THE MOST POPULAR GAME IN THE WORLD: 

EXCEPT IN THE U.S.

June 16, 2006  

This month billions of people around the world will watch World Cup Soccer on television, 64 matches played in 12 stadiums throughout Germany over four weeks. An estimated 1.5 million foreign fans, along with as many Germans, will attend the matches. Soccer, better known as football just about everywhere outside the U.S., is the most popular game in the world.

In the U.S. we have major league soccer. Practically every college and high school has a soccer team. And kids from one end of the country to the other play in local soccer leagues. Still, professional soccer in the U.S. just doesn’t attract the same kind of following as professional football, basketball, and baseball. Why is that? If you ask me, I think it’s just another example of the American people’s latent tendency toward unilateralism and general distain for the international community.

Let me disclose up front that I’m not an avid sports fan. A long-time resident of the Washington, D.C. area, I don’t generally watch Redskins games until they are 10-0. Last time that occurred, Joe Gibbs was on his first stint as Redskins coach 15 years ago. I watch the Super Bowl most years, but I watch it as much for those silly commercials as I do for the game. My Dad coached a semi-professional basketball team in the 1940s, and I played varsity basketball in high school, but March Madness for me is not is being able to watch the programs preempted by the games. My grandfather played on the farm team for the Chicago Cubs, and a close family friend, Dick Groat, played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1950s and 1960s, but I never really liked baseball. And I don’t care for soccer much either. I am, however, concerned about the American people’s go-it-alone attitude.

Sports historians will say there is a simple reason Americans don’t follow professional soccer all that much. They’ll point out that when the modern versions of all these games evolved, America was cut off from the rest of the world by two large oceans and it didn’t have the benefit of cross cultural sports exchanges that countries in Europe and Asia had. We developed our own games based on our own cultural and social temperament. Australians had a similar situation, and that’s how they got Australian-rules football.

But soccer (football) is an ancient game. Chinese Tsu Chu dates from the Han Dynasty (221-206 BC). The Greeks played phaininda. The Romans called it harpastum. Various forms of mob football, played in medieval Europe, involved groups fighting to move a ball from one side to the other. It was more akin to a riot than games that evolved from it. The riot part is a tradition kept alive by soccer fans today. Yes, modern soccer has its origins in the 19th Century like football, baseball, and basketball. But we are a nation of immigrants who came to this country since its beginnings playing games like soccer we learned in our countries of origin. Why didn’t soccer flourish in North America like it did in Mexico and Latin America? And what about ice hockey? Like soccer, it had its origins in Europe, but it managed to become a professional sport with a loyal following of Americans. So much for the history argument.

That brings us to contemporary explanations. Principal among them, soccer involves an element of chaos. Players and the ball move helter-skelter about the field. Players, coaches, and fans shout conflicting instructions and information. You never know what’s going to happen next. That’s why announcers are so surprised when one or the other team occasionally scores and they scream so loudly proclaiming it. Americans don’t like chaos, this line of reasoning goes. They prefer the more predictable order of football and baseball, downs and innings one after another, and the relative order of basketball, played on a much smaller court where everything’s easier to watch.

OK, soccer’s chaotic. So is a fight in the infield after the pitcher hits the batter with a baseball and both teams empty their dugouts and begin flailing each other. Americans love that. And they love it when one hockey player clubs another and both teams begin attempting to decapitate the other team’s players because the head is the only place you can hurt the other guy with all that padding he wears. Americans love chaos, especially when it has a purpose. Yes, the chaos on the soccer field may be a bit monotonous, but that doesn’t explain professional soccer’s lack of popularity.

Then there’s the economic argument that says American sports media markets are already saturated. Because regular professional soccer matches would not attract enough viewers, the major broadcast and cable networks can’t generate sufficient profits, therefore they won’t broadcast professional soccer during prime time. And because they won’t broadcast during prime time, they can’t attract new viewers. A vicious circle.

Wait a minute. More American kids are playing soccer today than ever before. And there are more soccer moms and soccer dads than ever before. There are more potential viewers out there for professional soccer than ever before. During the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, when the American women’s soccer team won the Gold Medal, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Joy Fawcett, Kristine Lilly, and Brandi Chastain were national heroes. Plenty of Americans tuned into watch the fab-five lead the American team to victory. 

OK, that was the Olympics, and a lot of people watch the Olympics that don’t watch other sports. During the Olympics they get to see all those boutique sports like ice-skating and gymnastics. And they get to see what their kids could have done if they had been willing to spend all that money and drive 100 miles one way three times a week for private coaches from the time their kids were three years old. But soccer isn’t a boutique sport. People watched 2004 Women’s Olympic soccer to see the U.S. team teach all those foreign teams a lesson. Americans may tune in during prime time once every four years to watch the Olympic soccer team do that, but they won’t tune in during prime time once a week to watch D.C. United play Kansas City. Soccer moms and dads get all that kind of soccer on Saturday morning.

So I hope this puts the argument to rest once and for all. Professional soccer isn’t less popular in the United States than professional football, basketball, and baseball because of historic reasons, because it’s chaotic, or because of economic reasons. There is only one inescapable conclusion. Professional soccer isn’t that popular in the United States because it’s too universal. It’s too popular around the world. Americans will never become professional soccer fans in numbers to rival professional football, basketball, or baseball fans because that would require us to abandon our latent unilateralist tendencies and become a full member of the international community.

Just forget about it. Professional soccer is never going to be a big sport in the United States until Americans become true citizens of the world. Since unilateralism is in our genes and it takes a gene about 20,000 years to mutate, that’s about how long it’s going to take.