June 1, 2006
As Germany prepares to host the World Cup of soccer starting June 9th and ending a month later in stadiums from Berlin to Gelsenkirchen it becomes apparent how enormously popular this sport, often called football outside of the United States, is to fans across the globe.
Having seen first-hand how unglued normal people become at soccer games when I attended the World Cup in Washington, D.C. in 1994 and how much people talk about the sport as I listened constantly to reports from my European colleagues at my days working at the European Commission office in D.C. it is obvious that soccer delights fans everywhere . . .but not in the U.S.
Looking at the sports pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times over the Memorial Day weekend it would be hard to even know that the World Cup was going to take place although The New York Times did have a travel piece on where to stay and party if any reader was going to travel to Germany for the games.
Americans reading sports pages delighted in the close and exciting results of the Indianapolis 500 car race; read that Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was still fighting valiantly for his life after his tragic accident in the Preakness; and saw that Barry Bonds had eclipsed Babe Ruth’s home run record and was now chasing after Hank Aaron’s record and the steroid controversy that follows Bonds in his final days of his baseball career.
And Americans are stilling watching basketball as we enter the hot days of June as the NBA is still on our tv screens and in the newspapers. We are following the box scores of our local baseball team or like me going out to the games as I did last weekend to watch the Nationals beat the Orioles.
We even watch the pro football draft on television to see if our favorite team will gain any star who will help put them in the Super Bowl which is America’s version of the World Cup.
Tennis fans are watching the French Open and golfers are viewing their sport every weekend on their tv sets but soccer – at the professional level – has failed to catch on in the United States.
More and more of our children are playing the sport when they are young but America’s three main sports continue to be basketball, football (not soccer but the football where they actually pass the ball with their hands) and baseball. What makes Americans so much different from sports fans everywhere else outside of our borders who actually know who Ronaldinho and Michael Ballack are and why they are today’s soccer stars?
Speaking for myself growing up in Indiana I lived and breathed watching basketball so that became my favorite sport. I don’t even remember hearing anything about soccer as a child in the Midwest.
Going to Indiana University I became a football fan as we went to the Rose Bowl my senior year and I was always a Cincinnati Reds baseball fan.
So, when I went to the soccer World Cup in Washington, D.C. in 1994 it was a strange and foreign experience for me. I was not excited by the low scores and the games seemed to drag on and on.
Obviously, if I had grown up with soccer as my European friends did I would have had a different attitude.
American business firms like Nike realize the importance of soccer to their sales and generate a large part of their revenue outside the U.S. thanks to soccer.
Two years ago we published a special issue of our magazine on sports entitled “Soccer or Football? Why We View Sports So Differently.” I interviewed Professor Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert at SAIS who is a sports fan and the author of the book “The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football and Basketball and What They See When They Do”.
When I asked him why soccer was the main sport in the world but not in the United States, he responded, “There are three reasons why soccer hasn’t attained the status in America that it has in so many parts of the world. Baseball, football and basketball got here first.” And, Mandelbaum went on to point out that “there is one feature in soccer that is completely unacceptable to Americans, and that is the frequency of ties. Tie games are decided in the European Cup and the World Cup by penalty-kick shoot-outs. This seems ludicrous to Americans. Americans want a decisive result in their sports . . .”
So, while most of the world will be glued to their television sets from June 9th through July 9th to see if Germany or Brazil or their favorite team will win the coveted World Cup most Americans will be more interested in their local baseball team and watching what they perceive as more “American” sports. Americans have our World Series in baseball which does not really involve the rest of the world except Canada and everyone seems to live with that. So, the World Cup, which has a team from the United States, will survive as the most popular sporting event for the world . . .except for the United States. |
