Is Soccer Un-American? - Part 2

This is part 2 of this article. Part 1 can be read here.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a dramatic change in American soccer. It moved out of its almost exclusive home in ethnic communities and was adopted by suburban families across the country. Soccer became the sport of choice for many suburban parents, who gave the sport a unique character. In his book Soccer in a Football World, David Wangerin writes about the ideals that some suburban soccer messiahs brought to the game.

It would be an exaggeration to claim soccer for the counter-culture, yet the sport often found its most fertile soil among those with egalitarian leanings. In 1964 a Californian named Hans Stierle founded the American Youth Soccer Organisation, which treated the game more as a highly participative, fun activity than a competitive sport. Its ‘everybody plays’ motto contrasted sharply with the win-at-all-costs philosophy of other youth sports. Kids were guaranteed to appear in at least half of every AYSO match, and to avoid lopsided scores leagues spread their talent equally across the teams. Though many perceived this as patently un-American, others were inspired. Soon soccer organizations with similar philosophies emerged across the country, signing up children by the thousands. (149)

AYSO Soccer (photo: Christopher Michael Darrouzet-Nardi)

The boom in soccer’s popularity indicated that these ideals appealed to many parents. But the egalitarian nature imposed upon the game made it slightly unsavory to another group of Americans. The culture wars of the past few decades have pitted Americans with very different ideals against each other. In his book How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer claims that “[soccer] has become a small touchstone in this culture war” (246).On the side of the debate are traditionalists, those who Bill O’Reilly would refer to as “real Americans” (and Stephen Colbert would jokingly refer as the Colbert Nation). They, of course, play American sports like baseball, American football, and basketball. On the other side are the egalitarian-minded parents whose kids play soccer.

Franklin Foer writes that “[w]hen they adopted soccer, it gave the impression that they had turned their backs on the American pastime. This, naturally, produced even more disdain for them – and for their sport (239).”We Americans are traditionally known for our independent spirit. So the idea that soccer encouraged, even demanded, people to work together strikes some as contrary to our nature. Writing in Slate in 1998, David Plotz claimed that soccer was “vaguely un-American” due in part to its having “too much cooperation.”

Most notoriously, former New York Congressman (and later vice presidential candidate) Jack Kemp said on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1986, “I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist [sport].” Kemp, who, not coincidentally, was a one-time professional American football player, later (sort of) apologized for his remarks, writing on the conservative website Townhall: “in the interest of America and Kemp family harmony, (seven or eight of my 16 grandchildren have played, or are playing soccer), let me now say in print, I love soccer, but it’s still boring. Oops, there I go again.”

Jack Kemp (photo: Wikipedia)

This was not the first crude attempt to explain the virtues of sports relative to the life lessons they can teach. Mark Salisbury writes of a similar attempt nearly a century before Jack Kemp.

While football was portrayed as a manly, virile game representing all that was good about capitalist America, soccer was reintroduced as a return to the gentlemanly ideal of amateur sportsmanship. Football was often called “a moral agent” or “a training for life.” In a 1905 editorial in The Independent, the author proclaimed football to be the very “epitome of our commonwealth, the real national game, the symbol of our civilization.”

It may come as a surprise to those in other countries where soccer is the epitome of masculinity, but soccer in the US is viewed as being not very manly. Salisbury also writes that soccer was played among some American colleges between 1869 and 1875, but not at Harvard. That school, he writes, “refused to compete under the soccer rules, proclaimed the rugby rules more ‘manly’.”These types of views about soccer remain today. It doesn’t help that soccer and American football are often played in high schools during the same fall season, putting them in direct conflict with each other. The American football coach at my alma mater often used colorful language I won’

It reprint here to describe his feelings about soccer and those who chose to play it. Shock jock Jim Rome has made a living, in part, by questioning the manliness of soccer players.

The fact that soccer has become so popular among girls in the US gave our women’s national team a head start in international competition, but reinforced notions about the masculinity of the sport. How good a sport could soccer be, some wonder with different degrees of openness, if girls can also play it?

There are several other reasons people have used to support claims that soccer is, somehow, un-American. It’s too slow, it’s too low-scoring, there are not enough meaningful statistics, there aren’t good breaks for television advertisements. All may be true to a certain degree, but I won’t go into depth on them here.

The last reason I will suggest why soccer has been painted by some as un-American is simply that Americans are not the best at it. We Americans are not known for being modest (we insist on calling the champions of our baseball, American football, and basketball leagues “world champions” despite there being no international competition, unless you count the few Canadian teams allowed in). So how much fun can it be for us to watch a national team that is decent, but not great? Only our women’s team has won a World Cup (though even that was close to 10 years ago now), but that won’t convince anyone who already thinks soccer is a bit “girly.” I think it’s only a matter of time before the US becomes a world power in soccer (demographics and money will rule in the end, I believe), but will a World Cup victory convert any of the people who believe the sport is un-American? I doubt it.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 6:34 am and is filed under Ethnicity/Race, Europe, History, Immigration, Nationalism/Identity, North America, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.