- Jason Davis

Soccer isn't just a game, this much we know. It's life and death, birth and rebirth, the athletic embodiment grit and bravery, and expressions of supreme skill and beauty all perfectly contained in ninety minute windows of time that have on their own shaped cultures, raised men to god-like stature, and spawned the flowery prose of many a wistful scribe whose milieu is sport and whose frustrations at his own athletic failings manifest in the appreciation of grown men playing a game.

The American analogue is baseball, a sport with a ponderous rhythmic cadence and reliance on blind luck that has given us David Halberstam, George Will, and films about the game that rely as much on magical notions and homey nostalgia as they do the play on the field. Romance is a part of the fabric of each sport, particularly in those cultures that birthed them; do the Japanese conjure ancient greats materializing from cornfields with anachronistic tools in hand, representing idealized imaginings of men who have long since turned to dust, but who we are certain ache in their eternal souls to recapture the past glory of their earthly athletic exploits?

The English staked their founders' claim to the pining for simpler days, the lamenting of passe strategies, and the debate over how best to play the game of football long ago. Even while giving lip service to the aesthetic pleasures of the swashbuckling Spanish and the flowing niceties of those foreign intruders whistling the ball along the ground at the Emirates, they struggle with the evolution of a sport that once represented the earthy doggedness of the blue collar Englishman. To let go of Route One is to let go of a part of what makes them English; just as the loss of the Dodgers forever scarred Brooklyn and the advent of million dollar contracts irrevocably changed the sport of baseball and spawned the laments of an aging generation, the smaller, connected world has created a existential crisis for those who feel hereditary ownership over soccer.

Is it improvement? Is baseball "better" now than it was in 1955? Has the shift in football culture in England, one which rewards big spending teams that often go abroad for talent, stolen something from the sport, or more pointedly, what it means to be a football lover and English?

The only certain thing we can say is that time has changed our world, and sport is no exception. Though different is not always better, elements of that change are almost impossible to color as negative. No writer, no matter how much he pines for the days of DiMaggio and Williams, would claim that baseball did not benefit from racial integration; still, while today's players expand in physical ways inconceivable in the 1950's, those fonts of wisdom might bemoan the loss of "small ball" or pine pathetically for shortstops whose brilliance laid in their defense and speed and not their ability to blast prodigious numbers of four-baggers. The same goes for the denizens of the direct English version of what the world calls football, men who recognize progress yet cannot rid their minds of the nagging sense that they betray themselves with every piece of Barcelona-directed praise.

Brian Phillips explores this dual-mindedness at The Run of Play, specifically the notion that beautiful football and the point of the game, to win, are indirectly painted as mutually exclusive by English writers who are hedging their bets with “the rhetoric of approving by disapproving” when addressing an issue Brian calls the "tension between utility and aesthetics."

Unlike baseball, a professional sport which exists in a North American cocoon still unchallenged from leagues abroad, American soccer is left to deal with the repercussions of this lingering debate. Even while MLS exhibits a style somewhat similar to the bygone days of First Division football, it suffers from a deficit of respect when compared to the modern game in England, Spain, and Italy. Nostalgia, and specifically the idea that there is still room in the game for utility to win out over aesthetics, does not travel; what is fondly remembered by the curators of football's ethic in England is not appreciated by the knowledgeable fans that inhabit America.

There are likely many reasons for this, many of them directly related to technology and the inundation of high-level soccer American fanatics experience on a weekly basis. It's all there for the asking, and much, if not all, of it is better than what we can see by driving down to our local MLS stadium. Lacking the resources to populate the league with players capable of the feats we see on satellite television and computer screens at the push of a button, American soccer is forced to soldier along, often at odds with itself and striving to be something it can't possibly be. At least not yet.

In a sense, the timing could not be worse for MLS. It exists in the expansive quilt of football cultures spread across continents and connected by the threads of instant communication. Nothing it can do, with its minimal budgets juxtaposed against a sports-obsessed society conditioned to seeing the best play their games for the most money, will make it relevant in short order.

The English proponents of utility aren't the only ones fighting against a ground-in ethos; American soccer does the same, enacting one-off rules to encourage splashy signings and attract high-quality talent, all the while rooting itself in financial restraint that guarantees direct and physical will almost always prevail over artful and sublime.

By the time, or if, professional soccer in America becomes the highly-refined and skillful game being played in the top leagues of Europe and South America, the days of romanticizing a simpler game will likely be long in the past. Technology will bury that notion, just as it has buried the idea that MLS can just be, without having to live up to an impossible standard set by leagues with a century of history behind them. We'll just have to leave that to the baseball writers.