[Sunday,
February 3rd is that national holiday known as Super Bowl Sunday.
For this year’s Super
Bowl series I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of great sports debates—add your
opinion into the mix in comments, please!]
On why soccer
hasn’t quite taken off in the U.S., and why that question might be the problem.
As a kid growing
up in the 1980s, I was (I believe) part of the first generation to play youth soccer en masse. I don’t know
exactly what percentage of us played soccer (I know I could try to look it up,
but I’m writing this post on Thanksgiving morning and am feeling a bit too lazy
to do so), but it felt like the majority of us at least (although I’m sure
there were race and class factors, since registration wasn’t cheap and personal
transportation to practices and games was a necessity and so on). By the time
my sister began playing five or so years later, the sport seemed even more
ubiquitous. Flash forward thirty years later, and it feels like literally every
kid my preteen sons’ age (or again, at least every one in certain towns and
communities) is out there every Saturday all fall and spring chasing that
checkered ball (and a sizeable number of their parents are out there trying to
herd those cats as volunteer coaches—I see you, my brothers and sisters in
arms, or legs!). When I think about how many pictures I see on social media of
kids playing soccer, posted by friends from all walks of life, around the country,
it feels like the sport has truly become one of the most shared experiences of
American childhood.
And yet, despite
those four decades of building momentum, by most
accounts soccer still hasn’t broken into the upper echelon of American
professional sports. I’ve seen all sorts of explanations over the years for
that gap, from xenophobic and silly ones about the sport’s
“foreign” flavor (more on that nonsense in a second) to practical and
understandable ones about how low-scoring
the games (warning, that’s a National
Review article, just FYI) generally are, among many many others. But to my
mind, there’s a simpler explanation for at least one factor in why men’s soccer
hasn’t become a dominant professional sport in America (women’s
soccer most definitely has, at least at the national team level): our
greatest male athletes have too many other options. In many nations, if you’re
a superstar or even just talented youth athlete, soccer is the most likely and
logical fit, and the best path to potential professional sports stardom (there’s
a reason why Neymar
joined a professional team’s system at age 11!). But here in the U.S., such
young prodigies have their pick of a number of sports paths, and who can really
imagine high school phenoms and freaks of athletic nature like LeBron or Zion picking soccer over
basketball (to name one exemplary trend)?
So despite all
those youth soccer players, the U.S. hasn’t produced a ton of great home-grown
professional talents, at least not yet. But honestly, while players are one
measure of a sport’s popularity, fans are another—and on that front, to say
that soccer isn’t a major sport in the U.S. is to replicate many of the xenophobic
narratives I mentioned. For many American communities, especially multi-cultural
and immigrant ones, soccer is most definitely the spectator
sport of choice; just check out fans of the Mexican national team
celebrating their recent performance in the World Cup at a rally in Los Angeles this
past June. Hispanic Americans are far from the only American community to
exemplify this soccer craze, but they certainly
are a prominent one—and any narrative of soccer as less popular nationally that
doesn’t acknowledge the sport’s centrality to this sizeable and growing American
community is fundamentally myopic and discriminatory. Soccer might not be at
the level of American football yet (and to be clear, neither are hockey or
baseball any more, and probably not basketball either although it’s closer),
but its popularity is only growing, and is one of the most telling 21st
century American trends.
Last debate
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other great debates you’d highlight?
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