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Manifesto Draft 1.3:
2/23/2004
A Call for Soccer with an American Accent
These bullet points are all answers to common questions that I don't think anybody should be spending their time and energy getting all exercised over any longer. As such they are intended to provide a coda to the second phase of American soccer history, what I call The Long So What? This phase created a comfortable, but small niche, which obviously wasn't desirable, but it was certainly tolerable with its suburban comfort and soccer moms in a minivan.
We are now entering the third phase, which will hopefully culminate in some group of Americans holding aloft the World Cup, again hopefully in my lifetime. With such a lofty goal, especially given that World Cups happen only every 4 years, and a human life is but so long, we should probably be sure that whatever energy we expend be used on developing the American game, and not on re-visiting tired, old chestnuts that could have been written at any point in the last 30 or 40 years, almost verbatim.
It is as though it is written in the Bible that on the seventh day God created America and said, "These people don't get kicking the round ball, but I'll let them figure out how to be among the best at every other sport anyone will ever think of."
So, in closing:
• No apologies: neither to traditional American sports zealots, nor to citizens of any other country, no matter how long they've been playing soccer.
• It's soccer here, not football.
• Nothing is impossible: how many World Cups can be claimed by the UK, and when?
• The game as it exists is not perfect; nor has it ever been, nor will it probably ever be.
• Soccer is not the sport of the future: it's one of the sports that Americans play, in greater numbers than just about any country in the world, and more than any other sport in the States.
• Soccer's future success does not necessitate the collapse nor failure of any of the other major sports.
• Americans live in the Western Hemisphere, specifically North America, where CONCACAF reigns, not UEFA, so we have to know how to beat Mexico, not France, no matter how appealing the latter might be for a variety of not even necessarily political reasons.
• Soccer is not only played by the cheese and crackers with wine set, but also by people who don't think twice about drinking cheap beer/cerveza.
• No apologies: neither to traditional American sports zealots, nor to citizens of any other country, no matter how long they've been playing soccer. Neither the person who thinks that the Super Bowl is everything Great with a capital G about America, nor those who claim that soccer is somehow incompatible with the American spirit. Therefore, us playing it is cute so long as we don't get too uppity and start claiming to know how to improve the game; or beat their true home countries.
It may be insulting and aggravating to hear otherwise respected journalists dismiss soccer by saying something along the lines of "Let's talk about soccer: Soccer sucks, next subject!", but in the end, who cares? These guys (and they are all men) arguably don't have a clue, but they are in general smart. They know their audience likes to yell and scream about things, and there's nothing like a little smack-talk to start the yelling and screaming. They also reflect their historical perspective, having risen to their current positions when not only was it true that not many played soccer, but thanks to the NASL and all of their hype-driven marketing, many of their jibes about foreign players and dandy-ish Anglophilia could be seen as largely true, 20 years ago.
Just remember: sport is not international relations, despite the frequent intrusions of the latter on the former. Sportswriters do not make a name for themselves by being cautious, or oftentimes even fair. Their job is to hype, unapologetically, games played by grown men and women. Some of the best writers manage to do this while still maintaining a sense of awareness of the larger world that sport is played in, but many, many of them do not. Many make their bread and butter by insulting the opposition (players, team, town, region, country, etc.); insulting those with opposing viewpoints (other columnists, publications, fans, coaches, officials); and every once in a while waxing rhapsodic about past glory days (their own, a player's, team's, town's, epoch's, etc.).
The American sports scene is very vibrant and fluid, with sports and nominal sports (NASCAR) rising and falling with regularity over time. When a new sport bubbles to the top of the attention span, it gets ink and fawning attention like the fad that it is. When I grew up in the 70s and 80s, the NHL went from being the domain of a bunch of toothless Canadian goons with names like "Guy" to a yuppi-fied product played by largely phenomenal athletes* from all over the world, in front of a beer-soaked, SUV-driving, snow-White audience.
There are similar stories for everything except the NFL, which just keeps getting bigger seemingly, and the MLB, which just keeps getting more and more irrelevant.
