Wherever they went, European colonizers were not content to just kill, maim, and rape, or simply work people to death. From the jump, Europeans bought into their own bullshit, firmly believing they should subject the surviving colonized subjects to vast campaigns of cultural genocide. First and foremost, ban their religions whenever possible and make them worship the European (as in, blue-eyed) Jesus. After that, forcibly rearrange their marriage and family practices to your liking, and if possible, have them speak your particular European language. Beyond that, no detail was too mundane. It went so far as to make the colonized dress in European clothing and play European games.
And thus, soccer is the world’s most popular sport.
Want proof that European colonialism is the real reason for, or at least the original factor in, soccer’s global popularity? Look at the nations that were not under European control during the late 19th or early 20th centuries, and you’ll mostly find countries where soccer is not the top spectator sport. The United States broke away from Great Britain long before the rise of soccer, and it has a bevy of its own sports that are far more popular (baseball, basketball, American football, and on a good day hockey). Canada, New Zealand, and Australia never rebelled, but rather faded away in time for their most popular sports to be, respectively: hockey, rugby, and cricket (summer) and Australian rules football (winter). Finland, up at the edge of the world, prefers hockey. Mongolia, at the center of the world, prefers wrestling. Ireland, forever looking to do whatever the English do not, very much prefers hurling and Gaelic football. China was never culturally colonized, and basketball is its most popular spectator team sport, with various individual sports also attracting huge fan bases. The United States is itself a massive colonial power, and wherever it held sway, soccer likewise takes a backseat: basketball in the Philippines; baseball and sumo in Japan; baseball in South Korea, Taiwan, and chunks of Latin America (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, and even Venezuela to some degree). India and Pakistan are odd, and extremely populace, outliers. Ruled by Great Britain until after World War II, the English upper class seems to have had an undue influence there, and cricket, not soccer, is by far the most popular spectator sport in both nations, which collectively account for over a fifth of Earth’s humans.
Add it all up, and we find that soccer is not actually the world’s game, but more accurately about half the world’s game. It’s tops across Europe, Africa, and most of Latin America, but secondary (at best) in the most populated parts of Asia, Oceania, and North America.
As a native-born American who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I have a mixed relationship with soccer. During my childhood, it was practically non-existent where I lived, which happened to be the most international place in the United States, and perhaps even the world at that time: New York City. But even there, soccer was almost never on television, and I only saw it in person very rarely when I might espy some non-Caribbean Latinos playing it on blacktop. I had about as much an opinion of soccer as I did of high tea, kimonos, or ballroom dancing. Because The Lawrence Welk Show occasionally (not often, just occasionally) accidentally made its way onto our family TV, I had more exposure to polka music.
Fast forward to age 23. I was recruited into a seven-players-per-team, coed recreational soccer league in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Although I had never played before, I quickly realized this sport suited my middling physical talents better than the standard American sports did. I was too short for basketball, too skinny for football, lacked the high level hand-eye coordination needed to excel at baseball, and I couldn’t ice skate very well. But I was very quick, pretty fast, could run all day, and had excellent balance. Of course it was too late for me; if you want to be very skilled at a sport, unless you are very physically gifted, you need to start when you’re a kid.
Afterwards, I was back in New York City when the United States hosted the World Cup in 1994. With some playing experience now under my belt, I enjoyed watching games. I, like much of the world, adored how the ageless Roger Mila would come off the bench in the final minutes to uplift Cameroon. I was actually in a small and ultimately very quiet cafe in Manhattan’s Little Italy when Roberto Baggio sent a penalty shot over the net to give Brazil the title. Shhh, I was rooting for Brazil.
Then, in my late 20s and early 30s, I played in FIFA-sponsored city leagues in Lincoln, Nebraska, first coed and then men’s. It was competitive. My trapping and passing skills were subpar, but I could translate what I’d learned in American football and basketball to be a serviceable defender, a solid right back who understood how both zone and man coverages work. I could effectively neutralize most would-be scorers who came into my area, though I was pretty worthless on the counterattack. The only goal I ever scored was a header on a corner kick in the coed league. It felt good.
I’ve never followed any of the major soccer leagues, whether in Europe, Latin America, or MLS here in the United States. However, I continued to watch the succeeding World Cups, and even the occasional Euros. Along the way, I’ve watched soccer in the United States transform from a near non-entity into a sport with very high participation rates among children, and a relatively small but highly enthusiastic fan base. My feelings about all this are mixed. Here are some brief thoughts on what I don’t like about soccer as a spectator sport and, despite all that, how to make it more popular in the United States.
