Opinion

Why don't Americans like soccer?

By Douglas Lummis

On the Armed Forces Radio there is a sports talk show that comes on every afternoon. I sometimes listen to it, not because it's interesting, but because it's on just when I'm cooking dinner, and it's diverting to hear some "English noise."

The two young broadcasters are incredibly knowledgeable about certain sports: American football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, golf and tennis. They know the names of the players, their statistics, their histories, their strengths and weaknesses. And the people who call in to the program are also impressively knowledgeable.

But they almost never talk about soccer. Even after the World Cup had begun, they were still talking about the NBA playoffs, which had finished some weeks before.

But one day when I turned the program on, they were talking about soccer. The question they were discussing was, "Why is it that soccer isn't interesting?" Most of the listeners who called in voiced the opinion that the rules of soccer should be changed so that more points are scored.

This is a bit arrogant, to say the least. Soccer is surely the most popular sport in the world, and soccer fans are not going to agree to changing the rules to make the game more interesting in the United States.

But the interesting question is, why are certain sports that are popular in one country, boring in another? I remember reading during the Cold War that two U.S. baseball teams played some exhibition games in Russia. The Russian spectators fell asleep, or got into conversations, or went home before the game was over. Too slow, was the general conclusion.

It's a mystery. Americans don't like soccer because there's not enough scoring is one theory. But there is also very little scoring in ice hockey, which is pretty popular in the United States. (And, in fact, ice hockey resembles soccer so closely that you could call it soccer on ice.)

Another theory is that Americans don't like soccer because they are not good at it. Soccer is one of the few sports in which the United States is regularly beaten, not only by Europeans but also by teams from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

But do Americans dislike soccer because they lose at it, or do they lose at it because they dislike it? If American kids loved to play soccer and played it all the time, America would surely produce good soccer teams. But even this is off the mark: the U.S. soccer team did pretty well in this year's World Cup, though I doubt if many Americans know that.

Another theory is that the trouble with soccer is that it does not have frequent pauses for commercial breaks. Football, baseball and basketball — the three great American television sports — have many pauses, which can be used for commercials. Soccer has very few pauses, which is why it is one of the most strenuous of all sports, and which is why commercial TV stations don't like it.

This is an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's the only reason. If any readers have a better explanation, please let me know.

Shukan ST: July 28, 2002

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