“Soccer: Why It Can't Make the Big
Time in the U.S.A.”
by Dewey Cheatham
Soccer - or football (or foosball
or futbol), as it is called by the rest of the world outside the United States -
is surely the most popular sport in the world. Every four years, the world
championship of soccer, the World Cup, is watched by literally billions all over
the world, beating out the United States professional football's Superbowl by
far. It is estimated that 1.7 billion television viewers watched the World Cup
final between France and Brazil in July of 1998. And it is also a genuine world
championship, involving teams from 32 countries in the final rounds, unlike the
much more parochial and misnamed World Series in American baseball (that doesn't
even involve Japan or Cuba, two baseball hotbeds). But although soccer has
become an important sport in the American sports scene, it will never make
inroads into the hearts and markets of American sports the way that football,
basketball, hockey, baseball, and even tennis and golf have done. There are many
reasons for this.
Recently the New England
Revolution beat the Tampa Bay Mutiny in a game played during a horrid rainstorm.
Nearly 5000 fans showed up, which shows that soccer is, indeed, popular in the
United States. However, the story of the game was buried near the back of the
newspaper's sports section, and there was certainly no television coverage. In
fact, the biggest reason for soccer's failure as a mass appeal sport in the
United States is that it doesn't conform easily to the demands of television.
Basketball succeeds enormously in America because it regularly schedules what it
calls "television time-outs" as well as the time-outs that the teams themselves
call to re-group, not to mention half-times and, on the professional level,
quarter breaks. Those time-outs in the action are ideally made for television
commercials. And television coverage is the lifeblood of American sports.
College basketball lives for a game scheduled on CBS or ESPN (highly recruited
high school players are more likely to go to a team that regularly gets national
television exposure), and we could even say that television coverage has
dictated the pace and feel of American football. Anyone who has attended a live
football game knows how commercial time-outs slow the game and sometimes, at its
most exciting moments, disrupt the flow of events. There is no serious
objection, however, because without television, football knows that it simply
wouldn't remain in the homes and hearts of Americans. Also, without those
advertising dollars, the teams couldn't afford the sky-high salaries of their
high-priced superstars.
Soccer, on the other hand, except
for its half-time break, has no time-outs; except for half-time, it is constant
run, run, run, run, back and forth, back and forth, relentlessly, with only a
few seconds of relaxation when a goal is scored, and that can happen seldom,
sometimes never. The best that commercial television coverage can hope for is an
injury time-out, and in soccer that happens only with decapitation or
disembowelment.
Second, Americans love their
violence, and soccer doesn't deliver on this score the way that American
football and hockey do. There are brief moments, spurts of violence, yes, but
fans can't expect the full-time menu of bone-crushing carnage that American
football and hockey can deliver minute after minute, game after game. In soccer,
players are actually singled out and warned - shamed, with embarrassingly silly
"yellow cards," for acts of violence and duplicity that would be smiled at in
most American sports other than tennis and golf.
Third, it is just too difficult to
score in soccer. America loves its football games with scores like 49 to 35 and
a professional basketball game with scores below 100 is regarded as a defensive
bore. In soccer, on the other hand, scores like 2 to 1, even 1 to 0, are
commonplace and apparently desirable; games scoreless at the end of regulation
time happen all the time. (In the 515 games played in the final phase in the
history of the World Cup games through 1994, only 1584 goals have been scored.
That's three a game!) And if there is no resolution at the end of overtime, the
teams resort to a shoot-out that has more to do with luck than with real soccer
skills. Worse yet, it is possible for a team to dominate in terms of sheer
talent and "shots-on-goal" and still lose the game by virtue of a momentary
lapse in defensive attention, a stroke of bad luck, and the opponent's
break-away goal. Things like that can happen, too, in baseball, but the problem
somehow evens out over baseball's very long season of daily games. In soccer, it
just isn't fair. Soccer authorities should consider making the goal smaller and
doing away with the goalie to make scoring easier. And the business of starting
over after each goal, in the middle of the field, has to be reconsidered. It's
too much like the center-jump after each goal in the basketball game of
yesteryear.
It seems unlikely that Americans
will ever fully comprehend or appreciate a sport in which players are not
allowed to use their arms and hands. Although the footwork of soccer players is
a magnificent skill to behold, most American fans are perplexed by
straitjacketed soccer players' inability and unwillingness to "pick up the darn
ball and run with it!" The inability to use substitutes (unless the player to be
substituted for is lying dead or maimed on the field of play) is also
bewildering to Americans, who glorify the "sixth man" in basketball and a
baseball game in which virtually the entire roster (including an otherwise
unemployable old man called "the designated hitter") is deployed on the field at
one time or another.
Finally, the field in soccer is
enormous. Considerably larger than the American football field, the soccer field
could contain at least a dozen basketball courts. Americans like their action
condensed, in a small field of vision - ten enormous sweaty people bouncing off
one another and moving rapidly through a space the size of a medium-sized
bedroom, twenty-two even larger people in bulky uniforms converging on a small,
oddly shaped ball. In soccer, on the other hand, there is a premium on
"spreading out," not infringing upon the force field occupied by a team-mate, so
that fancy foot-passing is possible. This spreading out across the vast meadow
of the soccer playing field does not lend itself, again, to close
get-down-and-dirty television scrutiny.
Soccer is a great sport and it
certainly deserves the increased attention and popularity it is getting on all
levels. But - primarily, again, because it does not lend itself to television -
it will never make it big in the United States the way these other sports have,
not until it changes some of its fundamental strategies.