In my experience, we Europeans tend not to think of soccer (yes, football) as particularly left-wing or democratic, or egalitarian, or non-competitive, but with the World Cup just starting, a few U.S. commentators have been arguing in full force for exactly that.
Here’s Gary Schmitt explaining that Americans (read: U.S. Americans) only enjoy sports in which the best team wins. Latin Americans and Europeans are different of course.
For sure, there may be a number of reasons that is the case but my suspicion is that the so-called “beautiful game” is not so beautiful to American sensibilities. We like, as good small “d” democrats, our underdogs for sure but we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert. And, in sports, that means excellence should prevail. Of course, the fact that is often not the case when it comes to soccer may be precisely the reason the sport is so popular in the countries of Latin America and Europe.
Oh, Gary’s evidence that soccer is not about the best team winning: The U.S. beating Spain last year in the Confederations Cup.
Here’s Matthew Philbin similarly arguing that soccer doesn’t require skill, agility and so on, unlike American sports.
And to conservatives, the troubling aspects of the game aren’t confined to the pros. Soccer requires comparatively little from children but the ability to run after the ball – the risk of failure for anyone except maybe the goal keeper is zero. Even the strong chance that any given game will end in a tie makes it attractive for parents reluctant to impart life’s difficult lessons to young kids.
It must baffle soccer partisans that Americans haven’t taken to their game. After all, the United States is a sports-obsessed nation.
Americans look to sports to teach work ethic, teamwork and responsibility, in addition to the physical and mental skills necessary for competition. They love underdogs and “Cinderella stories” and “Evil Empires” and “bums,” “Hogs” and “No-Name Defenses.”
And Americans like to think their sports reflect something about them. Michael Shackelford of Bleacher Report praised football because it, “requires a combination of power and agility, brute strength, and grace … In other words, it requires American characteristics in order to succeed.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
(Links via Gawker.)
“And Americans like to think their sports reflect something about them. ”
This is why so many baseball players can get away with being overweight.
@Jason
Thanks for bringing this up! The thought never crossed my mind.
*embarrassed*
Americans don’t like sports off which they can’t make immediate profit. All you need is a ball to play soccer, where is the market potential in that!?!? Fun should have to cost something right?
Americans also lead the world in short attention spans. They can’t find the virtue in a 0-0 tie. Ice hockey suffers the same problem.
@Abe
The attention span hypothesis is a little weird in relation to baseball, isn’t it? How many hours are those games again?
“we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert”
Yes, I bet you expect them to go to a desert. Instead, you probably want them to get dessert.
@Michael
The article says “desert”, so perhaps it’s a thinly veiled geopolitical commentary?
I don’t think the issue with 0-0 ties is attention span, but rather the lack of visible progress.
And as for the amount of equipment needed: pro soccer requires more than just a ball, like pro (American) football. You can get away with just a ball if you’re playing in your back yard, but the same is true of football too.
Baseball games are a whisp of time compared with Test Match cricket, with breaks for meals and if the weather gets bad and which can last up to five days but still end in a draw. Now that’s commitment.
an old roommate of mine used to make the point that football (soccer) is all about powerlessness: “i can’t use my hands!” “help me, referee, to redress this injury done to me!” of course, powerlessness is not of interest to americans.
although i don’t think of soccer as the “beautiful sport,” (sorry, that is hockey, especially after the blackhawks’ victory–lack of friction makes hockey sublime!) my roommate didn’t grasp that constraints are ultimately what make sports/games interesting.
We were talking about this yesterday. Soccer is very popular as a sport people play, but it’s not so popular as a sport to watch. It is not a media event in the U.S. as it is in Europe. Why? Because it does not provide as much advertising income as other sports. There’s only one break, and many networks may not be able to afford commercial-free advertising. It’s not in their own interest to promote a sport that, unlike baseball, basketball or American football, does not allow extra commercial bombarding on top of the logo overlays and stupid sponsored mini-events.
And saying that soccer is “left-wing” is not knowing nothing about the absurd paychecks of players. There are few sports where capitalism thrives more.
@Clara
Another explanation I heard was that American Football and Soccer/Association Football share the same folk game roots but became codified at the same time, only on different continents and with different rules.
If by some chance “American Football” had had soccer rules instead, perhaps the game would simply have been split into smaller periods once television advertising appeared?
@Jesse
I am getting better at watching baseball, but it still seems to me that nothing is fundamentally happening.
I like the attention span hypothesis. None of the major American sports have continuous play, like soccer does, so even though the games take forever in real time, the game time action evolves in 1-30 second “frames of interest”.
@Claus On the other hand, baseball games are *very* long, and Hockey is fairly popular too in the U.S..
