Posted on 03/11/2009 8:56:05 AM PDT by AreaMan
How Soccer is Ruining America: A Jeremiad
Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return.
What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.) The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.
For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.
1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.
2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.
Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, “Hey batter batter!” as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.
3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.
4) And then there is the question of gender. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.
Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.
Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and relevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.
I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me! Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. “Why not,” she asked? “Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? “Not at all,” I replied, “I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end.” That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.
Stephen H. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. His recent books include American Providence and Taking Religion to School.
Every child I know who was on a soccer team went on to “american” sports by the time they were 11.
It is a “kids and middle aged women” sport in the US.
Plus, executing an offside trap is a key part of the game. It's one of those things you don't appreciate watching soccer on TV.
Could be the Quintuple this year, first time in history. Every European game now matters. FSC has definitely improved my quality of life, in large part because I now have that cash I used to give Setanta network.
Here’s a another plug against soccer. It’s fun to play and kids like it. But kids who played baseball can play softball when they 45 years old, have bad knees, and an extra 30 lbs. They will have just as much fun as they did when they were 12. The only adults I see playing in soccer leagues are guys who never stopped playing and are stil in good shape. The adult soccer leagues in my community are primarily hispanic and the average age is in the low 20’s. The softball leagues have guys from 18 to 75.
“The thing which would perk up soccer for me is eliminating or at least greatly reducing the offside rule. A long kick to a teammate streaking to the goal to bring the score to 10-8 would be much more interesting than yet another 1-0 match.”
That’s an idea that has been tossed around the soccer powers for years. Of course, the limited scoring in soccer seems to be more annoying to those who are not soccer fans. Soccer loyalists see and appreciate more the careful strategy, ball control, positioning, fitness, and teamwork that leads up to a goal, so the game does not seem boring when no team is scoring.
For non-soccer fans, I explain that watching soccer is more like watching hockey than football or basketball. In a hockey game, there are many periods where no team scores; but to a fan who understands the complexity of hockey, that does not mean nothing interesting happened during that period.
For the record, any sport is better than no sport. Even informal activities or non-competitive leagues are great for children and adults; and the advantage to soccer is that games are easy to set up and play. My brother in law recently joined an adult soccer team because his friends needed another player. He never really played soccer before, other than occasional PE, but he is able to participate and have fun.
My favorite sport was and is rugby. That is a great game to play and fun to watch. It has the physical attributes of tackling, rucking and malling (similar to blocking), fitness requirements on par with any sport, and opportunities for certain plays to display great skill, all in an environment that requires continuous teamwork and coordination. Moreover, the excitement does not stop. And finally, not that I am thinking about it, in rugby, as with football, there is no flopping as we see in soccer and basketball. If a player tried to fake a foul or an injury, his own team would beat him up.
It’s growing in my town too. This town is so overrun by soccer that the la cross players had to make their own field in front of a school. We have two practice fields for five Pop Warner teams, while the soccer teams have access to twenty fields. It’s not right that soccer gets all the resources because the town council members like soccer.
I think that is changing as more American players are finding their way to the big European leagues. That will make pursuing soccer, as opposed to football or baseball, more enticing to US kids.
I must admit I’ve been torn between rooting for Chelsea or United, I was more for Chelsea last year. But it is a great rivalry, and I would love to see them meet again for the FA Cup or the Champions League title. The EPL is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
Soccer is for kids who can’t hit the ball.
This is just another reason why most American men will never consider soccer a real sport.
It’s the sport where everyone is ‘a winner’. That isn’t how real sports work.
And you can also be an awesome player, and play hard, and have respect of the other team and fans, even if you lose.
No, you've just described the NFL. No matter how bad a team sucks, they all get an equal share of TV revenue.
If you suck in the EPL, you get relegated to a lower division the next season.
Actually, had you read the article you would have
discovered that he a college professor and author.
You offer no rebuttal and just name calling.
Must be a soccer fan!
soccer evolved into rugby, which evolved into football.