I am not saying we should not get pissed off about this, but our time will be better spent if we channel that energy into making these opinions more and more absurdly ludicrous. That is one of the points of this site: to make it easier for American soccer fans to find the articles by the writers who understand the sport, and help them consign the old editorial guard to the proverbial dustbin of history. If xyz journal thinks that it is serving its readership by only printing Associated Press wire articles instead of sending a living, breathing writer out to cover the sport that is played by so many in their community, that is their loss. We will help their former readers find other sources for the news that matters to them, and all of the ad impressions that go along with that will also go with them. This isn't rocket science.
*Goons are a lot of things, and certainly physically impressive, but I have a hard time considering them true athletes, unless all of the things they are regularly penalized for have recently been made legal.
• It's soccer here, not football. We already have another, very different, game we call football, which fact did not present itself as an insurmountable problem by the early players of the sport, and they were actually alive when one might not know exactly to what one was referring depending on where they were hearing it said. Just as we have to specify "American football" when we are abroad, because nobody else really played it anywhere else, and thus never had to come up with an alternative name, people here have to call it soccer. At least they do if they want us to understand for certain to what they are referring, and honestly, I believe that is the respectful thing to do in another country, rather than telling your hosts how "wrong" they are.
This doesn't mean we need to be xenophobic language police, shouting down a crowd of Mexican-Americans discussing futból, but it does mean you should laugh at a couple gringos having a chat about "footie." As a predominantly immigrant nation, there will always be a need for a common lexicon to help us break down the communication barriers between our various cultural islands, and we will do our best to help that process. But another part of this assimilation process is that the new arrivals adapt to the practices of their new land. Americans travelling thousands of miles to live in Europe, but then spend all of their time meeting up with other ex-patriates talking about the homeland is no more obnoxious than a bunch of Brits huddled around a bar tv at 7 a.m. watching the latest Wolves-Leeds match over bangers and mashers.
• Nothing is impossible: how many World Cups can be claimed by the UK, and when? All the foreign armchair, or real, coaches who have absolute confidence in proclaiming that we have no idea what it takes to win the World Cup sure haven't a lot to show for it other than their feeling of superiority. Last I checked, England hasn't won but once, and that was 38 years ago. France only managed to get the star on their jerseys 5 years ago. Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal have none to speak of, with only the Netherlands even making it to the Final. In 2002 we equaled the best the Mexicans ever accomplished, beating them while we did it, along with one-time semi-finalists Portugal, and taking 3-time champions Germany to the wire.
• The game as it exists is not perfect; nor has it ever been, nor will it probably ever be. That being the case, anything less than regular review and periodic tinkering when appropriate is not respect, but neglect. The game, its rules, styles, formations, etc. are and have been in constant flux since the first rules were codified.
Any sport that either believes it has no problems, or refuses to address them out of some mis-placed sense of traditionalism, or because "that's just the way it has always been done", is either dead or moribund. Just because there wasn't any chance for video assistance for referees in 1895 is no reason to not investigate how we can take advantage of those kinds of technologies to make the game less un-fair.
Anyone who claims that a team winning a game on a goal that didn't really cross the line, or that a team loses because someone viciously tackles their star player but the referee doesn't even see it, is anything but unfair is lying to themselves. What logic is there in post-match punishment for violent behavior that went unnoticed at the time, but none for all of those miraculous "resurrections" that occur in almost every high-level game? I know it is widely considered the least objectionable option, but is anyone really satisfied with penalty kicks as the potential final decision in any game of any consequence?
I hear that part of the appeal of soccer is the relative simplicity of the rules, as opposed to the highly complicated and technical approach for American football. How does the relative simplicity of the rule regarding holding an opponent (Rule 12, supposed to result in a direct free kick) square with the reality of every single professional and international game where holding an opponent is just the beginning of the toolkit of the defending team. You see hooking an arm, jersey pulling, elbows, you name it, all illegal, all supposed to result in a free kick. The primary time you see these called those is when someone falls, either for real or in a "simulation". This is all visible in real time, from any vantage point, either in person or on tv, and yet largely un- or under-enforced.
