US Soccer Not Slouching Anymore

Joan Didion’s Miami describes how the city’s Cuban population continued, in the Eighties, to be regarded as an exotic curiosity long after it had, in fact, become the city’s establishment, in control of its politics, its banks, its most desirable real estate. As I read Didion’s book recently, it occurred to me to wonder if the American sports world is not similarly failing to discern a truth about soccer.

All too many traditional American sports observers continue to subscribe to the comforting notion that the US is essentially hostile to soccer and has successfully contained it within a few reservations of sorts. But, operating nimbly beneath this hoary old misperception, soccer has been devouring territory.

This summer, after witnessing the fast, youthful US team’s stunning successes in the Confederations Cup in South Africa, and after I attended the Real Madrid-DC United friendly, I became convinced that soccer has truly arrived in the US.

How else explain the fact that America’s homegrown soccer talent is already capable, on any given day, of beating the best in the world? How else explain the fact that the MLS teams, with the exception of hapless Toronto, acquitted themselves so admirably this summer against visiting billionaire-superteams like Chelsea, Barcelona and Real Madrid? How else explain the fact that ESPN shelled out the millions it cost for the rights to broadcast the top leagues in Europe?

And, believe me, you would have found it all too easy to see soccer as the greatest new source of excitement in American sports had you turned out for the Real Madrid game in Washington – had you been one of the more than 72,000 who did show up that Sunday despite high prices and high temperatures to rock the Fedex stadium as it may never have been rocked before.

Sitting in second tier of that stadium, amid a colossal mass of spectators that represented not our immigrant ghettoes but the unquestionably cosmopolitan demographic face of post-Bush America, I had to conclude that soccer is farther along towards establishing itself as a major American sport than some observers would like to think. (And the massive roar that went up each time Cristiano Ronaldo gained possession of the ball confirmed that Beckham is no longer the only soccer superstar known to American spectators. Indeed, fully half the soccer shirts worn by fans bore CR’s name.)

Indeed, I can foresee a time soon when no American city that wishes to see itself as truly a city – meaning, one known throughout the world – can afford to be without a quality soccer team and a dedicated soccer stadium.

The Meaning of All Those Goal Fests

Crushing scores have become strangely ubiquitous in top-tier soccer lately. Manchester United, which last year embarrassed Roma in the Champions League with such a score, this year got a taste of the same horrible medicine at the hands of Liverpool, which also dispensed it to Real Madrid – then nearly succumbed to the same treatment against Chelsea. Bayern Munchen gave my favorite Portuguese team, Sporting, the drubbings of its life in both legs of their recent Champions League encounter – only to suffer much the same fate at the hands of Barcelona. Porto was humiliated against Arsenal, only to come back and outplay Arsenal’s proven better, Manchester United. To fans of the winning team, of course, such inflated scores are the stuff of fantasy. Yet these are indeed inflated scores, more fantastic than real. They make the losing team look like utter crap, forever vanquished, and the winners like invincible supermen who will rule forever. If soccer were truly war, would not such routs mean the absolute conquest of a nation, even annihilation of a race? In fact, though, Roma is neither crap nor vanquished, nor is Sporting Lisbon in danger of vanishing or even of just ceasing to be a top European team. And that Bayern and Manchester United and Liverpool are not the godly teams that their goal fests would make them out to be was recently demonstrated by the humbling results they obtained against Barcelona, Porto and Chelsea, respectively. Scoring routs, then, may be spectacles especially pleasing to fair-weather fans mainly interested in seeing their team win, by the more crushing a margin the better. But the game’s true aficionados know such scores between well-matched teams are fairly meaningless, no more than aberrations that do not truly reflect the history, character, quality or future performance of either team and arise only in weirdly dysfunctional matches in which one team acts as if it had somehow been crippled by a sucker punch. After all, even in war, easy routs are not to be trusted, usually meaning far less than they at first appear to: consider what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Guardian Snubs Ronaldo

For a couple of years I have been closely following the career of my countryman, Cristiano Ronaldo, not only because I regard him as the most astonishing, aesthetically satisfying athlete I have ever had occasion to study but because of the drama of his emerging into greatness before a foreign and xenophobic soccer public that could not have been more reluctant to recognize it and that continues to find excuses to deny or belittle it. It is a drama which his finally winning the Fifa World Player of the Year award has obviously not brought to a close. For example, all day Tuesday I found not a whisper of his triumph ont he Web site of Manchester United’s hometown newspaper, The Guardian. Had I simply come too late – had the story already been taken down? I searched their archives. Nothing. Had the entire British press boycotted the story? I turned to the London Telegraph’s Web site and found that it had set up an entire category of CR stories to link to, including of course the latest on the award. So what could explain the Guardian’s snub?

