The other football: America’s enigma
We’ve got baseball, basketball and football. Those are the big
three in America. There are also the fringe sports like golf, ice
hockey and auto racing.
But somehow soccer just doesn’t seem to click with Americans.
Sure, the World Cup is going on and it’s the biggest sport globally
but somehow it just doesn’t grab the interest in America.
The other football: America’s enigma
We’ve got baseball, basketball and football. Those are the big three in America. There are also the fringe sports like golf, ice hockey and auto racing.
But somehow soccer just doesn’t seem to click with Americans. Sure, the World Cup is going on and it’s the biggest sport globally but somehow it just doesn’t grab the interest in America.
As a whole, America didn’t care whether or not Team USA advanced or got knocked out of the World Cup this year. Even the headline on ESPN’s Web site when the U.S. was ousted by Ghana summed our feeling up. It read, Going, Going, Ghana – a play of words on America’s pastime: Baseball, not soccer.
Maybe there was a lack of interest because the games took place halfway around the globe at odd hours of the day, who knows? But there wasn’t much interest in 1994 when the World Cup games took place right here in the good old USA.
For most nations that participate in the World Cup, the games are like our Super Bowl magnified to the 10th power. The entire country gets behind that one team. Most everyone takes the day off work just to watch the game. A win is like a national celebration that often erupts in pandemonium. A loss often involves the police.
The only thing that came close to that in the United States was in 1980 when the underdog U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Russians and went on to take the gold medal at Lake Placid. But even that doesn’t compare to the frenzied hype surrounding other competing nations during World Cup.
Maybe there is just too much else to do here – like watching Barry Bonds, U.S. Open golf, the Oakland A’s, Wimbledon (OK, that’s in England, but close enough), NFL training camp or something else. Whatever the reason, Americans don’t seem to get their kicks from soccer.
Go ahead send those letters and tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s true. Americans just don’t seem to care about soccer – a.k.a. futbol.
Yet trying to figure out why this is is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded – it’s impossible.
At the youth level, we love soccer in the United States. I don’t deny that. Every fall and even in the spring parents race to sign their kids up for soccer season just as quickly as they do for Pop Warner football or Little League.
But somewhere along the way we tend to lose interest in the sport. I wish I could figure out what the trip switch was that changes everything. In fact, we tend to love soccer all the way until we graduate from high school. Then, boom the interest in soccer drops right off the face of the earth.
Most people can remember playing soccer as a kid and having fun, yet most could care less about it as they enter adulthood. And the aspirations of playing professionally are never there at any age.
You never heard a kid say that he want to be like Landon Donovan but you always here them say, “When I grow up I want to be just like Tiger Woods, or Joe Montana or Michael Jordan …” Somehow as we get older the desire to watch or play the sport burns out.
Maybe it’s because the marquee players don’t speak the language. Then again, nobody talks when they’re playing anyway; and many athletes in other sports don’t speak English either.
Maybe it’s because we’re accustomed to seeing a lot of points being scored in the other sports, which probably has more validity to it.
The bottom line is that we Americans like offense. We like to see a three-point shot at the buzzer decide the outcome of a tied up 100-100 basketball game. We like an offensive show in football, a grand slam in baseball and an ace in tennis.
We don’t like to see a ball methodically go back and forth, back and forth and side-to-side for 90 minutes that ultimately makes its way between the goal posts on a penalty kick of a 1-0 game.
We want to see more drama and action. In America, we don’t like to wait for anything to unfold, which is why the fast-food industry does so well. We want the action now, instant gratification. In boxing, we want to see a knockout. We need that display of power. I guess that’s what excites us.
If common soccer scores were 20-17, I suppose Americans would enjoy it more. I think if there also was the option of seeing a team come back from a 3-0 deficit we would also have reason to keep watching. But soccer is also too predictable and too often games are decided on a penalty kicks or poor calls by the referees.
Maybe it will take the United States to win a World Cup one day in order to get the people here fired up for futbol in the fall instead of football in the fall.
Then again, if we were that good, the World Cup would probably become boring because the U.S. would probably win all of them just based on sheer population numbers alone.
So why isn’t soccer a huge success in the U.S.? As the old Tootsie Roll commercial once said, “The world may never know.”