I worship the lad who first picked up a soccer ball and ran with it, only to be tackled by his mates. There should be shrine to him somewhere.
Yeah, sure. They have been saying that for
years.
No.
Don’t confuse rules of real sports with the financial arrangements of sporting bodies. You’re lumping two separate issues together.
They are all part of the NFL. They have privately come together to determine they wanted revenue sharing that they have. I suspect it’s to ensure the stability of teams and franchises. There are some markets that innately have higher earning power than others and if they want to enter into such a sharing arrangement, then in a capitalist society they certainly can. Keeping the smaller market teams around by revenue sharing has been decided by the NFL to be a benefit to the entire league, not just to the small teams. If it didn’t make business sense it would not have been done.
But it is not the same thing as sportsmanship and why something is a real sport versus soccer.
Fair enough, but I just don’t get where this ‘everyone is a winner’ stuff came from. That is also equally applicable to any youth sport in this country, it certainly isn’t limited to soccer.
Fair enough, but I just don’t get where this ‘everyone is a winner’ stuff came from. That is also equally applicable to any youth sport in this country, it certainly isn’t limited to soccer.
“I worship the lad who first picked up a soccer ball and ran with it, only to be tackled by his mates. There should be shrine to him somewhere.”
That shrine would be the William Webb Ellis Cup, given to the champion of the Rugby Union World Cup, named after William Webb Ellis, who according to the stories first picked up a soccer ball and started running with it. He was attending the Rugby school, so his version of the rules became “Rugby Rules Football,” which became rugby, which Walter Camp, of Yale, altered into the beginning of American Football.
Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind,"
That's only in America, the rest of the world treats the game as serious competitive sport.
Blaming soccer in this regard is like blaming guns for killing people..
In fact it is AMERICAN Football that is the great bastion of Socialism, not Soccer.
Professional Soccer leagues exist world wide. The teams play everyone in their division once at home and once away in the season. The bottom two or three teams get RELEGATED to the lower division while the winning teams from below get promoted to fill their places. The winners of the Top Division are the National Champions.
What happens in the NFL?
The WORST teams get REWARDED with 1st pick in the Draft in an attempt to "redistribute the talent" and EVEN THE PLAYING FIELD (and we are talking about professional businesses here!).
In Soccer there is also a second, separate, Knock-out Cup Competition run during the season. For instance, in England, the FA Cup has over SEVEN HUNDRED teams entered in a sudden death tournament culminating in "The Cup Final", their equivalent to America's over hyped "Super Bowl".
America's attempt at a championship is to hold a domestic post season tournament between just 16 teams and then unilaterally declare the winners as "World Champions"!
Yup WORLD champions of the NATIONAL Football League...LOL!
Soccer, on the other hand, has a TRUE World Championship. It occurs every 4 years and is competed for between NATIONAL teams made up of eligible players from each country.
190 Teams compete to qualify for the WORLD CUP. The Final Tournament is played over a period of a month every 4 years. So don't tell me Soccer isn't competitive. - They don't vote their Champions like College Football does, or did, they don't hold "World Championships" where every other country in the World is excluded and they don't reward failure by redistributing the talent or by imposing wage caps. And as for boring; well, that is born out of ignorance of the game, just as it is with any sport.
But if you want to compare them, soccer is played continuously for two 45 minute periods (plus time added on for injuries) whereas Football takes three hours to play out a one hour play clock. So for two thirds of the time ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is happening. And, of that one hour play clock there is only about 12 to 15 minutes that the ball is motion, the rest of the time is run off.
So in Soccer you have an hour and a half of play in an hour and forty five minutes of elapsed time, in Football you have 15 minutes of play in three hours of elapsed time.
Seems to me that it's Football, not Soccer, that is more like Golf to watch...
Also remember NFL teams don’t have separate TV contracts, the league negotiates national contracts and splits the money among the teams.
Of course soccer really doesn’t have a “no losers” rule. Some little leagues do, but some baseball little leagues do it too. That’s got nothing to do with the sport, it’s about the pansies that organized those leagues.
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