Fish Meet Barrel

Much like Martin Luther King, Jr., I too have a dream. Only mine involves waking one day to find there isn't yet another blog post about why soccer isn't popular in the US or why the sport is doomed to fail here.

Yeah, well apparently dreams deferred end up at UF.

This piece went up at Top Ten Chicago Sports on Monday. And while it was obviously written by someone who knows a little bit about futbol, it is still relatively poorly argued.

First off, if your contention is that soccer is doomed to fail here in the US, you might want to establish that it is currently failing.

It's a data point of one, but the ratings for this season's Champions League final between United and Chelsea kind of suggest otherwise.

When the Spanish language broadcast is included, the match drew 950,000 homes and over 1.3 million viewers. And that is likely lowballing as the Neilsens don't account for mass viewing such as bars. Again, this is a data point of one, but I went to one bar to get a seat an hour before game time to watch and it was already SRO. I went to another up the street and got the last table. So by kickoff it was stand or look elsewhere. This for a match in the middle of a Wednesday workday. All of those people, they're not even in the number. Even without the Spanish language viewer boost, it marked the first time that a Champions League match topped the 1 million viewer mark.

A little more evidence? Canada and Brazil drew 47,000 fans over the weekend for a friendly... that was played in Seattle. If you are so geographically retarded as to not know that Seattle is neither in Brazil or Canada, then maybe stop reading now.

Tomorrow (Wednesday June 4, 2008), Mexico will play Argentina in San Diego. Can't get an attendance figure for a game that hasn't been played yet, but when I went to the Ticketmaster site to try to purchase 2 together, the only tickets left available were the ridiculously priced $300 premium seats. So, it's likely to be close to a capacity crowd. Again, San Diego, not in Mexico or Brazil.

So, just a couple of examples that suggest soccer is doing pretty okay in America.

Still, it's worth looking at the individual ten arguments supporting the basic thesis that might not even be true. We'll get to that, but first, indulge us a comment on the piece's intro.

The categorization of the "European Cup" as the "Winter Olympics of soccer" is simply wrong, and wrong in multiple ways. Okay, "multiple" is only two, but first it's not the "European Cup" it's the European Championships (or Euro if your nasty); second, the implication (or maybe the inference I'm making) that this is somehow a less exciting sibling to its World Cup brother is arguably wrong (I take it the analogy is World Cup: Euro::Summer Olympics:Winter Olympics). Many people—and count some of us UF'ers among them—consider the European Championships to be better than the World Cup. Why? No Asian, African, and CONCACAF filler.

Sure the African nations are getting better, but until they learn to defend they are not going to be making a cameo in the semis any time soon. The Asians? Just not athletic enough. And while the Americans were the only team to pull a point off eventual champions Italy in the last Cup, they needed an own-goal to do it. Mexico is delusional and our third place team is usually a lock for last place in its WC group.

Still, I'll indulge... (To see the full points to which I'm responding, again, the original blog post is here).

10 No big-name American stars.

So what? I was once in Chachapoyas Peru. It's fucking tiny. Didn't even have electricity 24-7 when I was there. I saw some kid who couldn't have been older than six with a Michael Jordan jersey on and once he pegged us as Americans he came running up to us pointing at his shirt and saying the name "Michael Jordan." Why? I don't know. Maybe the kid was a 'tard. But the biggest stars transcend nationality. Didn't matter that Michael Jordan wasn't Peruvian. Sure it might help soccer if Christiano Ronaldo was from Jersey. I might not want to punch his face so badly as a Manc in if he were scoring at a ridiculous clip for the USMNT but the color of his passport isn't hindering the sport here in America.


9 Politics

I'm not even sure what the author is getting at here. Is he talking about college soccer? College soccer is unwatchable. If he wants to make a point about poor player development in college, that I'll buy. But it's kind of hard to criticize this point when I can't make sense of it.


8 Few Big International Games

Let me go line by line here:

"US soccer has to qualify for the World Cup in a group that contains quite possibly the weakest international squads. (CONCACAF)"

It's not possibly the weakest. And it's not even close. Oceania is by far the worst. By far. They don't even get their own bid (that's why the Australians joined Asia). CONCACAF gets three. Admittedly, we're no Europe, but nobody else is. After Brazil and Argentina even South America (CONMEBOL) has a substantial drop off.

"Mexico is the only real opponent they face. Because they have racked up so many wins, the US has gone into the last two World Cups with very high rankings on the world’s list, (Top 15 in 2002, Top 10 in 2006) adding to the mockery when they are destroyed by the likes of the Czech and Ghana in the previous WC."

People who understand the game knew that the Americans were horribly overrated by FIFA. That was a flaw with the ranking system and it has since been changed. However, there is no shame in getting beaten by the Czechs or Ghana. The former were ranked in the top 5 entering the last World Cup (and ranking irregularities aside, with Rosicky, Nedved, Koller, Cech, the Czechs were an absolutely legit side). The US also got jobbed on a couple of calls in the Ghana match, and Claudio Reyna made the type of mistake that, when you make at that level, you pay for it. Ergo, we got eliminated.