-Spectator sports are a blight on society. We need fewer of them, not more. Sports fans are generally repugnant. The etymology of fan is a truncation of fanatic, and sports fans all over the world often live down to that, taking their my-team-wrong-or-right attitude to extremes. Forget cheering when the other team’s player gets injured. That’s kids’ stuff. I have listened to countless fans pile on when another team’s player is suspended or terminated because of criminal activity such as violent assault and rape. And worse, I’ve heard fans actually defend such players when they play for the hometown team. It’s thoroughly nauseating. Sports fandom encourages blind loyalty and dogmatic thinking. This is true of all the major sports, none of them more genteel than the others. It certainly applies to soccer fans, many of whom embraced violent hooliganism as their unofficial pastime during the mid-late 20th century. Now that most of the warlike riff raff in rich countries can no longer afford the grotesquely inflated ticket and concessions prices of any major sport, soccer fans at stadiums are less violent. However, they continue to show their mettle by routinely engaging in loud racist and homophobic chants against opposing players. Especially the black and brown players. That’s specific to soccer and largely absent from U.S. spectator sports, which has its own brands of ugliness. But it’s just one more version of fans from all sports being troglodytes. Add another brand of big time sports spectatorship and fandom to U.S. culture? No thanks.
-All sports are boring. This is painfully obvious to the large chunk of humanity that is thoroughly bored by spectator sports. All sports are boring, and it’s a fundamental flaw. Sports are, by design, extremely repetitious. Every sport has a very specific objective (eg. Put the ball/puck in the net/endzone, or get a batsman to his destination), and strict rules severely limiting the ways you can achieve the goal (eg. No hands, or hit the ball with a stick, etc.) When you combine a very specific objective with severe limitations on how it can be achieved, you get lots of repetition. Dribble, pass, shoot (basketball); pitch, pitch pitch, hit and run (baseball); run the ball, throw the ball (American football); kick, kick, kick, kick, kick (soccer). Someone who loves watching a sport also loves the repetition of that sport, perceiving it as rhythm and narrative arc. Someone who doesn’t love a sport’s repetition finds it tedious. One of soccer’s charms is its simplicity; but this also makes it about as repetitious as a sport can get. Of late, I have found soccer’s repetition more tedious than charming. Yes, I realize that’s a Me thing. But all sports are, by design, boring unless you can find some avenue of emotional investment, which many people never will.
-The culture of jaking. “Jaking” is old American slang for faking an injury. It happens in every sport from time to time, but as everyone knows, the most histrionic, over the top jaking imaginable is deeply woven into the culture of soccer. I have always found it to be utterly revolting to the point of infuriating, and ultimately extremely off putting. I grew up watching baseball players breakup double plays, collide at home plate, and occasionally get hit with a rock-hard ball moving 90 mph, and football players fucking each other up so hard and so often that most them end up with at least minor disabilities. AND NONE OF THEM EVER COMPLAINED! Although they occasionally got pissed at each other and fought, and that was cool too. Because I also grew up with an American sense of masculinity that said men do tough things, they get hurt, and they don’t cry. They suck it up. Because that’s what it means to be a man, not a little boy. Obviously there are some big down sides to that, and John Wayne was totally full of shit. But in this essay I’m talking about spectator sports primarily as an entertainment product, and what I want and don’t want to watch athletes do. And frankly, I like a little violence in my professional sports, and I absolutely hate whining, especially about fake injuries. If grown ass men are going to get paid millions to play kids’ games, then I want them to fucking earn it. There should be a little blood and bruising now and again. I’m not rooting for serious injuries, those are terrible. But let’s go! Like I said, spectator sports are bad for society and sports fans are trash. I am trash. And if the metaphor is trashy movies, I prefer dumb shoot ‘em ups to saccharine rom-coms. (In non-metaphorical terms I actually prefer rom-coms sometimes.) And every time I see a strong, healthy soccer player roll around on the grass, grabbing his armored shin after getting light bumped . . . in the shoulder? . . . and cry and bitch and moan like he’s facing amputation, I think to myself: Just take him out back.
This is another Me thing.
-I am repulsed by the native born U.S. soccer fan demographic. There’s a guy. He lives in the suburbs or maybe in a gentrified urban neighborhood. He wears sandals in warm weather, wool socks in the winter. He sorts and recycles religiously. If the weather cooperates in the least, he’ll bike commute to work. He’s civically engaged. He’s reasonably handy around the house. He takes his young children to the local brew pub on the weekend where he enjoys a an IPA, the hoppier the better. He hikes. He’s a loyal Democrat, a college graduate, and likelier than most to have a job in public policy, a STEM field, or to be an “artisan.” He eats more than his share of power bars, nuts, and whole grains. He knows his way around a frisbee and will correct you if you call it a frisbee; it’s a “disc.” His wife probably knits. As the avid biking and hiking suggest, he is reasonably athletic, and would like to follow sports. But when he was in high school, jocks were mean to him. The football players picked on him, the basketball players made him feel inadequate, the baseball players cheated off him on exams. But soccer . . . ooh la la, that sport is so cosmopolitan. Did you know high falutin’ Europeans like soccer? And best of all it’s not really American; it is untainted by the memories of a middle class American adolescence that was just a little painful.