I fail to see how any of this adds to the attraction of the game, or can be held as a positive alternative to other styles of rule-making and enforcement.
• Soccer is not the sport of the future: it is one of the sports that Americans play, in greater numbers than just about any country in the world, and more than any other sport in the States. That doesn't make it the only, necessarily the best, nor the biggest sport, nor does it need to be. This is a huge country that loves sports, of all kinds.
That means that there are more than enough people here to play several different sports, and still be one of the largest groups of participants in each. This is not a zero-sum question where basketball players can't play football, or soccer players can't play baseball, no matter what youth coaches try to tell us and our kids (metaphorical or otherwise). The average sports fan probably watches more than 1 sport, and which sports certainly has changed over the last 20 or 30 years. Ask a 50-year-old how many Stanley Cup games, or for that matter Super Bowls, they watched when they were kids in the "Good Old Days."
• Soccer's future success does not necessitate the collapse or failure of any of the other major sports. Each of those other major sports has experienced its own peaks and valleys, and will continue to do so. But for the most part they seem to have relatively secure futures despite the best efforts of some of their practitioners to destroy them while simultaneously alienating all of their supposed fans.
• Americans live in the Western Hemisphere, specifically North America, where CONCACAF reigns, not UEFA, so we have to know how to beat Mexico, not France, no matter how appealing the latter might be for a variety of not even necessarily political reasons. That is how it is and will be, until we no longer have to compete against our neighbors for the right to participate in major international tournaments, like the World Cup and the Olympics.
If/when we qualify, then we will have to worry about beating everybody else in the world. As such, it makes a lot more sense to re-evaluate our relative attention-spans, and particularly our strategy for international youth club travelling mostly to Europe, and start focusing a great deal more on our neighbors South of the border.
• Soccer is not only played by the cheese and crackers with wine set, but also by people who drink cheap beer/cerveza. It is not just Latin-Americans who are kept "off the pitch" as it were, but just about anybody else who doesn't have ready access to leafy, suburban parks and the cars necessary to get you there. Given that soccer is played the world over on any flat surface, and only requires some sort of a ball-shaped object that can be kicked, soccer is perfectly suited for the urban reality of a huge percentage of Americans.
I've played one-on-one on the sidewalks of North St. Louis, and played "numbers" in a tractor-trailer loading dock there as well. I've infuriated my Dad using a 3-foot-tall fence in my back yard as a goal, and practiced juggling* in more living rooms than I should admit, sometimes with a large plastic cup of a foamy, alcoholic beverage in one hand.
The chief motivator for soccer players the world over is the same chief motivator for football, basketball and baseball players in the United States: providing an economic opportunity to significantly better oneself while playing a game you love. This desire is a fundamental part of the equation by which the American economy is driven, and to not have a way to present that is a problem that will have to be addressed for the long-term health of the American game; and it should come naturally to us.
Team sports need to have a number of different roles played, and these often require people with a range of personalities, and the greatest range of personalities can only come with including the largest possible pool. If you only see mostly white, upper-middle class suburban kids, you are going to have a significantly smaller range of temperaments and styles, than if you look around and engage some of the many other people who play or would like to play if given a chance. Hell, that's yet another of the great American myths, the World War II platoon made up of the sharp-shooting Southerner, the street-wise New Yorker, etc.!
Of course this is an over-generalization, and I do know that stereotypes do not define a person, but our differing personal backgrounds very obviously directly color everything else about our lives. The more closely those backgrounds match the general breadth of diversity of the backgrounds of the American population, the more recognizably American the result will be. Strangely enough, baseball still most closely matches that diversity in the current sporting world, which maybe better explains its success despite itself.
*"Keepy-uppie"? That has got to be the single worst excuse for legitimate soccer-related terminology of the Anglophile set. Why not call soccer "Put it in their net more than you allow it in yours"?
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