"But with Mexico being the biggest rivalry, and America in general not having any problem what so ever with the country, it is difficult to truly make a rivalry out of the two. Soccer fans that hate the Mexican national team remind me of parents of U-10 teams that hate a particular area of Illinois because their son cannot beat the local team. It's so petty it sounds ridiculous."

"Whatsoever" is one word. And the US and Mexico rivalry is big and nasty and the teams hate each other. It's actually made for some pretty exciting matches. Yeah, they've been our bitch as of late, but they've got a ton of young talent (Gio Dos Santos, Nery Castillo, etc.) and this rivalry is only going to get better. And isn't some pettiness at the heart of all rivalries? That's what makes them, you know, rivals.

Anyway, what's the actual criticism here? Really. I think the author wants to say that we don't play that many meaningful international games. In about a 10-day span (starting last Wednesday) we're playing England, Spain, and Argentina. Hard to do better than that. It's also such a crowded fixture schedule year round that it's hard to get a lot of marquee games. Credit to Bob Bradley for putting together that trio ahead of WC qualifying.

7 The game is too slow

Again, says who? And the author seems to be equating scoring with pace. There is often little correlation between the two. Games can go box to box with plenty of action and still finish 1-1. Ugly, unwatchable games can finish 4-4. Did you watch the Champions League final? That was 120 minutes of soccer and it produced two goals. And it was riveting stuff. What's the obsession with scoring that people in this country seem to think soccer needs? Lots of scoring doesn't necessarily mean excitement, it usually means shitty defense. Need an American analog? The last Super Bowl, that incredibly exciting one between Giants and the Patriots that the NFL's official site says "will go down as one of the greatest ever played" (yes, I know, the official site's job is part hype), it finished 17-14, or the soccer equivalent of 2.5-2 (yeah, that reads "2.5"... not sure what the soccer equivalent of a field goal is).

6 MLS is a joke

It's not. It's only kind of one. It's not well-respected and justifiably so. It is a second rate league. But the quality of play has improved immensely over the years and, by our horribly unscientific own UF pool, it ranks as the 10th best league in the world (scan the archives for it). That's not too bad for a league that's not even 15 years old. And blaming Clark for England's first goal—and what that has to do with the quality of MLS, I'm not entirely sure—against the US last week is like blaming Mrs. Lincoln for picking the seats she did for Our American Cousin. Okay, that's not a great analogy, but we spent half the first half giving up free kicks around the box. It was the shit marking on the free kick that led to the Terry goal, not the free kick itself. Anyway, if your argument is: the MLS player gave up the goal to England, therefor MLS sucks, what's your argument for the almost all-MLS USMNT that made it to the quarters of the 2002 World Cup?

5 Too much structure

I'm not sure how structured practice stifles creativity. If you want to rail on young parents for being super-anal and putting their kids into organized activities that they might have no talent for (like soccer), I'll listen to that argument. Player development in the US sucks. Young parents are fucking annoying. But those two things combined aren't going to stop truly gifted players from getting noticed.

4 Athletes head to other sports.

See, if you had just written the last sentence of this section and left it at that, I would have been totally on board with you. But making such a crappy argument, with the rest of it, kind of undermines the larger point. Do you really think there are 50 people in this country right now who are shaking their Magic 8 Ball and asking it if they should go to England to try to hack it in League 2 or move to Atlanta to race in the Prestone Anti-Freeze Truck Series*? Plus I don't think my grandfather ever watched any baseball, so I'm not sure how that's even relevant.

(* I have no idea what the actual sponsor for the series is, nor do I care enough to look it up)


3. Most important moment?

"US soccer’s most defining moment was when Brandi Chastain ripped off her jersey after hitting the game-winning penalty kick in the 1999 Women’s World Cup final."

If that's not 100% your opinion, then maybe you could source it. I wouldn't put that on a list of Top 25 defining moments for soccer in the US. I'll pass on unpacking the sexist overtones in the rest of the argument.

2. Soccer’s a thinking game

Of all the points made here, I bet this is the one that most soccer fans in the US would agree with. But it's fucking elitist. Even though I also think Americans are dumb, it doesn't mean they can't comprehend good soccer. Look at the rest of the world, it's filled with fucking stupid people, and they can somehow understand the complexities of this game that escape us? Bullshit. The beauty of soccer is in its simplicity: kick the ball to the other goal, you can't use your hands. That's about it for rules. So really, is the game that nuanced that our country full of glorified 7-11 tellers can't grasp it? Sometimes, maybe. But not really.

1. Because we don't need it

Do we need any sports? Yes we have other options. And yes most of us would rather watch cars go round in circles (see, I agree, we are stupid). But the same economy that makes Miley Cyrus a billionaire can also support Wilco, Sonic Youth, and Tom Waits. Soccer might not ever be one of the big 3 or 4 sports in this country, but A) who ever suggested it had to? And b) that doesn't mean it can't still be wildly popular. If you look at nothing more than the population trends in America, you'd be stupid to think that soccer is doomed in this country.