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)

Hockey does have one thing that I think would make soccer very exciting. When a player commits a foul, he should be sent to a penalty box for five minutes. It sounds ridiculous, but this kind of thing would add a bit of uncertainty to the game and require additional strategy on the part of both teams when the game is played under "penalty time."

I would agree if the box time were limited to yellow card fouls. Maybe set up different rules for fouls, identifying which would result in penalty time. That would be interesting.

Players are tossed for red cards anyway (and for 2 yellows in the same game). Putting a player in the box for every foul would really stop the flow of the game.

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.

Possibly because there is not a single country on the planet that fields a professional football team that can play with the US. And the only possibility in baseball is Cuba, but assuming their dominance against American college kids would equate to even being able to play with the best baseball team in the US is a stretch. Beating the Baltimore Orioles in a few games during a season where they lost 100 games isn't that impressive. Additionally, these would be professional championships, and the Cuban National Team is not a professional team, technically.

The one sport where an argument could be made that the team we claim is "World Champion" isn't would be basketball, but it should be noted that the other teams we play in competition like the Olympics are anchored by NBA players who would not be eligible were there to be a World Championship where the rest of the world was asked to send their best professional team instead of an "All-star" team.

I consider the addiction to scoring part of the lack of fondness for subtlety. American fans like seeing points on the board, when an American fans walks into the room and asks who's winning they don't want to hear about which team is controlling the ball more often in the offensive zone and causing the other side to run around in their own end in a panic, they want to hear a score.

You can really see it in baseball fans. Some baseball fans pray for 1-0 pitchers duels, they love the intensity of any at bat being able to win the game. Most baseball fans think 1-0 games are boring. The former have what it takes to watch soccer and hockey (they probably also dig Sergio Leone movies), the later are your more typical American fan.

The author claims football and basketball skills can be mastered by practicing alone? What planet did the author come from? This is a ludicrous as saying soccer players can master their game by practicing alone.

Team sports require practice with the team as a group to achieve best results. Surely the author doesn't suggest a football team can achieve greatness on offense or defense with each player practicing by themselves? The same with basketball, maybe the author believes all 5 players can just run individual drills and magically become a good team?

There's more anticipation in soccer and hockey than in any other sport. You never know when a flukey bounce will result in a goal, there literally is never one single minute of play when it's not possible for one team to score, they are total anticipation.

What you've said here is true about hockey, but I don't get that same impression about soccer. The problem with soccer is that a "flukey bounce" rarely results in a goal -- simply because the playing area is so large. In hockey, a flukey bounce will often result in a goal simply because 1) the game moves much faster, and 2) the playing surface is actually "smaller" than its measurements would dictate -- because players move much faster on skates than any athlete would move on feet.

Hockey is different than most other sports in that it is primarily a "transition" game, not a "possession" game. Football is purely a possession game, and basketball is nearly so. Soccer is more of a transition game than these two, but for the most part goals are scored as the result of methodical ball movement instead of rapid transition from defense to offense.

There's no doubt in my mind that hockey's the best sport around. In fact, I'm going out right now to play hockey on inline skates for a couple of hours. LOL.

In hockey and soccer you do thing like come across the line and look to your right for somebody to pass to not to actually pass to somebody but to program your opponent into thinking you'll be regularly looking pass when you hit that part of the playing surface.
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didn't say it's beyond the American sportsfan's ability to fathom. I said it's more subtle than they want to watch.

More subtle than setting up a tailing changeup after coming hard inside?

More subtle than the applied leverage at the line of scrimmage that allows the RB to look like a star?

My point is, there are subtleties in all sports. So it is rather an empty argument to say that soccer is on some sort of higher aesthetic level.

they don't understand flow and positional mechanics.

I wonder whether "positional mechanics" applies to ice hockey. My sons are avid ice hockey fans, but this is because they play roller hockey. Whenever I watch the NHL, all I see about 80% of the time are pucks being shot out of the reach of team mates "in position" for a better shot on goal. There seems to be an awful lot of skating around in ice hockey that is pointless.

