There’s a cultural disconnect between soccer and U.S. sports fans

Let’s talk about soccer, and why it is the rage of most of the world, yet in the U.S. it trails in popularity. True, there are some dedicated school teams on L.I. and here on the North Fork, with talented athletes and dedicated parents and families behind them. But in terms of spectator interest, advertising revenue, and TV viewership, soccer ranks fifth in this country after “American” football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. Even NASCAR and professional golf events will pull ahead of soccer competitions televised in the U.S. Does our shaky embrace of the sport of soccer tell us anything about ourselves?

The VOX website reports that 3.2 billion people the world over watched at least some of the World Cup championship games in 2010. This year, well over half the world’s population watched most of the World Cup. Soccer clearly dominates the global sports scene. It is big — huge, in fact — in all of Europe, South America, Central America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It’s a low-maintenance sport with low-maintenance players (compared to U.S. athletes, especially), with minimal equipment.

Soccer takes a back seat, but just a bit, in some countries: Canada and Finland, for example, go for ice hockey, while baseball is all the rage in Japan, Taiwan, Venezuela, Cuba and much of the Caribbean; China’s sports obsession is none other than table tennis (with basketball holding a strong second place); the Indian subcontinent and South Asia, Australia and New Zealand go big for cricket, with rugby making headway. Basketball dominates the Philippines, wrestling the choice of Mongolia, while Laos and Cambodia have kick-boxing as their No. 1.

Overall, however, soccer, called “football,” reigns supreme worldwide and continues to gain fans — everywhere but here. Yes, it is more popular with Americans than it used to be, but it never seems to keep loyal followers in the big numbers. What follows are some theories that might explain this.

For starters, U.S. soccer teams go nowhere on the world stage. A milestone win forever eludes them. Compare this to the enduring zeal in the U.S. for such teams as the Cowboys, Yankees, Celtics, Lakers and Rangers. Common to all of them is that they win, and win repeatedly, and Americans absolutely love winners.

Another feature of soccer that may explain its limited U.S. following lies in the way many games end — in a tie or a draw. One could argue that this goes against the grain of American culture. Ties and draws are quite a letdown after team competition — in other words, nobody wins. It verges on the unacceptable, except for soccer aficionados. But in baseball, on the other hand, a U.S. team will play for 5 to 7 hours to decide the outcome of a 162-game season.

Another aspect of soccer that’s hard to appreciate is how the clock is forever running, with no disclosure to the spectators, or even the players, of what time remains till the game is over. It’s tough to grasp the explanations for keeping secret what’s on the clock.

Add to this a perception, even here on L.I., that soccer is alternative and European. Talented American youth athletes who are often the best players on our school soccer teams constantly move to the other mainstream sports by junior year. In a classic episode of the cartoon comedy, “King of the Hill,” the father character, Hank, forlorn over his son’s quitting football to play soccer, carps that his son “quit sports to join a soccer team.”

In the last decade or so, the U.S. men’s team has found some success, most notably in 2010 and 2014 (the World Cup is every four years). But in ’18 they again failed to qualify. Sports writers howled with headlines of “Embarrassment” and “Catastrophe,” and then there were no headlines at all. Once again almost everyone forgot about soccer here. Sports Illustrated and others reported that the ’18 World Cup had a record high price tag for broadcasting rights at the time that hopes were high that the the U.S. would be in contention, then drew a record low audience by the time it aired live. A whole decade of hope and momentum for the U.S. on the world stage of soccer evaporated.

But all is not lost for America’s fifth-ranked sport. The first potential U.S. soccer superstar is on the rise, 19-year old Christian Pulisic, now playing as a German pro, of course. He, if anyone, could capture America’s imagination and put soccer solidly into our cultural radar.

Further, certain developments in American football’s disfavor may prove to be an advantage for soccer’s rise. One is the decline in the ratings of the NFL games, due in great measure to protests during each game’s salute to the flag. Will audiences, followed by advertisers, turn to soccer to fill the gap? In U.S. schools and colleges, will soccer teams gain — and retain — more players owing to the discovery of the long-term effects of head injuries, CTE and other issues suffered in football?

But what would really hit the nail on the head with soccer is understanding the logic of this the world’s most popular sport. A good place to start is the just published book, “The Language of the Game – How to Understand Soccer,” by Laurent Dubois. He makes the case that the paucity of goals is part of something larger in this sport. One basic rule, called the “offside rule,” sheds light on how to understand and appreciate soccer. He goes so far as to say that this rule is at the “heart and soul” of the game.

Simply stated, the “offside rule” requires that a player may not pass the ball to a teammate unless, at the moment of the pass, two members of the opposing side are closer to the goal than that teammate. Imagine that you are a soccer player with the ball, and you eye a teammate all by himself, with no defender anywhere around him, a few yards from the goal. Just pass (i.e. “loft”) the ball in his general direction, and he would be playing one-on-one against the goalie. But it is not to be — there’s no scoring opportunity, no lofting to your teammate, because he is obviously out of position.

When you consider how this one rule generates virtually all of the patterns and geometries of soccer, it clarifies why a goal is a rare occurrence. Soccer fans see this as value in rarity — scoring should not be easy. So the rules are designed to prevent scoring. It is when players have not merely the physical gifts, but also the skill — and the imagination — to circumvent the rules that brings soccer fans to their feet wildly cheering.

And soccer fans surpass by far the level of prolonged cheering — screaming — to be found in any stadium for any sport in the U.S. A recent broadcast of 60 Minutes characterized soccer spectators as a “collective, manic mood swing.” Players in the World Cup games often complain that the volume of the fans’ extended, high-decibel cheering or denouncing made it impossible on the field to hear what their teammates were saying.

And still, to almost all the fans of soccer, scoring a goal seems secondary to how the game is played. One of the game’s most famous moments, in the 1970 World Cup between Brazil and Uruguay, was a play by Pele that ended in a missed shot. How he played in those moments counted for much more than that he missed it. Is it that soccer fans are more patient?

When the immortal American football icon, Vince Lombardi, played college football at Fordham U in the 1930s, he was one of that team’s “Seven Blocks of Granite.” Compare that to soccer stars’ nicknames such as “The Divine Ponytail” (Roberto Baggio), “Stevie Me” (Steven Gerrard) and “”Ginger Mourinho” (Gary Megson). And just as alien to their sport is Lombardi’s famous maxim, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Sure they want to win, but soccer’s excitement lies beyond the few goals that might happen.

So there we have a bit of insight into soccer, the world of sports in general, and in some ways, ourselves. And it’s just a game.