A couple of interesting soccer articles from The Guardian (UK). This piece by Steven Wells opines that the United States Of America - having won a hot war against fascism and a cold war against communism - is being slowly but surely eaten alive from the inside by socialist soccer. Though it's worth noting that since the European Court of Justice's landmark Bosman ruling, European soccer resembles capitalism far more closely than any the US' "big four" sports or America's Major League Soccer.
Though I'm as big a soccerphile as anyone, I think Wells has his head in the clouds when he writes: America's homegrown sports, like the genetically unique fauna of some long-isolated island, have no natural defences against the soccer plague. And - like the Dodo, the Tasmanian Tiger and the Passenger Pigeon - baseball, basketball and gridiron are all doomed to extinction.
Soccer may eventually replace the NHL as the country's fourth sport, especially if the hockey league continues to shoot itself in the foot, head and every other body part. Though soccer will never eliminate basketball, baseball or American-style football, no matter how much soccer supporters may hope. And I'm not sure why they would want to hope.
Though it IS nice to read a piece in the British press about soccer in America that isn't completely condescending and doesn't make a single pointless and snide remark about the use of the word 'sawker.' The Guardian's footie pages seem a rare exception in that regard.
The evidence is everywhere; every suburb of every city in America is dotted with soccer pitches. In many communities gridiron has ceased to exist as a youth sport.
This is true, yet it underlines the fundamental paradox of soccer in this country. So many people play soccer but so few people watch soccer on TV. This conundrum has baffled Major League Soccer executives since the league was born in 1996. There are many theories about this but a few I subscribe to are:
a) Soccerphiles are so busy playing soccer themselves and/or ferrying their kids to games on weekends that they don't have time to sit in front of a television set. American kids playing soccer is highly organized and structured; kids spontaneously gathering to kick around, yet alone watch a game, is rare compared to other countries.
b) Soccer gets so little coverage in the mainstream sports media that you have to actively seek information on when/if games are going to broadcast and results. For many American fans, following soccer closely would be nearly impossible without the Internet. The kids I coach, I always try to tell them whenever the national team has a game or when MLS championship final is upcoming (this Sunday, 3:30 PM Eastern Time) because I'm probably the only way they'll hear about a match being broadcast.
c) Even of those fans who do watch the game on TV, many won't watch Major League Soccer. Many of them view it as crap soccer. With so much soccer on television (if you have digital cable or a satellite dish), some would rather watch the Mexican or Spanish or Italian leagues or the English Premiership than 'unskilled' Major League Soccer. Some dismiss this as silly, since the "crap" league provided a majority of players for the US national team that made to the quarterfinal of the most recent World Cup. But fair or not, the pre-conception remains.
Wells concludes: The inevitable anti-soccer backlash has been as savage as it has been futile. High-falutin' neo-cons intellectuals and knuckle-dragging internet boo-boys have combined to claim that soccer is inherently gay, feminine and communistic... The rest of the world has been worried for some time that America will try and change soccer. The truth is that soccer is changing America.
In other words, the soccer boom in America has a double bonus: pissing off both the Mexicans AND the neo-cons.
Then there's the warning that the European Champions League is killing soccer.
England's Premiership is one of the least open because the 'competitive imbalance' between the richest three - Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United - and their 17 rivals has become so acute on and off the pitch, say [European soccer's governing body] Uefa. Their views are backed up by research from a sporting think-tank, The Sports Nexus... in a conclusion sure to shock no one.
But the most absurd revelation was this: The Uefa president, Lennart Johansson, privately blames the Champions League's financial rewards for ruining domestic football. 'He feels that Uefa created this fantastic competition in 1992, but that it has now become a monster that has produced this unequal struggle between haves and have-nots in countries across Europe,' said a source who has discussed it with Johansson.
Originally, the Champions League comprised only the winners of Europe's domestic soccer leagues. Thus the name Champions League. However, in the last six or seven years, the competition has been bloated to include second-, third- and even fourth-place finishers in Europe's more prominent leagues.
Johansson's protests about the negative effects of a bloated Champions League might gain a more sympathetic ear except for the fact that Johansson presided over that very bloating.
4 comments:
Baseball and basketball going the way of the dodo or Tasmanian tiger due to a Soccer (or Football as we British-influenced folks call it)invasion? Doubt it. These sports seem to be engrained in the very fabric of American society.
But the development of a professional American league at par with Europe's will be a great thing. Hope it happens in the not-too-distant future.
"But the development of a professional American league at par with Europe's will be a great thing."
Definitely. But for the time being, MLS will be primarily a development league that feeds talented young players (mostly Americans) to the better European leagues. The present structure of MLS (strict regulations, salary cap, small budgets, single-entity so the clubs have no real autonomy) is an impediment to its growth as a league competitive with rival leagues but is good for stabilizing it financially so it doesn't go the way of that great Dodo Bird of American leagues, the North American Soccer League.
I wonder if our youth coaching is partly responsible for young players not becoming big fans of the game later in life. From pre-K through high school I was coached with one strategy: kick the ball as far downfield as possible and then run after it. We played 'dump and run' and we were always succesful until we would run into some team in the state tournament that would just soundly whip us. Why? Because they had been taught to think tactically, to control the ball and the pace of the game, to pass the ball and move without it.
The game seemed simple to the history teacher who doubled as our coach, but only because we never learned the complexities of the game. It took me a while to understand the beauty of the game as it should be played after that and to develop and appreciation for watching great soccer.
I see it more as a result of massive overcoaching at the rec and youth levels. Particularly by well-meaning parents who simply don't know much about the game (kick and chase is easy to coach and to understand, though ugly to watch). If you're barking a lot, then it makes a less knowledgable coach feel like he's doing something productive. Unfortunately, it teaches kids how to follow orders rather than think for themselves in a game that's fairly spontaneous.
As a coach, I make a conscious effort to bark out orders as little as possible, especially to attacking players, while the play's in motion. I let them make the mistake and THEN offer them advice (as privately as possible) after the fact. After they try it their way and see it doesn't work, they're more receptive to trying my way.
One of my biggest challenges as a coach is to getting my kids (I spend most of my time with 11-13 year olds) to be creative, to feel confident enough to take risks to make that great play. I emphasize especially to attacking players that if you're not screwing up sometimes, you're not trying hard enough. There's such a barrier from younger levels where risk taking was discouraged because it was seen as "selfish."
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