The Heat of Color

The strip of the soccer team I grew up supporting – the Sporting Clube de Portugal, also known as Sporting Lisbon, with its horizontally green and white striped shirt, black shorts, and green and white striped socks – has never ceased to give me a thrill that I can be deceived into thinking derives from the colors themselves, independently of what it is I associate them with. It is difficult to imagine a different set of colors provoking a similar reaction in another team’s fans, yet I know they do. For such is the power of color, of colorful banners, flags, uniforms, to arouse passionate identification – a power so great as to seem independent of the power of what is represented by the colors. It is as if it were the colors that were lending appeal to what they represent, rather than the other way around. And that may at least partly be the case: it seems to me that poorly colored teams do tend to be lackluster, as nations with uninspired flags tend to inspire little patriotism. Whence this power of color to promote and indeed to intensify or even replace identification with a group? I imagine it has to do with the fact that, in nature, it is color that primarily enables us to group things. First there is light, which renders things visible; then form, which lets us distinguish one thing from another and classify it; then color, which is so effective at letting us group things that we tend to think of their colors as their primary attributes, as if they were their colors. In other words, color is naturally an attribute of the group, of the team, and sports have simply, and wisely, copied nature. But not all sports – not, say, baseball, which uses club colors sparingly, with uniforms predominantly white or gray, and so cannot hope to arouse the passion that color-reliant sports like soccer do. And the relatively recent introduction of color uniforms into cricket may not only have marked but perhaps caused a heating up of a traditionally very cool sport.

The Soccer Field: A Classic

If sports fields were to be considered aesthetically, I would like to think that none would be found so compelling, so perfected, so beautifully classical in design as the soccer field. My enthusiasm for the sport itself has ebbed and flowed through the years, but the lines of a soccer field have never ceased to gladden my eye. The sight of soccer field, even if only the representation of one in a board game, always arouses at least a smidgen of joy that cannot, I think, be explained entirely by its power to nostalgically evoke the role that soccer has played in my own life. And little has turned me off U.S. soccer leagues as much as their willingness to hold games on American football fields. It seems to speak of a shallow psychological connection to the sport, a lack of true passion for it, a dilettantish impurity of interest. What a travesty to see a soccer field’s beautiful lines temporarily superimposed on, made subservient to, indeed marred by, the crude underlying gridiron, which consists entirely of horizontal stripes, like some basic measuring instrument. And, in my boyhood, did my sense of soccer’s utter superiority to rugby not have much to do with how bare and undeveloped, how barbaric even, the rugby field seemed. It is a field that truly requires only touch lines. Even the goalposts in rugby appear superfluous, more decorative than functional, an attempt to disguise rugby’s brutal simplicity, hence the low, afterthought-like value attached to getting the ball between those uprights. In my eyes, the simplicity of the rugby field made it more of a ring or arena for displays of brute force and brute instincts than a stage for a complex, strategic, tradition-rich team sport and the many and difficult skills required to play it. The empty soccer field, on the other hand, does indeed affect me as a stage that has been so thoroughly set as to make it seem that the play is already underway. That elegant, sparse, absolutely symmetrical complexity of circles, half circles and quarter circles playing off boxes within boxes already seem to be having a game amongst themselves and certainly imply much that could happen on the field.

The Exercise of Watching Soccer

It is common knowledge that the most rabid sports fans could not look less like the athletes they revere, being woefully out of shape; but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these fans are themselves bewildered by the paradox. Many were once jocks and don’t truly feel as if they have ever ceased being athletic: for it may have been almost without noticing it that they passed from real to vicarious exercise, from playing the game themselves to allowing others to do it for them. Why without noticing it? Because watching soccer or any other field sport can serve us as a suprisingly effective substitute for seizing the day ourselves. Our yen to be outdoors gamboling, exercising, competing, earning the peculiar glory of the arena, can be satisfied by staying indoors to watch a game, or, better yet, by being in the stands at a game. On days that beckon me outdoors I almost alway wonder, especially if a soccer season or tournament is underway, if instead I might not find a good game on TV. And it is, I find, on such appealing days – and not, say, in a bar at night – that a soccer match is best watched, that I truly find myself catching the spirit of the occasion. (In light of this, it should puzzle me that Monday Night Football in the US was ever a success, but pro American football is so laden with lurid artifice and showmanship that, like all other showbiz, it properly belongs to the night.)

