At some point when I was growing up in the 1970s, the mainstream media gleefully announced the arrival of the next great American sport: Soccer!
In due course, investors were lined up, a league was formed, teams were assembled, washed-up “football” stars from Europe and South American were lured to American teams, and then…nothing.
Then, as now, normal, well-adjusted Americans who weren’t shut-ins had not the slightest interest in watching soccer because of a couple of small problems with the organizer’s business model.
Namely, that soccer is a dull, boring game with little or no scoring and, as compared to baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, not nearly enough discernible strategy or drama to hold the interest of the average American sports fan.
Soccer’s popularity overseas is probably less a ringing endorsement of the game than it is a statement about their lack of entertainment choices.
Several subsequent attempts to incite soccer fever in the U.S. were attempted in the apparent belief that a sport so popular where flush toilets are considered a novelty would find an audience in America.
Each time, it has proven a dismal failure. Last week, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy article pondering the nagging head-scratcher of why Hollywood has yet to produce a hit movie about soccer.
They might just as well have asked why Hollywood has yet to produce a hit movie about curling, or hacky sack, or buzkashi, the Afghan version of polo in which a headless calf’s corpse is swatted about by players on horseback instead of a ball.
In each case, the answer is simple: Nobody wants to see a movie about soccer (curling, hacky sack, buzkashi) because it’s a dull, boring game with little or no scoring and not enough discernible drama or strategy to hold the interest of the average American sports fan. (OK…buzkashi can actually get kind of interesting during the play-offs.)
Of course, the Times piece had another explanation: Americans were too xenophobic to fully appreciate and enjoy soccer because it was foreign. Odd, this, as basketball and hockey both originated in Canada, while baseball and football are both descendants of English games (rounders and rugby, respectively).
But no matter, their point was self-evident: Americans don’t like soccer because Americans are smug, uptight bigots who hate foreign things. Bad, bad Americans! But soccer proponents are nothing if not persistent, and in recent years the game has developed a certain following– as a participant sport, that is.
Lots of American kids play Little League soccer now or are forced, I mean encouraged, to play soccer in gym class at school. But soccer as a spectator sport is unlikely to ever surpass baseball, football, basketball, or even hockey in the U.S. because, as has been noted, soccer is a dull, boring game to watch with little or no scoring and not enough discernible strategy or drama to hold the interest of the average American sports fan.
But soccer does serve one useful purpose beyond being a reliable cure for insomnia when it appears on ESPN 7 at three o’clock in the morning. Soccer is, in fact, a useful metaphor with regard to American politics and foreign policy.
Americans are constantly being told that we should behave less like ourselves and more like people in other parts of the world. Given a choice between the way Americans do things and the way people in other countries do things, the presumption is that the foreign way is always smarter, more efficient, more enjoyable, more responsible, more ethical, more logical, greener, and in general simply better than the American way.
Case in point: Israel. Since the entire world seems to agree with now-retired journalist Helen Thomas that Israel is the bad guy in the Middle East, America’s decision to defend the region’s sole stable, pro-western democracy must be wrong-headed.
Another case in point: Iraq. Since most of the world was against the 2003 liberation of that country, America was clearly in the wrong in dismantling Saddam Hussein’s mass-murdering, rape room-friendly terror state and installing a functioning democracy there as we seem to have done.
The possibility of America being right, and the rest of the world being wrong, is never seriously considered. The fact that soccer is wildly popular in other, often less developed parts of the world does not reflect badly on soccer, we’re told– it reflects badly on us!
But, we’re told, soccer isn’t just big in countries where female circumcision is still practiced and sources of drinking water are indistinguishable from open sewers. Soccer games on TV get huge ratings in the United Kingdom.
Know what else gets huge TV ratings in England? Live coverage of championship darts. Seriously, that’s not a joke. English people like nothing better than sitting in pubs playing darts and getting sloshed while watching other people play darts on TV. No wonder the English find soccer fascinating.
Soccer also appeals to the simplifying, back-to-basics, New Age sensibilities of the typical progressive. Unlike American sports, which require expensive equipment like bats and helmets and gloves, soccer can be played on almost any flat, rectangular surface with nothing more than a round, inflatable bouncy object preferably crafted from some animal’s bladder or hide.
Soccer is so simple, we’re told, so pure! They say this as if it’s a selling point. As if it’s a good thing.
On a more elemental level, the human species has been evolving for either 6,000 or 60 billion years, depending on your point of view. Unlike most other animals, we’ve developed hands with independently functioning digits and opposable thumbs with which to grasp and manipulate objects.
This ability is essential to American sports, whereas in soccer it is all but forbidden. Soccer is, in fact, a devolutionary game in that respect. It’s almost odd that at some point during a soccer game players don’t begin to fashion primitive tools from sticks and rocks, or engage in hunting and gathering. At least that would be interesting to watch.
In the final analysis, soccer is the metric system of sports: Accepted everywhere in the world except for the U.S. because either (A) America is a nation of jingoistic, bigoted cowboys or (B) maybe, just maybe, because our system of weights and measures is simply better.
Keep that in mind over the next few weeks whenever your favorite baseball team is pre-empted on ESPN by World Cup coverage and you’re desperately trying to care about the scoreless tie Costa Rica and the Czech Republic are listlessly crafting for the record books.
Just keep telling yourself that it could be worse. You could be in some English pub, drunk, watching darts on TV.
Ned Rice is a Los Angeles-based TV writer who has written for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Politically Incorrect, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.
