The Name of the Game

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by Hendrik Hertzberg

July 12, 2010
The New Yorker

Keywords
Soccer; World Cup; United States; Ghana; Football; Sports; F.A. (Football Association)

Do Americans hate football? Not regular football, of course. Not football as in first and ten, going long, late hits, special teams, pneumatic cheerleaders in abbreviated costumes, serial brain concussions—the game that every American loves, apart from a few, uh, soreheads. Not that one. The other one. The one whose basic principle of play is the kicking of a ball by a foot. The one that the rest of the world calls “football,” except when it’s called (for example) futbal, futball, fútbol, futebol, fotball, fótbolti, fu?ball, or (as in Finland) jalkapallo, which translates literally as “football.” That one.

The question arises now—as it has arisen periodically for eight decades—on account of the World Cup, the quadrennial global tournament of the sport that goes here by the name of soccer. “Soccer,” by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby’s nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers—a bit of upper-class twittery, as in “champers,” for champagne, or “preggers,” for enceinte. “Soccer” is rugger’s equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The “soc” part is short for “assoc,” which is short for “association,” as in “association football,” the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA—the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S. But where were we? Ah, yes. Do Americans hate it? Soccer, that is?

Here’s one plausible answer: we don’t. The non-haters include the nearly twenty million of us who stayed indoors on a balmy Saturday afternoon to watch Ghana join England, Slovenia, and Algeria on this year’s list of countries beaten or tied by the United States in the World Cup. We were disappointed—Ghana won, 2-1, sending our team home from South Africa. Still, 19.4 million, the number registered by the Nielsen ratings service, is a lot of people. It’s not just more people than had ever watched a soccer game on American television before. It’s also more people than, on average, watched last year’s World Series games, which had the advantage of being broadcast live in prime time. It’s millions more than watched the Kentucky Derby or the final round of the Masters golf tournament or the Daytona 500, the jewel in NASCAR’s crown. And we don’t just watch. We do. An estimated five million grownups play soccer in these United States on a regular basis. Kids are mad for it, especially little ones. More American children play it, informally and in organized leagues, than any other team sport.

Soccer may be an import, as is our entire nonaboriginal population, but it’s well on its way to becoming as American as pizza, tacos, and French fries. (And motherhood: Sarah Palin notwithstanding, “soccer moms”—a term introduced to the political world in 1996, by a Republican consultant—are the proverbial key demographic.) Of course, soccer has its challenges here, many of them owing to its relative newness in the arena of American commerce. The enthusiasm of toddlers and post-toddlers is all very well, but, if that were enough to do the trick, Nike would have a division devoted to dodgeball. Compared with its established rivals, big-time soccer is ill suited to televisual exploitation. The game’s continuous, almost uninterrupted flow of action denies it a steady supply of intervals for the advertising of beer and the fetching of same from the refrigerator. The expedient of selling space on the players’ bodies—plastering their uniforms with corporate logos from neck to navel—is less than fully satisfactory. Also, the soccer pitch is vaster than the gridiron or the diamond, and the choreography of the game demands the widest of angles. On TV, the players are tiny—a problem for those as yet unequipped with enormous high-def flat screens.

Do Americans hate soccer? Well, some of us dislike it immoderately—not so much the game itself as what it is taken to represent. This spring, anti-soccer grumbling on the political right spiked as sharply as the sale of those great big TVs. Back in 1986, Jack Kemp, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback turned Republican congressman, took the House floor to oppose a resolution supporting America’s (ultimately successful) bid to host the 1994 World Cup. Our football, he declared, embodies “democratic capitalism”; their football is “European socialist.” Kemp, though, was kidding; he was sending himself up. Today’s conservative soccer scolds are not so good-natured. Their complaints are variations on the theme of un-Americanness. “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much,” Glenn Beck, the Fox News star, proclaimed. (Also, “Barack Obama’s policies are the World Cup.”) What really bugs “silly leftist critics,” the Washington Times editorialized, is that “the most popular sports in America—football, baseball, and basketball—originated here in the Land of the Free.” At the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote, “Soccer is a socialist sport.” Also, “Soccer is collectivist.” Also, “Perhaps in the age of President Obama, soccer will finally catch on in America. But I suspect that socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.” And then there’s G. Gordon Liddy. Soccer, Liddy informed his radio listeners,

comes from Latin America, and first we have to get into this term, the Hispanics. That would indicate Spanish language, and yes, these people in Latin America speak Spanish. That is because conquistadores who came over from Spain—you know, tall Caucasians, not very many of them—conquered the Indians, and the Indians adopted the language of their conquerors. But what we call Hispanics now really are South American Indians. And this game, I think, originated with the South American Indians, and instead of a ball they used to use the head, the decapitated head, of an enemy warrior.

Liddy’s guest, a conservative “media critic” named Dan Gainor, responded cautiously (“soccer is such a basic game, you can probably trace its origins back a couple of different ways”), while allowing that “the whole Hispanic issue” is among the reasons “the left” is “pushing it in schools around the country.”

Do we hate soccer? That depends on who we think “we” are. One of the things that Franklin Foer’s charming book “How Soccer Explains the World” explains is how soccer, along with its globalizing, unifying effects, provides plenty of opportunities for expressions of nationalism, which need not be illiberal, and for tribalism, which almost always is. The soccerphobia of the right is tribalism masquerading as nationalism. One in four of those twenty million viewers of the U.S.-Ghana match was watching it on Univision, America’s leading Spanish-language network. The three others were—well, who knows. Liberals, probably, or worse. Enough. A yellow card is in order here, maybe a red one. Soccer may never be “America’s game” (though it’s already one of them), but America is game for soccer. We’re the Land of the Free, aren’t we? Can’t we be the land of the free kick, too?
　

Cover of THE NEW YORKER, July 12 & 19,2010