still kicking it down
July 2005
Just over twenty years ago, the future of soccer in America looked terribly bleak. The country's one bona fide professional league announced it was going into a hibernation, from which it would never return; the national team had failed to qualify for the World Cup for the eighth consecutive time, and the media's hostility to what had become a staggeringly popular children's recreational activity showed little sign of subsiding. Soccer continued to be portrayed as boring and un-American, replete with riotous fans, players named Stanislav and Manfred, and omnipresent zeroes on the scoreboard. To an entire generation of sportswriters, such imported nonsense represented a threat to the established order. Soccer could not be granted a peaceful co-existence, it was to be batted down.
In 1985, the disasters at Bradford and Brussels helped to entrench prejudices. Not only was this a stupid game, it was also deadly. Though that same year an American sociologist produced evidence of some 300 sport-related riots taking place in the U.S. over a twelve-year period — very few of them related to soccer — many of these had gone virtually unreported. Sports editors, it seemed, took less kindly to socking national pastimes in the eye. Not even the ugly riots on the streets of Detroit in the wake of the previous year's World Series seemed capable of tainting baseball. Of course, the incontestable newsworthiness of this 'disturbance' compelled the media to cover it, but alongside the celebrations of the home-town Tigers' victory, its significance had been kept in perspective. Soccer was not so lucky. America knew nothing of the teams from Liverpool or Juventus, or what a European Cup Final was; it had never given thought to why people turned up at tinder-boxes like Valley Parade.
Two decades have passed since that dismal year, and fortunately much has changed. The latest American professional league enters its eleventh season with as many teams as it's ever had and a level of media attention the late NASL only dreamed of. The United States has developed into a creditable World Cup force, its players coveted by the Premiership and Bundesliga, and its manager enjoying an unprecedented seven-year reign. Meanwhile, the legend of the World Cup-winning women of 1999 seems to grow with each year, the now-retired Mia Hamm having been thrust into the firmament of sporting idolatry.
Spectator behaviour in America also appears to have changed, and not necessarily for the better. Pillaging fans taking to the streets after championship-clinching victories are now common enough to be abruptly dismissed; the infamous fan-player brawl at an NBA basketball contest in November 2004 did engender some hand-wringing, yet inevitably there were pundits who seemed less concerned about the indiscipline than the effect of player suspensions on the playoff race.
Soccer, though, is yet to benefit from such adulation. I undertook much of the work on Soccer In A Football World in Wisconsin, where, over breakfast, I thumbed through the pages of the Milwaukee newspaper much as I did a quarter-century earlier. It carried no reports of MLS matches, or scores from overseas, and certainly no opinions from any of its hidebound writers on Bruce Arena's chances at Germany 2006. Instead, there were occasional extracts from wire service reports casting the game in a familiarly unfavourable light: a refereeing bribery scandal in Germany; a stampede at an Iranian stadium which left five dead; two Newcastle United players fighting with each other during a Premiership match. Even the behaviour of Inter Milan supporters in a Champions League quarter-final somehow squeezed its way onto the page — something the competition itself had little hope of ever achieving.
Of course, Milwaukee is hardly the soccer centre of the nation, and newspapers in MLS markets like Boston and Washington no doubt provide fans with a more balanced perspective. But provincial attitudes are hardly confined to provincial media outlets. Most of America does not rely as it used to on local newspapers for coverage of the day's games; it prefers to see them relived on television. Fans lean heavily on the likes of ESPN's SportsCenter, with its intemperate dose of slam-dunks and end-zone dances, accompanied by high-decibel presenters and their machine-gun jargon. Soccer, as you might expect, makes infrequent appearances on this programme (the occasional wild goal or ball-kicking elephant), but when a goalkeeper in Italy is struck by a flare from a rival fan, suddenly the sport — as played halfway around the world — reaches its screens. Had the match itself been wonderful, had one player scored seven or eight goals, had a 5-1 deficit been overturned with five strikes in the last ten minutes, it would have been completely ignored. The same is undoubtedly true had the flare been thrown during a contest in a sport less popular throughout the world.
Soccer does have a place on ESPN — from the start, it has been MLS's principal broadcaster — but its place is not SportsCenter, the domain of Tiger, LeBron and other water-cooler heroes, and where unsavory but blisteringly topical issues like steroid use amongst baseball sluggers never seems to detract from the day's home-run parade. Sideswipes at soccer have been taken by SportsCenter anchors for years; it is seemingly as hip to trash the game as it is to marvel at Ben Rothlisberger.
That print and broadcasting editors can continue to get away with subtly discrediting the game in this way is not terribly surprising. America is, after all, a country where 'faith' means more than just attending church. It means reports from 'trusted' media outlets are not always taken with the grain of salt needed to see through the veneer of prejudice and manipulation. If the newspaper or the TV says soccer is un-American, who is there to disagree, apart from those sad people who already happen to like it?
It's possible that soccer fans, or at least a subsection of them, deserve some of the blame. Editors who attempt to portray the game in a sympathetic light are often made to suffer for their efforts. The slightest mistake — mispronouncing a name, omitting a goal-scorer — can induce apoplexy in soccer nuts furious at the 'disrespect' shown to their obsession. Faced with a hostile barrage of correspondence and phone calls, ignoring the game altogether seems a safer option.
MLS may be entering its eleventh year, but its future is far from certain, not even with soccer-specific stadiums sprouting up across the country and benefactors like Philip Anschutz and Lamar Hunt apparently smitten enough with their investment to continue bankrolling the league. The oceans of empty seats and flaccid television ratings can scarcely be laid at the feet of a disrespectful media, not when Manchester United and their ilk have filled NFL stadiums for meaningless mid-summer friendlies. Some have claimed that events like the Women's World Cup of 1999 have laid to rest the final vestiges of any anti-soccer bias. This, though, reeks of the same ignorance which — for generations — has attempted to translate the country's surfeit of soccer-playing kids into season ticket holders. Where is the Women's United Soccer Association now?
I can think of no more damning evidence than a programme ESPN aired during my time in the States. Celebrating its 25th anniversary with a series of programmes, they devoted an hour's worth of programming to the events of 1994, offering air-time to a baseball strike, the winter Olympics and professional ice hockey. Yet not one word was mentioned about the event the network had spent most of that summer broadcasting: the 1994 World Cup, held in its own backyard. America, apparently, needs to reflect on Tonya Harding; but not the three and a-half million who spent part of that summer watching the world's premier sporting event.
Last update: September 2007.
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