Soccer sucks?
- more children and youths play soccer in the united states than any other organized sport. period.
- soccer is by far the most popular sport in the world by any measure.
- almost everyone else in the world calls “soccer” football, or futbol. it is also referred to in other countries as the “beautiful game”
- no professional soccer league has ever flourished in the united states; it has never come close to approaching the Big sports: baseball, basketball, football, and (now) nascar
so this is somewhat of a strange confluence of facts, don’t you think? everyone in the country plays soccer. everyone in the world LOVES soccer. and… for some reason, soccer is not that big in the united states.
first off, let’s address my personal thoughts on the game of soccer (futbol). i like it. as a kid i played ayso soccer and enjoyed it enough. heck, everyone i knew played soccer also. i loved basketball far more, but i certainly didn’t dislike the game played with feet. i think, in general, americans feel this way about the sport. there is nothing WRONG with it. we enjoy playing it enough. but for some reason, we don’t get embedded into the culture and excitement of the sport like other countries do. when i took Sociology in Sports in college, we spent an entire segment of the class talking about this. there were all sorts of theoretical and cultural explanations for the lack of popularity in soccer throughout the country, including “Americans didn’t invent the game so they think it sucks.” at the end of the day though, i think there are two reasons for its lack of popularity: the television and we’re not the best.
i guess it’s not really JUST the television, but more the television married with the relatively late arrival of the game in the american consciousness. but let’s get to the point: soccer kinda blows to watch on television. it’s true. it’s a beautiful game with amazing intricacies and fast action, but restricting it to a television screen is impossible for the tv producers of a soccer game. they either have to pan out too far, turning the players into ants scouring around a ball that you can’t see, or they have to pan in and see, at any time, the player with ball and maybe 20 meters radially around him/her. in soccer, that does not come close to properly representing the complexity of the game.
let’s compare that to basketball, where 90% of the time all ten players on the floor can be seen well within the screen. the boundaries of basketball are restricted to a 94′ long playing field, of which participants will usually only use half. in football, players line up in two rows of amassed bodies prior to the snap. true, action often runs off the screen, but the excitement of all running plays can generally be noted on-screen, leaving only passing plays to the imagination of the viewer. also, americans like seeing people hit each other.
baseball can focus on the central figures of the game (pitcher, catcher). nascar is in theory a simple conceptual ordering of cars, meaning that you can focus on a single vehicle and still, based on its standing, have a clear understanding of the overall action of the race, as it is (conceptually, at least) a two-dimensional game. that leaves just soccer and hockey, neither of which display well on television and neither of which have (really) captured widespread excitement in the US.
but why does this matter when actual in-person viewers and players of these sports can clearly grasp the intricacies of them? well, mostly because soccer started “behind” and is trying to catch up. to flourish professionally in the US means to get fans, and fans want to see one of two things from sports they watch on television: 1) excitement and understandable complexity (aesthetic experience), or 2) something that they can’t or wouldn’t want to do themselves. basketball? people feel like they understand the game (even thought they don’t) and they can’t dunk. football? people feel like they understand the game (but it’s far more intricate than they think) and they don’t want to hit or get hit. nascar? people feel like they understand the game and they don’t want to risk their own lives. soccer? they can’t understand everything that goes on on the field (cuz most of the time they can’t see it) and there is nothing particularly dangerous or mystifying that is done on the field.
so that brings us to the second point, because if it’s just that people in america need those two aspects of the television-viewing experience to get excited about a sport, then why isn’t the WNBA blowing up? one could argue it’s because the women don’t dunk, but several women have dunked in the past few years and that has led to zero increased interest in the sport. well, it’s because americans don’t like watching less than the best on tv. we don’t watch division II football because “it doesn’t matter”. we don’t watch minor league baseball because the majors are there. and therein lies the problem with the wnba: people inherently treat it like a minor league because we don’t perceive the players to be as good as nba players. period. that’s it. if the wnba all-stars played the nba all-stars in a full-court 48-minute game and beat them, then people might start watching the wnba. so, for soccer, because we know so many countries have been at it for so long, there’s very little chance that we’re watching the best players in the world in the mls. and so we don’t watch. it’s a mindset. so combine that perspective with the fact that soccer is the new guy, and there is zero traction.
