More on the World Cup - Why don't Americans Care for Soccer?

Note: Regularly scheduled "mommy" blog posts will follow and, pretty soon, some dissertation-related stuff. I think I'm just too eclectic in this blog and I hope this doesn't scare away my few readers! :)
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I still want to comment about other things that I didn't have time to get into in the previous post. A few weeks ago, my husband emailed me an article from the Boston Globe that, in his words, would make "great blogging material." He was perfectly right and I don't want to let the chance to blog about it slip away.

Most everywhere in the world or at least "in all countries in Europe and most of Latin America," as the article states, footbal (known as soccer only in the U.S.) is the sport of choice. It certainly is a "democratic" sport in that it's pretty "cheap" to play, requiring only a ball, any kind of structure for a goal (kids in Brazil play with any objects they can stick on the ground for goals), some open flat space and a flexible number of players, though the official game requires 11 on each side, including the goal keeper. I have always wondered why is it that soccer has no following in the U.S. even after 1994's World Cup that was here and after the relative success of its national team in the 2002 World Cup. Interestingly enough, U.S. women's soccer is one of the best of the world, something that doesn't happen in other countries in which the game is extremely popular and is most commonly played by men.

So when I saw the Boston Globe article, I eagerly read it, and it answered most of my questions regarding soccer and sports in the U.S. The article, written by Andrei Markovits, is titled, "Soccer remains foreign concept to most Americans" definitely a great title. The first reason for the sport's lack of popularity in the U.S. laid out by Markovits sounds pretty strange to me, since England was the country where footbal/soccer was invented and the game is still pretty
popular there:

[In] many countries under former British political rule . . . the two games played by members of the British ruling military and bureaucracy in the late 19th century -- cricket and rugby -- furnished their hegemonic sports cultures and do so to this day. Just think of India, Pakistan, the West Indies in the Caribbean, indeed all of the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. None of these became soccer countries then and they still are not to this day.

This statement follows

Soccer surely is the globe's most widely played and also most widely followed game and sport. But it does not mean that it has succeeded in covering the entire globe in an equal manner. It has remained from the beginning of the 20th century predominantly the prerogative of Europe and Latin America, with the rest of the world always playing the game but never following and experiencing it as culture.

When footbal/soccer was created in England in the 1830s, the U.S. was already an independent country which was creating its own sports, first and foremost, baseball, which quickly became popular. I was intrigued to learn what's probably obvious to people who have grown up in this country: that football, or American football as we call it in Brazil, became popular and hegemonic because it was adopted as the game of choice of the main universities. The article states that "Whereas baseball flourished in America's working-class culture and was played during the summer, American football became the cultural domain of its growing middle class and was played during the fall on college campuses."

Then basketball and volleyball (which he doesn't mention in the article) were invented [I lived only a few miles from Springfield and Holyoke in Massachusetts, where each or these sports was invented] for indoor play during the winter months. I didn't know this fascinating fact about basketball, which is "the only modern team sport that had absolutely no predecessors in ancient Egypt, Renaissance Italy, the Inca empires, or rural Britain but was literally created de novo by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield in 1891."

The article continues explaining that soccer was played in the U.S. and still is practiced today by around 18 million people, "But playing and following are two different things. Millions of people bowl, fish, jog, bicycle, or play billiards, yet this does not mean they follow the sport." This is a key fact regarding the average American's obliviousness when it comes to soccer and the World Cup. Soccer became, because of the educational reforms from the 1940s on claiming equal access to team sports to women, the sport of choice for women in this country, while men "had concentrated all their energies on the hegemonic sports cultures of the Big Four." (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, I suppose). In spite of the success of the women soccer players of the U.S. (two time world champions and Olympic gold medalists), "soccer has become feminized in America to an extent totally unimaginable anywhere in the world, where it remains a proudly guarded and strutted male preserve and masculine domain."

The article continues stating that because of the Olympics and the World Cup in the U.S. in 1994, every four years, some Americans will follow soccer for a few weeks, but that's about it. "But the American public -- beyond the small community of real soccer fans -- will not be upset, hurt, or angry if and when its team loses. Nor will it be overjoyed and ecstatic should its team prove unexpectedly successful. The World Cup will play second fiddle to the NBA Finals."

This is something that is hard for the rest of the world to understand. The articulist begins and ends his article saying that he pities the American team that, with the probable exception of the Australians, is the team with less support from their country's people and that's why he will cheer for them passionately. Interestingly enough, Americans are passionate about the NBA finals, "the World Series" (what a silly name that is to us foreigners - world? - the U.S. and one or two Canadian teams? It's truly laughable), but, anyway, I was intrigued to learn that "American sports identity does not know the term 'national team'."

Markovits ends his essay writing that

The absence of this integral discourse to the soccer world is precisely why I am such a massive supporter of our American team at the World Cup beyond my being a citizen of the United States. Because unlike our basketball or ice hockey players, who can return home to their superstar existence and take immediate and comforting refuge from their international debacle, our soccer players have the worst of both worlds -- disrespected and vilified by the international soccer world and virtually unknown at home. Such is the burden the historical development of American sport culture has placed on them.

Before I end this post I just wanted to make a quick comment about something I read in the New York Times' World Cup Blog (yes, there is such a thing - with tons of comments!). I only quickly read one post about the first game Brazil played and browsed through its comments. One commenter said that he'd been to a bar in lower Manhatan where many Brazilians had assembled to watch the game and he commented that it's a pleasure just to watch us Brazilians watching a soccer game. He said that one has to learn with us how to watch a game. He described the audience's involvement in the game and how each move in the field elicited close reactions from the crowd. I had never thought about that, I mean, for me any big sports fan watches a sport passionately, but perhaps we Brazilians are even more passionate and I am definitely like that!