Flukey bounces are harder to come by in soccer because the field is huge and flat. They need seamed glass ;). Generally in soccer your flukey bounce is more likely to be an opposing player tangling his feet and falling on his face, that'll give you a chance to get in close on the goalie and get a scoring opportunity.

Have fun out there.

Definitely more subtle than setting up pitches, largely because every player is doing that same kind of mental combat with every other player every moment of the game. In baseball it's just the pitcher vs the batter and only on the pitches. In soccer and hockey you're trying to teach the other player to expect every aspect of your movement so that you can do one thing different and leave him behind.

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"? While the actual battle in the trenches of football is highly intricate and subtle it never gets discussed in the coverage.

I didn't say there aren't subtleties in all sports. I said there are MORE subtleties in soccer and hockey and the subtleties are deeper and require more dedication by the fan to learn, and are also more necessary to understand to understand the game. It's not an empty argument, it's the raw truth, and I'm not saying it's on a higher aesthetic level. I'm saying it's more subtle than the average American sports fan is willing to watch.

That is not always an addiction to scoring. It is wanting good play to actually impact the outcome.

You have already stated that Americans are capable of appreciating good play that does not lead to scoring (although not all Americans). The fact is that, in a sport like baseball, we appreciate that good play is preventing the scoring. In soccer, great offensive plays regularly not only don't result in scoring, they don't even result in a scoring chance.

Personally I think the sport would benefit from a few changes.

I think the offsides rule could be scrapped instead not allowing players to camp out in the goal box, but allow them to be down at that end of the field.

I'd like either more liberal substitution or a switch to quarters so players are more rested and able to play more aggressively.

One other change that would be hard to implement is addressing fake injuries used to draw a yellow card or stop play. Flopping is a part of every sport, but fake injuries are not as widespread. In football, if a player is injured causing a stop in play, he has to come out for a play. You still see some faked injuries, but not many.

"...And historically American sports audiences don't like that kind of subtlety."

Well, this is a ridiculous statement. Do you know how many people go to baseball games and watch signs being flashed for sacrifices, hit and runs, straight steals, and actually try to intrepret them?

For years, nearly everyone in the ballpark was keeping score - down to the very last detail. I'll bet you could take 20,000 scorecards out of a game at Ebbet's Field, and they'd all read the same at the end of the game.

Yeah, Americans don't get the "subtlety"....we've been watching "pivot plays", "double steals", "williams' shifts" forever. They are "subtle" to you maybe, but they are part of an EXCITING game to the rest of us.

I had the pleasure of going to two WS games last year. The one, where Alex Gonzalez won the game, was the most exciting sports moment I've ever witnessed.

And that includes countless PSU/Nebraska, PSU/Alabama, PSU/Pitt, PSU/ND football CLASSICS.

Baseball is our National Pastime because it's timeless. What gets overlooked is that when played right, in the right moment, it's the most exciting game ever created. Soccer on the other hand, is hopelessly boring, regardless of it's "subtlety." We can handle "subtlety", we just don't like "BORING."

Absolutely there is positional mechanics applied to ice hockey. Look at what's going on inbetween the passer and the guy that missed the pass, most of the time the puck is going in the wrong place it's because the passer is trying to avoid the opponents sticks. In hockey having your stick right in front you and extended out can be two vastly different things that completely alter the game. the skating around isn't pointless, they're trying to setup plays, trying to gain room to manuever, trying to convince the opponents to do something dumb. That's exactly what I mean by the subtlety of the games, if you've lived the game long enough to catch the hand shoulder and head movements you see that there's never a single pointless stride or glide in hockey, you're always trying to get in position to make the play, and trying to get the other team out of position to make the play. Where it gets slow in the NHL is that the players there are good enough where accomplishing the later is very difficult, and it's much harder to accomplish the former if you can't accomplish the later.

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