so what does soccer need? fostering a grassroots approach to the game is not going to turn it into a big professional sport in america. no chance. people are too entrenched with football on sundays and nascar on whichever day it is that they race on. what soccer really needs in america? it needs the US mens’ team to win the world cup, more star players coming to the mls from europe, and some television breakthrough that allows people to better experience the game. until then? until then i guess mainstream america thinks soccer sucks.
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i didnt play soccer as kid, so I cant speak on it, but i’m 90% certain that 75% of children worldwide have played soccer at one point in their childhood. I’m also 95% certain tht 90% of the grown men playing futbol at the park on saturdays are from mexico. Its really really boring to watch on tv compared to american football and definitely harder to focus on than baseball. I’ve been to a few soccer matches and its a LOT more interesting in person (then again, what isnt?), but the tv experience is just not happening. Anyway, we should play some pickup soccer on sunday.
And thats why Futebol which is what they call it wont be embraced in the US culture.Im an Avid supporter and ahve played soccer for my Highschool and College teams which has made me in better shape and its agood exercise avenue.Its Popularity in europe is as big as they say it is and a major Influence to young kids its all they know go to Brazil thats all they play.The TV experience can be boring but so is other sports,Once you learn to love it you will understand it.Forca Futebol
The best athletes in the United States DO NOT play soccer. Until then, well…we get to watch guys that are 5′7″ and 145 lbs. get dominated.
I was enjoying an anti-soccer website because I find the ’sport’ so mind-numbingly boring. I came across a link to this site. It seems that most people that chime in their 2 cents get shot down by the soccer die-hards. This is largely because they sound so ignorant when they do it that it sounds like a rant instead of fact. You must back your argument with fact. Please keep in mind you can never refer to soccer as a ’sport.’ A ’sport’ does not have playoff games that END in TIES! That defeats the purpose of the word playoff. I also will never refer to it as ‘football.’ That would be an insult to the athletes who play through pain and play real honest-to-God football.
I grew up in Northwest Pennsylvania and I played hockey. To be honest, soccer can’t hold hockey’s jockstrap. There are only two reasons soccer gets played in this country at all. There is the large influx from Latin America where it is literally the only game in town. Who’d believe that? Poor people from other countries WANTING to come to the United States? Unbelievable! Kids in this country play it because their parents (soccer moms) can drop them off, let them run around in circles for a few hours so they are nice and tired, and pick them up later so they can take them home and put them to bed. It’s cheap babysitting – shorts, a t-shirt, and cleats. That’s it. Throw in some extra laundry soap for grass stains and it’s still the cheapest sport this side of ping-pong. It’s that inexpensiveness that makes it ‘most popular,’ not the fact that it is soooo riveting.
It’s the ideal Communist sport. Lenin probably played it between revolutions in Red Square. A team from the suburbs can play against an inner-city team and everyone is on equal footing. No one gets a technological advantage unless you count nicer cleats than your opponents as an advantage. And ties? No one gets to feel good about winning and no one has to be upset because they lost. EVERYONE feels disappointed because they ran their behinds into the ground and accomplished nothing! See? Communism.