Logically, baseball should not be a U.S. sport then.
I think that a sport is also popular because it is already popular. A sport (or a game) becomes more meaningful over time as it gains historical events that new games refer to and can be discussed against. In other words, I think the soccer vs. football distribution at least partially random and dependent on various minor decisions made in 19th century England.
I guess that was just an automatic comment to my post on Tecnozilla (http://tecnozilla.info/blog/jesper-juul-a-referencia-antinarrativa-no-game-design-resenha/#comments), but I felt I should say that I do love your article on GameStudies. Unfortunately, I never found a definition/description of “game” that place the player on position to actually change something. The player is usually one at least one level below the “game designer”, being manipulated by the designer as any other character of the game.
If that is in fact the only possible way to define the interactions that create gameplay, then (bad for us, literary critics) I will have to learn everithing from the beginning again.
By the way, thank you for the great work!
First of all ties are the worst possible outcome for a sport. It has nothing to do with attention span. We like to have a clear cut winner and loser after an hour or more of competition; it’s about winning. As Americans we are the world super power, so of course winning is important. If we had mediocre economic and military strength then maybe we would enjoy the idea that ties are a part of the game.
As for the making instant profit argument is concerned, what about basketball? A ball and two nets, the same as soccer and we dominate.
Also, if the USA were to put our best athletes into “futbol”we would dominate hands down. Our soccer team is made up of guys that are too slow for football, too short for basketball, and too stupid for baseball.
As far as pitcheres are concerned, ones weight has little bearing on his ability to throw a 90mph plus fast ball or breaking ball.
And besides soccer isn’t a sport, it’s a recess activity like monkey bars or duck, duck goose.
@Maurício Thanks for stopping by. My game definition does name player effort as a central component of games.
@Soccer
I assume you are trolling, but your comment is hilarious either way!
No, thank you, I thought I already knew your definition, but I will read it more carefully.
What I am trying to understand is the role of the player as “interpreter”, maybe, of the rules. Meaning… in Literature, we assume a “narratee” (is that the english word?) BECAUSE there is a narrator. And, in Literature, the narratee is not the reader.
This may probably be a basic problem for you, but I still do not know how this relationship works within (on? in?) games – if it exists, or why it shoud not exist.
@Mauricio
Maybe what you’re looking for is something like Bernard Suits’ 2×2 chart of ludic attitudes (from his book on game philosophy, “The Grasshopper”, which divides things up by whether the player is obeying the designer’s rules and whether they’re seeking the designer’s goals. It goes something like this:
Player: Obey/Seek. The standard model.
Cheater: Break/Seek. A straightforward attitude all are familiar with. The player is breaking the rules, but by seeking the goal (and presumably attempting to hide their cheating from other players in order to do so,) they are in a larger sense “obeying” the designer.
Trifler: Obey/Diverge. This term has always struck me as overly pejorative, and I think in this day and age the more value-neutral term “Toyer” would be much more appropriate. A trifler obeys the rules of the system, but treats it more like a toy than a game—in Scrabble, for instance, maybe they tend to look more for humorous juxtapositions of words than making the tactically optimal move. Most player creativity, from self-imposed speed run goals to “keepin’ it close” against a easily-discouraged nephew to pretty much anything you can do in a Will Wright game would fall in this category.
Spoilsport: Break/Diverge. A Spoilsport is simply someone who actively refuses to recognize the “magic circle” of the game. For instance, if your opponent in chess puts you in checkmate, and your response is to pick up your bishops, jam them up through their eye sockets, and declare victory over their corpse, odds are you are a spoilsport. The distinction between being a cheater and a spoilsport is roughly analogous to that Harry Frankfurt made between lying and bullshit: the liar knows what the truth is and is intentionally manipulating it to their ends, whereas the bullshitter is so contemptuous of truth that they may well even be telling it without knowing it, on the “stopped clock is right twice a day” principle.
Obviously, these are all just fuzzy categories, and you can’t study orchids with a bulldozer etc. etc. But maybe it’ll give you a framework from which to start. I’m interested in this soccer debate and will try to put some thoughts together about it later today, once I actually wake up.
@Jesper He must be trolling, as Duck Duck Goose is obviously a sport under any reasonable definition.
Many thanks! Huge help.
Sorry if I pollute the article with off topic comments… I promise I only bother you again after I dig into this references ;)
By the way, “in topic”, as a Brazilian, I must say it is really interesting for me that soccer did not yet blossom in US. Specially, I find odd that soccer is a “minor” sport, I mean, soccer is what you teach your kids before they are old enough to play Football, right?