I’ve known a lot of these soccer fans. Some of them are very dear friends. One-on-one, they tend to be truly outstanding people: honest, kind, generous, dependable, trustworthy, great values. But when I’m around them en masse, I wanna kill myself. It’s not their fault. This is another one of those Me things. But as I’ve noted, spectator sports are trash, and if I’m going to watch sports with other people, I don’t want them giving off vibes about making the world a better place and using sports to bring humanity together. That’s total bullshit, and it’s a specific brand of cloying bullshit that FIFA pushes hard, and which many American soccer fans buy into. I can’t stand it. Sports bring out the worst in fans, not the best. I need some open honesty about that when I’m watching sports with other people, not an underlying sense that if we work really hard, we can bring about a renaissance in American mass transit. Yes, but not right now, goddamn it.
-How to make soccer more successful in the United States. Despite all my complaints and misgivings, here’s the answer: stop treating soccer like a foreign, specifically British, sport. I know this sounds like old white guy shit, but it’s real. And if it doesn’t happen, soccer will forever remain the domain of immigrants, some of their children, and the loveable, NGO-supporting liberals mentioned above. And while those liberal, cosmopolitan soccer fans might say they want to see the sport grow in the United States, mostly they’re talking about playing participation rates. Deep down, a lot of them don’t actually want soccer to grow too much as a spectator sport because they love being part of the in-crowd. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself if most native-born American soccer fans you know wouldn’t shit themselves if Trump voters traded NASCAR for MLS. The point being, a lot of the current, native-born American soccer fans get off on watching broadcasts with British announcers or American announcers who ape the Brits, and crap like that is exactly what’s holding soccer back as a spectator sport in the United States.
It’s a game, not a match. Cleats or shoes, not boots. A field, not a pitch. It’s scoreless or zero-zero, not nil-nil. A team evened or tied it up, not leveled things, which in this country is a phrase for carpenters. And I don’t want to hear any bullshit about, “Well that’s just the words they use.” You think they call them “boots” in Brazil? Of course not. They call them chuteiras. Which actually sounds more like cleats. In the United States, cowboys, go-go dancers, and pirates wear boots.
Why is this important for growing soccer as a spectator sport in the United States? Because spectator sports are cultural products, and language is humans’ central cultural product and medium. Spectator sports have other important elements such as economics and even politics. But spectator sports primarily function like music and movies and other forms of entertainment: they’re cultural expressions and receptions. Thus, if you want a form of entertainment to be popular in a society, then it needs to resonate with that society’s culture. And when that cultural product is being funneled through language, it needs to be through the audience’s language if you want mass popularity. If soccer comes across to most Americans as a foreign game because it is forever being described in foreign terms, they will be less likely to embrace it as a spectator sport than if they see and hear it as an American game. It’s one thing to enroll your 7 year old in a soccer rec league because you want them to runaround more than they will in baseball. It’s quite another thing for an adult to spend two and a half hours watching other adults play it on a Saturday afternoon. Just look at the numbers.
The biggest TV event in U.S. soccer history was the recent World Cup elimination game against Belgium, which drew about 42 million viewers. Of those 42 million Americans, 12 million watched a Spanish language broadcast, and 30 million watched in English on Fox. That’s impressive. It’s more than the 33 million who watched Game 5 of the NBA Finals a couple of weeks earlier. Even if we point out that all Americans can root for the U.S. team as opposed to mostly just New Yorkers and San Antonians rooting for the NBA’s Knicks and Spurs; and that the U.S.-Belgium game got a modest bump in interest after Donald Trump turned it into an international scandal; and that it’s only a third of the Americans who watch an NFL Super Bowl: 42 million is still a very big number. Bodes well, right? Kinda. The truth is, you don’t want to base a spectator sport’s health on the occasional big stage spectacle. That’s not how you build enduring fan bases. That’s how you end up like boxing or horse racing, two dying sports. When Belgium took firm control of that game, in countless bars around the United States, casual fans there for the spectacle didn’t get sad; they just became disinterested and turned their attention away from the game and to each other.
Instead of occasional spectacles, regular season league play that features regional teams is the prime indicator for a spectator sport’s true popularity and health. And there, the U.S. numbers for soccer border on the grim. A typical MLS game on TV gets only 120,000–300,000 people watching. Meanwhile, a typical WNBA game gets somewhere between 700,000–1.3 million TV viewers. An NBA game gets 2–4 million viewers. A typical Sunday afternoon NFL game gets 16–18 million viewers. A typical Sunday night NFL broadcast, just two regular teams playing a regular season football game, gets well over 20 million viewers. A compelling Sunday night NFL match up bumps the viewership to over 30 million.
So whereas the typical, low-end NFL broadcast brings in about 1/7 of a Super Bowl audience, a typical MLS game brings in somewhere between 1/140 and 1/350 of that U.S.-Belgium game.
Meanwhile, the average English Premier League TV broadcast in the United States actually does much better than the MLS. It draws over half a million viewers, which is still less than 1/80 of the U.S.-Belgium game, but 2–3x better than the typical MLS broadcast. However, that’s not a success story in the making; it’s a problem. I t represents a ceiling for growth, not a launching pad. It’s a sign of what I’m saying. Discounting the children of immigrants, most American-born soccer fans are kinda like the white, suburban, middle aged dad version of K-Pop fans: super loyal, super excited, and very niche. Yes, K-Pop is a huge story in the United States . . . from time to time. But we all know it will never as big as Taylor Swift or even Drake. Likewise, soccer’s a big story in the United States every four years, and bigger than ever right now because the United States is hosting the lion’s share of it. But it will never be the NFL, or even the NBA.
How do you close that gap? There’s a lot to it, of course. But one thing you can do is hire broadcasters and favor/promote writers, influencers, and podcasters who talk to Americans about soccer in American English and broadcasting styles, not British English and broadcasting styles. The United States has one of the world’s most established and saturated spectator sports cultures. Sports are deeply entrenched in American culture. The audience is rabid, but the competition is stiff and the expectations are largely set. Furthermore, Americans, on the whole, don’t do well with foreign accents, dialects, or frameworks. Framing soccer as a British sport is swimming upstream. There’s a reason why popular British TV shows like The Office and Ghosts are largely unknown in the United States, but then get remade into American versions and really take off (the list is actually quite long).
While mulling over some of these ideas recently, a friend suggested that I was falling into the same trap that he occasionally did: becoming that American who tells the rest of the world how to fix soccer. But I’m not suggesting the rest of the world do anything about soccer. Half the world already loves it as it’s presented to them. They’re good. Rather, I’m offering suggestions to U.S. media about how they can popularize soccer as a spectator sport here in the United States. And it’s not about my personal gripes or preferences, such as more violence and less whining on the field, and less granola and Kumbaya at bars and watch parties. Those are Me things, and they have little to do with growing soccer as a spectator sport in the United States. Rather, it’s about offering up media presentations of soccer that are more accessible to the average American, instead of asking Americans to adopt a foreign culture’s take on soccer. Which is not a Me thing. It’s an American thing. And it’s not that I don’t get it. I’ve been periodically watching soccer for over three decades. I really do understand the British terms, faux poetry, and stylized but empty platitudes that these Limey broadcasters, and the American broadcasters who follow their lead, spill onto microphones like gobs of orange marmalade upon dry scones. And I even much prefer the original Ricky Gervais-Stephen Merchant British production of The Office to the American version. But guess what? The American version of The Office was way more, you know, American. And it became one of this century’s most successful U.S. sitcoms.
Soccer isn’t from the United States like baseball, basketball, and football are. Nor is it ever going to get rammed down the United States’ throat like it was in Africa. And it’s probably never going to be mass imported like it was in Latin America. It’s just there, lurking around the edges of U.S. sports culture. And since spectator sports are cultural products, when they get imported, the local culture needs to change and adapt them in order to maximize reception. Otherwise they will remain niche foreign cultural products like K-Pop and Dr. Who.
You don’t believe me? Remember those 12 million American viewers who watched the U.S.-Belgium game in Spanish instead of English? You figure it’s all Latino immigrants and their families, right? Well mostly, sure. But there’s also a contingent of English-speaking Americans so turned off by the current English language broadcasts that they prefer to watch in Spanish, even though they don’t understand Spanish!
I love “real” Chinese food. I ate at a killer Szechuan place last Friday. House made wantons in chili oil. Incredible. But like most Americans, I also love Chinese-American cuisine you won’t really find in China. You know, an egg roll and a fortune cookie. In fact, I just cracked one open. It reads: “Great opportunities await if you can just stop mimicking those fucking Limeys.”
This essay first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.