Even if kids continue to play all the way through high school, by then most realize that it is a go-nowhere sport. Maybe they can get a scholarship to play in college. That would be the only realistic ‘pro-’ I can find for soccer. (They may not be able to get into college on academics. They may not be able to hit a baseball, ice skate, swim, dunk, etc.) But what are they going to do after that? Get drafted by an MLS team so they can play a few games in front of a couple hundred friends and family in a stadium where most fans come disguised as empty seats? Fine. Go ahead. But don’t forget to make sure you have that application in for the Manager’s position at McDonald’s for the off-season. You gotta pay the rent somehow! Even if they were good enough to get to play over in Europe, they’d mostly be playing in stadiums that double as cow-pastures for the rest of the year. Look at the stadium that the Giants and Dolphins played in this season. Famous Wembley Stadium had turf that made Heinz Field look good! They’d be playing in front of fans who are rowdy alcoholics first and soccer fans second. I saw a shirt pinned up on a wall in a local restaurant owed by a great couple from Buffalo, NY. It half jokingly stated “Buffalo – a drinking town with a football problem!” It’s also like the classic line always used against hockey. “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” Well, the more apt line would be “We went to a street riot with a banner, a keg, a few bricks to throw, and some flares to shoot and a soccer game broke out.”
Believe me, I have tried to watch. I just can’t credit a ’sport’ where you are offsides for being faster than the defensemen. It seems like every time the offense gets the ball and has a breakaway on the goalie – IT’S OFFSIDES! Apply this silliness to hockey and it would take away every single breakaway that ever was! People always ask me why a hockey team has never put some big 400-pound behemoth in as a goalie. I respond with “why doesn’t a soccer team put a few in on defense? Any time someone runs past him, play would be dead anyway because it would be offsides!” That, and the fact that the line that denotes offsides doesn’t even go all the way across the field of play so the referees are left to ‘guess-timate’ if it was truly offsides or not. This would be like in tennis if the box for serves only extended half as deep from the net with no back line at all and the linesmen (who in tennis are at least stationary to view what they need to) had to judge IF the ball would have been in IF the line WAS there! Totally illogical.
I also think the uniforms are pretty silly for supposedly professional teams, too. In hockey and REAL football, the athletes dress like gladiators ready for combat. Soccer players resemble grown boys in silk pajamas. Also, if you represent a city (or club), put a logo or use the name of the city on your jersey so we can at least tell what team you are and where the heck your team is from – not which variety of beer your sponsor is. I swear, the team names should be the Circuit City Home Theater Systems, the Time-Life Elvis Collectible Dishes, the Minute Maid Frozen Orange Juicers, or the Tampax Panty-Liners based on what you see on the uniforms. Advertise on the field or something and provide some recognition for the city you supposedly represent. The owner of the New England Patriots also owns (or owned) Gillette (the razor company). The team plays in Gillette Stadium but the team doesn’t have to advertise it on their uniforms. Uniforms should be sacred – not billboards for hire. A little Nike swoosh, Reebok symbol, Champion “C,” or Adidas stripes are one thing. A corporate logo that covers the entire front of your uniform? Sacrilegious! Given time, a soccer team will eventually be fielded wearing sandwich boards to maximize advertising space.
Do we really have to go into the argument about how “tough” these candy-a**es are, too? It would be difficult to tell an Aussie Rules Football player or rugby player apart from a soccer player by looking at uniforms only due to the lack of padding. But that is where the similarities stop. Those other sports have all of the running that soccer does; yet both are so much more physically demanding than soccer. Soccer fans say ‘you run 3 miles during a game.’ Fine. You run three miles. But just because you can run 3 miles during a 90-minute (plus ’stoppage’ time ;o ) game does not make you “tough.” (That’s 2 miles per hour by the way. You move about that fast walking your dog, people!) A soccer player bends a finger back and writhes on the ground for 10 minutes like someone severed his Achilles tendon in order to get a penalty called and then he is running around again 5 minutes later. Gamesmanship? No. Integrity? No. These players should add another sign on those stupid jerseys. Instead of a player’s name it should say “Fragile” or “Handle With Care.” This makes me think FedEx or UPS would be ideal sponsors for ANY team!
