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.)