Why Americans Like to Play Soccer, But Don’t Watch It

Because the World Cup games have been going on for a few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of derogatory things said about soccer in “water cooler” conversations at work and on the radio. I’ve heard soccer called boring and stupid, devoid of strategy, inferior to other sports, and I have even heard it called a game for the ignorant and poor (this last by a conservative talk radio host who infuriates me with his knee-jerk hostility to illegal immigrants). A recent article in the Wall Street Journal pointed to some evidence that the game is downright unfair, with the low-scoring outcomes governed more by poor officiating and the “Hand of God” than by the great skill of athletes.

I am certainly not going to step into that debate. I personally do not care to watch soccer; I think it is fun to play and boring to watch. However, the sports that a person likes--if he likes sports at all--is a very personal thing. I wouldn’t criticize a fan for liking any sport, not even golf. My love of baseball and hockey, for instance, runs very deep and has roots in childhood memories. And of course, it is a well-known and uncontroversial fact that all sports, with the possible exception of baseball, would be better if they were hockey.[Note 1.]

I would not have found the topic to be blog-worthy at all if I had not heard one fascinating comment on my favorite sports radio show. A group was discussing possible reasons why kids play soccer when they are young but do not go on to be fans of the sport when they grow up. For twenty or thirty years, the game has been ubiquitous in extracurricular sports programs for elementary school kids--it gave rise to the “soccer mom” and the mini-van--but this fact has not been translated to revenue in televised sports. Despite several attempts to popularize it, Americans simply don’t care for soccer compared to football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Lots of reasons for this were suggested; for instance, perhaps parents push their kids into soccer because it seems safer than alternatives like football and hockey, but the kids themselves prefer those other sports when they get older. Among the several ideas put forth, one stood out starkly. A commentator (I believe it was former NFL linebacker Steve DeOssie, but my apologies to the actual speaker if I got it wrong) offered this: Maybe Americans don’t like soccer because it is so low scoring--and Americans admire, above all things, productivity.

This is a stunningly philosophical comment, particularly coming from a bunch of guys jawing away about sports. Whether it is substantially true about soccer or not is not even terribly important. What I love is the recognition that achievement is linked to productivity--and in sports, what you produce in order to win is points, runs, and goals. It is an amazingly sharp observation that Mr. DeOssie is making here: Americans like high-scoring games because Americans like to produce.

I don’t want to push the idea too far--it’s just sport, after all. Obviously, scoring is only one facet of most sports; good defenses often win championships in football and hockey, and true students of baseball recognize that pitching, not hitting, is what wins, especially in the playoffs. Also, occasionally baseball and hockey games can be low-scoring affairs. But it is hardly surprising that American audiences would be indifferent to a 0 - 0 stalemate between Portugal and Brazil, no matter how important that game is to those teams.

I am aware that I am forcing a comparison here, but there is something fitting about the goal-starved futility of an international soccer match; the dreary, perpetual impotence of midfield play reflects the gray, welfare-state mentality that is lauded by the rest of the world. In my ignorance of soccer’s finer points, I am tempted to draw a parallel between the game and the continents that love it: on the one hand, the fruitless repetition of passes and turnovers--athletes, numbered and anonymous, exhausting themselves to move a ball back and forth, up and down, with no ultimate gain; on the other, the endless labor of interchangeable drones, toiling in socialist and egalitarian states, meekly accepting instructions and their allotted wages. This comparison is no doubt unfair to the game precisely because it is so true of the worlds’ governments.

image from EA Sports Forums

Americans may have become quite European on the surface, but deep down, the passive lack of productivity in the typical soccer match grinds the American soul. Americans want goals. We want to see our heroes score. Above I wrote that pitching wins in baseball, and it does--but when the highlights are shown, which clips make the news? It is generally the home runs and the clutch hits that inspire: Youkilis putting one over the Green Monster or Jeter stroking a walkoff single. We want to see Crosby and Ovechkin find the back of the net after burning a defenseman with magical stick-handling. We want Ray Allen to knock down the three-pointer, and we recall in awe those times Michael soared through the air before a dunk, as if he were flying. We even put up with the antics and laziness of Manny Ramirez . . . as long as he knocks in runs.