An NHL hockey player recently had his Carotid (sp?) Artery severed 3/4 of the way through by the skate of a body-checked teammate falling to the ice. Leaving a pool of blood and a blood trail behind him, he had the presence of mind to skate half the length of the rink to his team’s bench all while applying pressure to the wound. He was dismissed from the hospital within a week and will likely be playing again within another week. After witnessing an injury of that nature and the impending return to action after such a short time, is it any wonder why Americans look on with such disgust at a ’sport’ like soccer where the blatant faking of injuries is the norm?
A friend in college (from England) tried to turn us on to soccer. We tried watching one of his intramural games. His team scored early and took a 1-0 lead. The guys on his team started yelling something like “Play Italian” or some other European nationality. We all thought that meant we were going to have pizza after the game! I guess the Italians (or whoever it was – it was almost 15 years ago) are known for stall tactics or something. His team soon started kicking the ball as far out of bounds as possible so the clock would run off as much time as possible. Brilliant strategy! We used to play “keep-away” in kindergarten, too, but we never thought someone could go professional at it!
Which brings me to my next argument – the clock. Some soccer-aficionados argue that the non-stopping time means non-stopping action. The Heck you say! All it does is allow the game to mercifully be over as quick as possible. Allowing the clock to run while players argue with the referee about whether or not a player was tripped or if he flopped (usually the case), to allow for a ball to be retrieved and brought back into play, or to allow “walls” to be set up on a free-kick (if they’re not ready, that’s their problem – kick the darn thing!)? And this extra-time thing is supposed to compensate for the ‘down-time’? You gotta be kidding me. In 90 minutes of a soccer game there is only like 1 or 2 minutes of ‘injury’ or ’stoppage’ time? Are you joking? That would be like saying baseball only has 5 or 10 minutes of down time. And only one man in the entire stadium knows when the game is REALLY going to end? Ridiculous! Apply this to basketball for a second. We all know that the last minute of a close basketball game lasts about an hour. What if the teams didn’t know when the game was going to end? How long would the game drag on then? How many times would a player be caught dribbling the ball, waiting to make a move to try and win the game and the referee ends the game at some arbitrary time? Sounds like a hometown ref would be pretty hard to beat! (”Let’s see, today we need 10 minutes of extra-time so my hometown boys can tie the score and if they can’t, well, I did my part at least.”)
I love some of the arguments put forward by the ‘true-believers’ though. Read a half-dozen postings on anti-soccer threads and you are guaranteed to see at least one of these. “Chicks dig soccer.” This is good only if you like your chicks to look like they just ran the Boston Marathon (skin and bones? – you can keep ‘em). Then there is the intellectual/cussing group. “I got a 1470 SAT, 36 on the ACT, and my GPA is 3.97. Soccer is the best, you f*****g p***y wanker c*** s*****g son of …” and on and on and on it goes. Yeah, you sure are a rocket scientist there buddy. This isn’t 2nd grade. Or maybe it is. They do say that 2nd Grade IS the longest 5 years of a soccer fan’s life! Grow up, for Pete’s sake! Who are you trying to impress? I played ice hockey as a kid but I do not feel the need to go onto websites to protect it. The sport speaks for itself. Anyone who feels the need to have to defend their sport, seek out websites like “Soccer Sucks” or “anti-soccer” and chime in with unintelligible foul-mouthed ‘hooliganism’ is only proving the point of the kind of followers the sport has and why so little is thought about it here in the States. You guys are right there with Pro Wrestling fans! But it’s “The Beautiful Game.” Who gave it that name? Soccer fans? You can call the most ugly girl that you went to high school with “beautiful” but that doesn’t make it so. Even if you put her in nice clothes, slather on some make-up, and do up the hair really nice, she still isn’t beautiful just because you say she is! Then there is the eternal argument that it’s THE MOST POPULAR SPORT IN THE WORLD. Not so long ago, Communism was the most common/popular form of government in the world. Look how that’s worked out! Much of the world still conducted bowel movements over a hole in the ground until the last 30 years or so, too. Many still do. That doesn’t make it the best option, though. Most civilized people in the world wipe after a trip to the bathroom but that doesn’t mean we all need to watch it when it happens much less refer to it as a sport! At least we ALL win we everyone wipes. And there are NO ties when it comes to toilet paper!
