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 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.