Whether or not he understood the full depth of his point, Mr. DeOssie has touched upon something important in recognizing that Americans value productivity. The next time I see Tom Brady or Peyton Manning march downfield to put up six points, I will not only admire their skill and poise as I always do, but will remember how very, very American they really are.

NOTES

1. Even though I pretty much agree with the universal superiority of hockey, I am obviously kidding about this being an objective fact. And I apologize to golf fans for my gratuitous slap at their sport!

Adventures at MiniCon

Lynne and I were not able to attend OCON this year, but we made up for it by going down to Georgia to the MiniCon 2010 that was organized by Jenn and Kelly of the Atlanta Objectivist Society.

We stayed with Jenn and her family; they were wonderful and gracious, and it was a thrill to meet them after having been online friends for some time. It was also great to meet Kelly and her “significant other,” with whom I discovered I had quite a lot in common. We made a few new friends and also reconnected with our friend Shea, whom we had met at OCON last year. All in all, it was fun and inspiring to be among like-minded individuals.

Father's Day

I thought this would be an appropriate time to thank my father for everything he has done for me. He is a good man. Thanks to him (and my mother, too) I was raised with a strong sense of property (“Don’t touch other people’s stuff.”), the idea that one must earn one’s way in the world (“There are no free lunches.”), and a role model showing that one must be honest and right even when it is difficult.

I do not feel any particular gratitude for the selection of the outfits that my brother and I are wearing in the picture above, but I doubt that my father had much to do with that.

P.S. My father-in-law is great, too!

This Future

I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to chime in on the BP oil spill. I have seen some good articles, including Tom Bowden’s piece and one by Doug Reich that connected President Obama’s chilling behavior to the villains in Atlas Shrugged. I’m not sure if I’ll have the time or energy to address the issue in detail in future posts. Readers of this blog will probably guess my basic position: that private property and free markets are the means of minimizing the occurrences of such accidents, and provide the best means of cleaning them up if they do occur; that government regulation is not the solution––and indeed, is a source of such accidents; and that BP is responsible for damages it caused, just as any other business or individual would be. Predictably, Mr. Obama is calling for an increase in regulations, is throwing taxpayer money at the problem, and is renewing his call for “alternative” forms of energy. Oh, and like a dictator or street thug, he’s looking for an “ass to kick.”[Note 1.] In other words, as usual, the President is doing everything wrong.

I cannot resist highlighting one comment he made Tuesday night in his Oval Office address, which even among the rest of his bluster stood out to me. Mr. Obama was brazen enough to say, after describing the damage done by the oil spill, “We cannot consign our children to this future.”[Note 2, emphasis mine.] There is simply no comparison between the damage of the oil spill, large as it is, and the utter long-term devastation that the Obama administration, the Federal Reserve, and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have wreaked. (By the way, I’m focusing on President Obama here, but the same criticism applies to Bush, Paulson, etc.) Even just in terms of money, the damage of the oil spill is a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars squandered, borrowed, or inflated by the government. The larger damage, though, is in the loss of freedom, the erosion of individual rights, which is nearly impossible to win back once it is lost. One cannot measure the cost in human lives of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care “reform,” which has set a course to destroying health care outright. If there is a man on earth who has dimmed our hopes for our children’s future, it is Barack Obama.

NOTES

1. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Obama Uses Off-Color Language on Spill,” The New York Times, 7 June 2010, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/obama-uses-off-color-language-on-spill/?scp=1&sq=ass%20to%20kick&st=cse.

2. Transcript of Obama’s First Oval Office Address, courtesy of The New York Times, 15 June 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/us/politics/16obama-text.html?ref=politics&pagewanted=all.