I do credit two players, though, on the entire field for a soccer game. Soccer goalies must be otherworldly! How one man from each team can keep 9 out of 10 games to a 1-0 or 0-0 score while defending goals larger than the houses that most soccer fans grew up in I’ll never know! It’s inconceivable how the scores aren’t 10-8 or 12-11 with the goals being the size of an 18-wheeler. Try standing in front of your house while your friend races towards you trying to kick the ball and hit your house. Then again, remember – EVERYTHING is apparently offsides so your friend would probably be offsides anyway and the house would remain unscathed. I am old enough, though, to remember the MISL – Major Indoor Soccer League. Now that was an improvement that should have caught on – soccer in a broom closet!
We can put ice rinks in cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami and watch world class athletes play a faster, stronger game with more action in one game than in an entire season of soccer and people outside the US wonder why sports like NASCAR and hockey are still more popular among adults in the US than soccer – and NASCAR doesn’t even HAVE athletes. All they do is drive in a circle (ovals, tri-ovals and street tracks all end where they start – hence, a circle). Of course most soccer players from Third World countries could only approach duplicating that by racing their mule against their neighbor’s.
I’m not a fan of the show, but there was an episode of The Simpson’s where Lisa asks Homer to take the family to see an Exhibition soccer game between Portugal and Ecuador (I think). The whole town is abuzz with soccer-mania and attends the game. The game starts with 3 players passing the ball back and forth to each other. They continue unabated for 5 minutes as the frenzy in the stands turns to silence until Homer finally stands up and yells out “C’mon! Do something already!” The crowd is so annoyed at the lack of anything happening that they begin fighting amongst themselves in order to be the first to leave the stadium. Cartoon or not, this absolutely nails America’s opinion of soccer – 90 minutes of practically nothing!
As to why America doesn’t produce great soccer players, it’s easy. The great athletes are playing real sports. Can’t hit a baseball? Can’t kick, throw, or catch a football? Can’t shoot or dribble a basketball? Can’t ice skate and stickhandle a puck while someone is trying to knock you on your behind? Go play soccer. Jim Rome once said something to the affect that he will ‘give his son a sequined blouse and figure skates before he allows him to participate in soccer.’ Why not consider a position as a male cheerleader, as well? That, at least, has some fringe benefits . This may be a LITTLE ‘over the top’ but it makes the point. There are simply too many options here in this country to try before a kid realizes his only chance at athletic participation is to play in a kids’ soccer league where everybody gets a “participation trophy” at the end of the year. “Who cares what our record was. I got a trophy for just showing up.” Performance is immaterial. It’s the Liberal equivalent of a welfare system for un-athletic kids! Throw them into soccer since they can’t do anything else, and give them a little plastic trophy and a pat on the back. They feel better about themselves for a while until they realize they still can’t hit a baseball, catch, throw, shoot, dribble (not soccer), or skate and they are still going to be the last kid picked for everything else in gym class. They still won’t be able to climb the rope, either.
Personally, I’d even watch golf, tennis, or a “Golden Girls” Marathon on TV instead of soccer. At least Bea Arthur and Betty White don’t fall down every 2 seconds faking an injury. Maybe someone should try using game film and do a study to see whether or not soccer on TV really is the cure for insomnia!
If you want a real question, ponder this…
Your TV is broken. The only channels that work have soccer, a shopping channel, and the World Series of Poker. What do you watch?
Answer: Nothing – go rake the leaves or mow the lawn. Better yet, go spend some time with your wife and kids. Even better yet, go get a job and support your family. Watch your soccer while you are waiting in the unemployment line! Although, being unemployed is probably bad enough. Forcing people in line to watch soccer would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment!