JONATHAN CHAIT JUNE 15, 2010
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I've been a long-time, tongue-in-cheek participant in the regular soccer Kulturkampf. But there seem to be a lot of people who take this issue deadly serious, and it's a little frightening. Max Bergmann at the Center for American Progress rounds up some of the unhinged conservative rhetoric about soccer. So let me say that, as a confirmed non-soccer fan, the prospect that America will one day become a soccer-loving nation does not strike me as dangerous in any way. It's a very healthy sport, and I've encouraged my kids to play it.
That said, the triumphalism of soccer enthusiasts is genuinely annoying. There's nothing wrong with having a minority taste. I don't think the fact that only a tiny portion of the American population reads TNR says anything bad about the value of TNR. This is a huge country with rooms for lots of different tastes. There are innumerable minority interests out there—handball players, model train enthusiasts, wine aficionados, and so on. The difference is that you don't hear model train enthusiasts brag constantly about how their pastime is sweeping the country.
Again, I don't really care if soccer becomes a major sport in the U.S. But it is not a major sport in the U.S., nor is it remotely close to becoming one. Bergmann cites two data points to suggest that soccer is a runaway cultural juggernaut. The first is that the World Cup has drawn higher television ratings. This is true. But keep in mind that the World Cup is a quadrennial event that creates massive international hype. Americans love international competition. When the Olympics comes on, we'll watch sports we'd otherwise never dream of following for the chance to cheer our country on against foreigners. U-S-A! U-S-A! Yet the U.S.-England match still drew less than any NBA Finals game. (Check SportsMediaWatch.) It drew less than NFL pregame shows, let alone actual NFL football. This is not a good showing.
The second data point is that millions of American kids play soccer. This is true. It has been true since the 1970s, which is when the claims that soccer is the sport of the future began. Soccer is a great sport for kids -- young kids don't have the hand-eye coordination to play baseball, basketball or football, but they have enough foot-eye coordination to play soccer. When I was a kid, my friends and I all played in soccer leagues for years. Then we got older and starting playing other sports. Even the kids who continued playing soccer mostly became fans of other sports. I realize that soccer can be played by skilled athletes at a high level. In this country, it is primarily a children's game.
The cultural backlash against soccer may get nutty at times, but soccer triumphalists bring it with with displays of smugness like this, from The Nation's Dave Zirin:
Among adults, the sport is also growing because people from Latin America, Africa and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautiful game to an increasingly multicultural United States. As sports journalist Simon Kuper wrote very adroitly in his book Soccer Against the Enemy, “When we say Americans don’t play soccer we are thinking of the big white people who live in the suburbs. Tens of millions of Hispanic Americans [and other nationalities] do play, and watch and read about soccer.” In other words, Beck rejects soccer because his idealized “real America”—in all its monochromatic glory—rejects it as well.
This sentiment actually mirrors the right-wing's efforts to divide the country into "real America" and the unrepresentative coastal elites. People who don't like soccer don't really count because they're white, fat and live in the suburbs. It also fails on its own terms, because of course African-Americans are also loyal to football and basketball. But attacking black people for being too fat and unsophisticated to appreciate soccer doesn't have the same P.C. zing, does it?
13 comments
Actually, when Glenn Beck rails against soccer on behalf of the "big white people who live in the suburbs", he's probably thinking of himself and his own family.
- wildboy
June 15, 2010 at 5:18pm
Hate to break it to you Jonathan, but your data on the NBA Finals is simply NOT TRUE: http://www.epltalk.com/england-usa-viewing-audience-beats-first-four-games-nba-finals/20914 You fail to include the 4+ million that watched on Univision. That number (and it is not entirely hispanic; there are plenty of soccer aficionados who go there for the World Cup because ESPN's pre-2010 WC crappiness turned them off. Not only did the game outdo games 1-4 of the NBA finals (impressive when you compare a prime time game to a Saturday afternoon one that started at 11:30 AM on the West Coast), it alone drew more viewers than every game of the 2010 Stanley Cup Final. And that was after the June 9 broadcast of the Stanley Cup Final on NBC was the most-watched NHL game in the United States in 36 years with 8.28 million viewers, and both teams were big media markets with popular followings (no Edmonton-Carolina or Tampa Bay-Calgary here). As for the NFL pregame show: The link you give points us to the pregame show before the NFC and AFC title games. Talk about selective sampling! If someone did that on economic policy, Chait, you'd crucify their ass and rightly so! The title games are the biggest games on each network all year. Last year they had good story lines (Brees/Favre) or a huge market (Jets/Manning) Obviously, those ratings are going to be their biggest numbers of the year. Look at an average NFL week, which is what you imply with the pregame: http://sportsmediawatch.blogspot.com/2009/11/weekend-overnight-ratings_10.html CBS pulls a 2.6. Fox pulls a 3.6. Even combined, those don't match even ABC's 7.3, much less a guestimated 9.6 you got when you added the Univision numbers. ABC's 7.3 was higher than any College Football game that weekend, including both LSU/Alabama and Ohio State/Penn State, each heated and anticipated matchups. The idea that the NFL Today beats this game is not just silly, it's deliberately false. We expect seriousness from you in your policy work, try not to lose the plot in your sports.
- Crock1701
June 15, 2010 at 5:20pm
Crock, Whether or not Chait flubbed the data [apparently it looks so], the larger point stands. Soccer simply is not a huge draw here in the US. And using outdated, prejudiced notions about who gives a fig about soccer here makes for one of the most foolish articles I have ever seen. Get back to me when a regular MLS game outdoes any regular-season game, attendance-wise or ratings-wise.
- rlgordonma
June 15, 2010 at 5:28pm
Thanks Mr. Chait -- this is a similar point to the one I was making here: http://www.tnr.com/blog/world-cup/75574/critique-the-right%E2%80%99s-war-soccer. I'll watch some World Cup soccer, just as I watched some biathlon and some bobsledding at the Winter Olympics earlier this year -- because watching countries go at it in ANYTHING on the international stage is fun.
- flynnb_az
June 15, 2010 at 6:12pm
Chait has children who play soccer, so he knows that the level of participation drops off the table when the children reach about age 10-11. And it drops off the table for other sports as well, including my sport, baseball. Anybody who spends time with youth sports knows that slow and overweight is the norm for kids when they reach that age. Sorry, but sometimes the truth hurts. Fast and agile kids become the accomplished players, whether baseball, soccer, or any other sport. And it doesn't matter what color they are or what sport they play. I coach the fast and agile boys, and I have great expectations for their future in sports. But my favorites, by far, are those with less natural gifts of speed and agility, who will make whatever commitment it takes to get better, for getting better is all any good coach wants for his players.
- rayward
June 15, 2010 at 6:38pm
Children playing sports or even just playing is a good thing, and completely separate from discussions of soccer's proper place in American culture. Part of the problem getting children playing is forcing them to do so in the context of organized team sports rather than just letting them run around. 30 minutes playing tag beats 30 minutes of typical U8 soccer, especially for the poor kids stuck in goal. Soccer's place in American culture is growing, but at the pace of a soccer score rather than a basketball score. As the ESPN presenters never tire of saying, soccer is a game of patience. Shame most American sports fans have acute ADD. And for all those hoping that the browning of the US population will elevate soccer in the US, the melting pot is more likely to see immigrants' children (well, boys) playing traditional American sports than playing nothing but soccer. Population must have something to do with this. There's got to be some reason China, India, the US and Indonesia aren't exactly soccer superpowers even though together they have over 40% of the world's population. Maybe soccer needs a relatively small population to catch on. Brazil's was a lot smaller at the time of the first world cup in 1930, by which time soccer had already become an established sport there. (BTW, the US took 3rd place in 1930.) Maybe it's the sport where small countries compete best. Nothing wrong with that, but it could explain why soccer isn't a widely shared passion in the US. [Just to add gas to the fire, are the Golf Channel's ratings higher than MLS games? How about NASCAR? Competitive bass fishing?]
- hrlngrv
June 15, 2010 at 8:39pm
As a committed soccer fan who has an active interest in seeing the sport grow, I find this entry to be pretty ironic. I don't see a lot soccer enthusiasts claiming that soccer is "sweeping the country" or has become as widely popular as the NFL. What one typically sees is a highly accurate observation that the sport is growing in popularity - even the quoted excerpt from the Zirin piece seems to be making this modest point (though I agree that the denigration of "big fat white people in the suburbs" is offensive and stupid). But while the strawman you're attacking hardly exists, I constantly see non-soccer enthusiasts tuning in once every four years (or at other periodic moments of peak interest, such as MLS' Beckham signing) to pound the drum about the how the sport really isn't that popular. It usually takes the form of bizarre proclamations like yours -- it's not on par with the NFL or NBA! As if that's enough to take an honest and subtle measure of the sport's growth. My attitude is the inverse of yours. I don't care if you don't like soccer; I just don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear your eleventy reasons for why you think it's boring, about how it isn't really that popular, etc. No other sport gets treated to this kind of constant stream of defensive criticism. It's quite annoying. I'm not a huge golf fan, but I don't go around the second weekend of every April telling golf fans how boring golf is.
- RerunStubs
June 15, 2010 at 8:52pm
rigordonma - MLS regular seasons games often outdraw NBA games in terms of attendance. Seattle averages about 36,000 per game. Toronto and LA average around 20,000. I suspect Philly and New York will finish the year around 19-20K as well. And using MLS as a proxy for soccer's popularity, as anyone with rudimentary knowledge of the sport's fanbase in this country could tell you, makes no sense. Once again, I don't understand why every four years, some people try so hard, with so little background knowledge or understanding, to convince everyone that soccer is not popular.
- RerunStubs
June 15, 2010 at 8:58pm
To piggyback on RerunStubs, for most of the team's existence DC United has outdrawn Washington's NBA and NHL franchises on a per-game basis. Jon Chait doesn't have to look very far to find evidence that soccer in America is doing just fine relative to other sports.
- rhubarbs
June 15, 2010 at 9:05pm
Leaving the cultural debate about soccer to one side, Jon, I think you've done the post a disservice by bolding the quote the way you did. It is tremendously valuable to point out that soccer fandom in the US is undervalued in the popular imagination because those doing the imagining lack the understanding of how multi-national the US has become. The *rest* of the link ("brought their love of the beautiful game") is highly obnoxious.
- wev22
June 15, 2010 at 9:09pm
wev22 - Jon not only ignores that point, but emphatically underscores it by relying on only the number of ABC viewers for his comparison to the NBA Finals ratings -- ignoring the 4.1 million Univision viewers.
- RerunStubs
June 15, 2010 at 10:09pm
I agree wholeheartedly with RerunStubs. As a soccer fan I could really care less how it ranks in popularity compared to other sports. What I DO want is for it to be popular enough to support a decent US league, a number of international matches locally each year, decent (cable or PPV) television coverage, and a few good bars by my house that get packed with knowledgeable fans for important games. I have that now. Hell, in just the last month or two Mexico sold out Soldier Field ( >60,000) and The Fire vs. AC Milan sold out Toyota Park ( >20,000). In many ways I don't want it to become more popular, I can easily get affordable tickets to great games that are packed with enthusiastic fans. If it becomes more popular I would have to pay more and fight to get tickets. I'm very happy with where US soccer is now.
- Attrill
June 16, 2010 at 12:02am
to piggy back everyones lament against rlgordonma, lets also not forget that our MLS is not the best in the world, the Euro leagues are. In China, for example, they have their own pro. basketball league, but the NBA is bigger there, and it would be silly to judge Basketballs popularity only on how their league got ratings wise. In Mexico I think the Premier League has more TV coverage than even the Mexican league has, and if you went by only the TV coverage of the Mexican league would conclude that soccer is not popular here, which, of course, is not true.
- blackton
June 16, 2010 at 12:44pm