I think I agree with the “lack of visible progress” hypothesis. But because US sports are designed to be broadcast (radio, then tv). Soccer is not good for that. Even the rules of Volley changed during the 90’s and 00’s to allow better TV airing (faster points, shorter sets). That is why baseball can be so long, because the bases are “conquered” step by step, the same with the yards of football (as steps on a ladder).
I do not know how this “lack of visible progress” would apply to hockey. But my guess is that people like hockey as a “contact” sport, not goal driven.
Different sets of rules were tested inside Brazil some years ago (the coaches were allowed to call “Time” like basketball, which led to some weird circle of players near the center of the field like football players do to, I don’t know, “confer”; the goalkeeper were allowed and disallowed to walk with the ball in hands; the “throw in” from the side lines could be a kick instead of hand throw — and many other tests). But no one around here liked any of that. All were “against the essence of the sport”. You, know…
Also, in Brazil (and Argentina) for example, it is kind of the essence of the sport to lure the referee. I mean, the player can fake an injure to force the referee to expel an adversary. That could be unfair for people who use 4 to 19 (really?) referees, like US do to make sure the game (football, with those video replays and the guy explaining to the audience what the damn call meant) is fair.
Still kind on topic: http://www.thespoiler.co.uk/index.php/2010/06/14/americans-still-coming-to-terms-with-the-rules-of-football
I know… but it is a good joke.
I’m reminded a bit of Frank’s article in response to Gladwell’s recent-ish American football debate: http://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=1831
My takeaway is that American football is essentially a game of chance enhanced by a narrative we overlay. Seems like it falls right into the same bucket of traits that those people are assigning to soccer.
John Cleese explains the difference:
http://maniacworld.com/John-Cleese%20Rants-Soccer-vs-Football.html
Baseball is about the lowest-scoring game Americans can tolerate; a typical score is 4-2 or so. In American football you can count on 6-7 scores per game, counting field goals (one of the few times an American football is actually kicked, Jesper). Ice hockey scores can be low, but it is extremely fast-paced and violent — the energy of soccer compressed into a playfield with less than half the surface area. Basketball is one of the most popular American sports, with scores occurring every 10-20 seconds, and scoring attempts more like every 5 (on average).
Soccer is too slow and too dull. They need to shrink the pitch to 2/3rds of its current size and get rid of the utterly pointless offside rule. (If it leads to scores of 20 and 30 per game, so much the better — if both sides play by the same rules, what differences does it make?)
@Ernest
I guess the basic cliché is that the U.S. population is impatient and wants to see results and action – but that very clearly rules out baseball, and this makes me doubt that we can really make these types of arguments.
My pet theory is rather that a sport or game only becomes interesting once you have enough familiarity with it to see what is going in, meaning that a sport that for some random reason becomes popular is likely to stay popular.
From personal experience, I can assure you that American Football and Baseball are intensely boring when you don’t know them. But they are also becoming more interesting now that I am getting a grasp of the rules and the different types of play.
I do not get the “baseball is slow” thing. Ok, the games last hours, but they still have the step by step advance scores, right? One base at a time. And it is turn based (one team controls the ball each time). Still looks a lot like “football” and opposes to the mess of soccer.
I mean, baseball is slow, but you can focus when something is going to happen (you get the action and the results). And then your focus can be relaxed again in a couple of seconds (like football, unlike soccer).
I admit I do not understand baseball at all, but isn’t that short “focus” what is important for TV, advertisement, and drinking beer?
@mauricio
I think baseball appears faster to me now that I have a better understanding of what I am supposed to look out for. But it still feels very slow. I do think that a game that you do not understand always feels slow because it looks like noise (or “a mess”) – it is only once you understand the game that you start to see events and changes.
soccer is hockey for the claustrophobic.
The word by Matthew Philbin:
“Soccer requires comparatively little from children but the ability to run after the ball”
…
reminds me some side comments by Jack Katz, about his book “How Emotions Work”, where he described baseball as a school of shame for little kids.
It suggests me that it’s not only about the structure of the game, but about the whole social situation – as in some Goffman statements about the relationships between representation and situation in “Frame analysis”. To try a formula, we value “representation” (with inside logic), they praise “arena” (as a social mechanic). Is it the same that in MMOs, they value cooperation (which is socially oriented) and we praise pvp (whose results come fully from internal rules) ?
To answer the question of “is soccer un-american?” I think it depends on which “america” you are refering to. The things is that the nations of the united states is undergoing gradual changes that will change the core values thus also changing the sports that people prefer to watch. Historically we can say that “soccer was un-american”. But in today’s united states many economic and social changes are taking place that I can foresee a big in the game of soccer(football). We are slowly moving away from capitalism so that will have an impact on the values and sports in the united states. The united states today is starting to look alot different from the traditional days. Soon I think this nation will be a completely new one.