Supporters Bought and Sold

In the Premiership and elsewhere, professional football clubs have for the most part ceased to be clubs; they are businesses, there to make a profit, and to be bought and sold. And what is an investor mainly buying when he buys a club? Not the players, whom he will be trading for others as opportunities arise, but the club’s mass of supporters, who naively still support the club as though it were still a genuine club – their club. In fact, it is the supporters (read: brand-loyal customers) who belong to the club, not the club to them.

Why Soccer Can’t Heal Nations

The five-day 1969 conflict between El Salvador and Honduras indelibly linked the words war and soccer (or football). But there are those who claim that it is in considerable part due to soccer – to the way in which it satisfies nationalistic passions without bloodshed – that Western Europe owes the peace that has lasted since the Second World War. It certainly is pretty to think so – as pretty as it was to think that the Iraqi team’s success in the Asia cup last year, celebrated euphorically by Iraqis of all persuasions,  would have helped to unite and pacify that nation. Alas, more carnage soon followed. And at this Euro 2008, it was pretty to read that even the Basques were supporting the Spanish team; but it’s doubtful that ETA separatists will soon lay down their arms as a result. And it was pretty to think that the Turkish team’s amazing, agonizing feats would inspire their nation and heal its East-West divisions. Alas, a week or so later, former generals who had been critical of the Islam-leaning government were being arrested. As much as we would like to think that sports are not pure entertainment, that they do have transcendent value, evidence contradicts it, showing us that the emotions released by a sporting event, even one as seemingly earthshaking as an international soccer final, have a very short shelf life and usually no lasting repercussions in society.

English Fans’ Euro 2008 Alternatives Expose Racism

Another English writer has remarked on how much more enjoyable Euro 2008 – and soccer as a whole – is when you are not cheering on your own nation’s team, when you can be more objective about the tournament and the sport. This time it is no mere journalist but, surprisingly, the novelist A. S. Byatt. “I wondered whether Euro 2008 would be exciting or gripping with no national team to support,” she writes in The Guardian. ”It has, in fact, been infinitely more pleasurable, more varied, and more interesting. This has caused me to think about the emotions that go into ’supporting’ a team. … But when you look closely at ’supporting’ it is a weird emotion and bears only a tangential relation to admiration of skills and courage in players.”

But Byatt, when she notes that “I myself tend instinctively to substitute northern European teams if there is no English interest,” also brings up an issue that she does not get around to addressing. Perhaps it simply slipped her mind, or the editors snipped it. But I’m surprised that no one else has addressed or even simply made note of how, in the many columns and press contests devoted to whom the English fan should support in lieu of England, the choices offered or suggested were usually race-based. Rarely was a southern European or even Slavic country chosen or suggested, as if it were presumed natural that the English fan could see his way clear to ”identifying with” only those countries that are racially closest to his own – Holland, of course, seeming to come closest to the ideal choice.

The Soccer Wars

No sport should arouse the passion that national-side soccer football does, in competitions like the Euro and the World Cup. The red-mist fervor blinds you to the sport itself; the pleasures you derive from watching it become less proper to a sport than to a bloody spectacle, to the wars that such competitions in effect stand for and perhaps have helped to avoid: terror, panic, orgiastic euphoria, bloodthirstiness, suicidal despondence. Watching a game in which much is at stake for my nation is more ordeal than fun, I have found: though normally an admirer of the embellishment, the display of flair, and clean play, I suddenly become a Germanic ogre of anxious pragmatism, intolerant of anything that is not directly aimed at triumphing and willing to condone the dirtiest tactics if they will ensure victory. So I am with with those English sports journalists who, like Simon Hattenstone in the Manchester Guardian today, have written about how much England’s no-show has enabled them to enjoy Euro 2008. Us soccer fans could learn from the fans of American sports, who allow a dash of irony to keep them well this side of hysteria and so do not let a defeat of their team ruin their lives too much.