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.

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)

Your nostalgia for the days of the Edmonton Oilers is understandable, but there are a number of factors that come into play here.

Modern NHL history (and by this I mean the modern era that began with the expansion of the league from six teams to twelve in 1967) is remarkably simple. It can be described as a period in which the dominance of the game alternated between the "Montreal Canadiens" and "Edmonton Oilers" teams.

I use those terms in quotes because they don't really represent actual teams -- they represent styles of play. I'll describe them in detail here:

1. The Montreal Canadiens were a classic "transition" team -- often mistakenly described as a "dull, trapping" team. Their strength was not in their dominant offensive prowess, but in their ability to shut down opposing players in the neutral zone and generate scoring chances through their rapid transition game after opponents' turnovers. They were really not a "defensive" team at all -- in fact, they were usually among the top scoring teams in the league.

Their real strength was their depth -- not relying on a few offensive stars. They spread their offense among three solid forward lines, none of which was "spectacular" by most standards but all of which contributed to the team's offensive totals. With the exception of a three-year period from 1976-78 in which Guy Lafleur set the scoreboard on fire, there hasn't been a single Montreal player to win a scoring title since the expansion of 1967.

The 1976-77 Canadiens may have been the greatest team in NHL history. They finished the 80-game season with a 60 wins, 12 ties, and an unthinkable 8 losses. Lafleur won the scoring title that year with 136 points, and his linemate Steve Shutt finished with 105 (and 60 goals). What was most remarkable about that team, though, was their offensive dominance from one end of the bench to the other. They scored 387 goals that year (an average of nearly five a game); eight players on the team had 20 or more goals, and fourteen had 10 or more.

The team also boasted what may have been the finest defense corps in modern NHL history, with three Hall of Famers on the blueline (Larry Robinson, Guy Lapointe, and Serge Savard).

The Canadiens success after the 1970s was limited to Stanley Cup titles in 1986 and 1993, but their style of play was used to perfection by the New Jersey Devils in the last ten years. This should come as no surprise to anyone, since the Devils' recent success began with the arrival of former Canadiens' stars Jacque Lemaire and Larry Robinson on their coaching staff in 1994 (and later Pat Burns, who himself began his coaching career in Montreal). The Tampa Bay Lightning were the latest team to ride the classic Montreal transition game in a championship year.

2. The Edmonton Oilers, on the other hand, employed a back-and-forth, high-stakes style of play that drove scoring totals through the roof. They deliberately refrained from playing any semblance of a defensive game in the neutral zone, and took pride in their style of play by referring to themselves as the "non-Canadiens." This tempo and attitude was very popular in the modern, rapidly-growing areas of western Canada.

The Oilers redefined offensive play in hockey, with a series of unbelievable team and individual efforts that bordered on ridiculous. They included the following:

-- Wayne Gretzky's 92 goals in 1981-82;

-- Five consecutive seasons (1981-82 through 1985-86) in which they scored 400 or more goals;

-- Four players with 40+ goals and 100+ points in 1982-83 (Gretzky, Mark Messier, Glenn Anderson, and Jari Kurri);

-- Three players with 50+ goals in 1983-84 (Gretzky, Anderson, and Kurri);

-- Two 70+ goal scorers in 1984-85 (Gretzky and Kurri);

-- Defenseman Paul Coffey's 121 points in that same year, and his 138 points (along with an astonishing 48 goals) the following season.

-- Gretzky's 163 assists in 1985-86, and 200+ points in four out of five seasons during the mid-1980s.

Edmonton also boasted what may have been the best power-play unit ever to step on the ice in an NHL game, with Gretzky centering a line between Messier (who played left wing on the power play) and Anderson, and Coffey and Kurri playing the points (Kurri was a natural right wing but played the point on the power play due to his devastating shot).

