, cerebral and subtle than anything that happens in a soccer match.
This is true in real football as well. When the trainer comes onto the field to aid an injured player, the player must leave until the next legal opportunity for substitution.
I was referring to real football.
In soccer they fake injuries and stay in.
Yeah but motion is how the subtle chess match happens. In baseball the chess match is between the batter and the pitcher. In soccer and hockey the chess match is between every player on one team and every player on the other team, in hockey you've got the addtional coaching chess match of line matchups.
Sorry but the baseball chess match isn't as sophisticated, cerebral or subtle as the chess match going on in soccer between the players and the ref, forget the chess match going on between the teams, baseball can't come close to competing with that. Baseball is a fine game, but let's not go crazy by overstating what happens when a guy with 3 good pitches goes up against a guy with one good bat, it's really not that complicated, much less subtle.
Then it's field hockey. A fine sport because the chicks where mini-skirts. And if you give the sticks nets it's la cross, also a fine sport and one played by many hockey players in their youth (you can always tell by the grip on the stick, watch the thumb).
Great point on the time of game. EPL matches are over in two hours from TV sign-on to sign-off. They play 90 minutes, break for halftime and get in all their commercials.
As you probably know, you can be yellow-carded for diving but few referees call it. Sort of like interference in hockey - some 6'5" defenseman who blots out the sun can hang all over your team's best forward and throw him offside - but it's never called.
I like sports in general but prefer games where scoring really means something - this means soccer, hockey, baseball and American football are at the top of the list. What the heck is wrong with making the objective of the game difficult to obtain?
That's probably because we see it as a rich man's sport, like polo.
How's the new broad brush working out for you? I have no argument with either the NFL or real football played with the feet.
Players get hurt in both sports.
I wouldn't say "about to" but its popularity will steadily grow. Most towns and/or schools already have a soccer league, bringing up the next generation of soccer players and fans.
However, as another poster mentioned, the schedule of a soccer game doesn't fit well with American advertising practices, and networks are always loathe to change.
Judging from all the "Go Lance!" I saw around here, the news coverage and Bush's personal phone call, I'd say he's made cycling a lot more popular. Six straight? It's hard to think of a sporting feat that matches it.
It's a cheap exercise program for schools. Most kids out grow the notion that soccer is "exciting". Because other countries embrace soccer, is just meaningless. Other countries embrace socialism, does that mean the USA should also? Soccer is painfully dull to watch and will NEVER be a "major" sport in the US.
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