The team won five Stanley Cups in an eight-year period, including the last one (1989-90) after Gretzky had been traded to the Los Angeles Kings. The "Edmonton Oilers" style of play, however, dominated the league for several more years after their last Cup -- the Pittburgh Penguins and New York Rangers won a total of three Stanley Cups in the four years immediately following the Oilers' last championship year (the 1993 Montreal team interrupted this long stretch).

. . .

These two styles of play still compete for dominance in the NHL today. What has changed dramatically in the last 15 years is the following:

1. Expansion. Despite the addition of a lot of talented European players to the NHL, there is no doubt that the talent pool is severely diluted these days. What sets this era apart from previous periods is not so much the lack of talent (illustrated by the decline in 50-goal and 100-point scorers), but the lack of talented groups of players on the same team. Nowhere was this more evident than in last year's Stanley Cup finals, in which two teams reached the finals with their star players (Martin St. Louis and Brad Stuart for Tampa Bay, and Jarome Iginla and Mikka Kiprosoff for Calgary) and not much else.

2. The Patrick Roy Factor. When Roy first entered the NHL in Montreal's 1986 Stanley Cup season, nobody would have realized that he would eventually define a new era in the league. He was the first modern "superstar" goalie who had played the position for his entire childhood (before, goalies were usually "position players" as kids who converted to goaltenders in their teen years due to a lack of offensive skills). The Roy era reached its peak in the last couple of years as the league saw multiple Hall-of-Fame caliber goalies (Roy, Dominik Hasek, Martin Brodeur, and perhaps Ed Belfour) setting new goaltending records on a regular basis.

. . .

Another factor I didn't mention has been an ice surface that is effectively getting smaller as players get bigger. And hockey, like many other sports, is now "over-coached" in that coaches have done their best over the years to break the game down into simple, predictable segments over which they can maintain some level of control.

There are no simple answers as far as what the NHL can do to restore some excitement to the game (aside from the most obvious -- go back to a league of 21-24 teams). Some Freepers have posted some very interesting suggestions here, and the league has considered experimenting with some of these in pre-season games.

I'll post some more on this later . . .

My random rants on the subject:

1) I like soccer - it is the sport that draws my interests most. But I wouldn't want to shove it down everyone. I also disagree people saying "Americans are stupid becuase they don't like soccer." or things like "US sports are garbage, oops, rubbish.". I also like soccer, basketball, rugby (that's rugby union), and baseball.

2) The original author of the Guardian article didn't realize that in parts of Asia in which soccer is popular (which he applauds), basketball, which he seems to belittle, is also big there. In fact, soccer and basketball are equally popular in (Eastern) Asia like Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore. NBA has as huge following in that part of Asia as the English Premiership (and also lots of sports bettings on the NBA matches). Although I admit the NBA is virtually ignored in more British-influenced countries like New Zealand, India or Britain itself - ask about the results of the Lakers to a Kiwi and he will probably return a blank stare.

3) It is not strictly true that soccer as the term is only used in the US and everyone uses "football". Here in New Zealand, or across the Tasman in Australia, or even South Africa, we never use "football" for soccer and sorry, it isn't because of American influence. Australia has Australian Rules Football (but NSW and QLD refers rugby league as football), and here in NZ and South Africa we never call a specific sport "football": we prefer to say rugby, league, soccer, American football, Australian football, but no football.

4) Many soccer supporters are less conservative, true, but I consider myself a rabid soccer fan and yet I would be considered fringe right by NZ standards. (I'm a great deal more conservative than George W. Bush)

5) To be fair, soccer depends a lot on what we call "luck": how the ball is flown around, and whether weather affects performance of players. By contrast, basketball as a sport is a more purely skills-based contest. If you win in a soccer match, it's often becuase you are lucky in addition to being more talented. If you win in basketball, there is no question you are a better team.

6) The world's best known sport stars are from soccer and basbetball. Michael Jordan, David Beckham, Ronaldo, Yao Ming are all as famous as each other on the global scene.

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