Like it or not, soccer fan culture in cities across the United States and Canada will naturally reflect the character of the particular city. Individually speaking, this means that the supporters for an MLS team are going to act like fans from other sports. Maybe they'll sing a little more. Maybe they'll have drums or chant in Spanish due to a larger Latino makeup. But for the most part, New Yorkers are going to act like New Yorkers, Chicagoans like Chicagoans, Philadelphians like Philadelphians, etc., etc.


And those Philadelphians like to curse if you haven't heard, or if you've simply ignored the fan behavior at Phillies, Flyers, Eagles, and Sixers games over the years. In most cases more than a few fans aren't doing it in unison, so the extent of aural destruction is limited. Get a couple hundred or thousand fans on the same page, however, and you have a chorus of profanity washing over everyone and everything in its path like a wall of dirty sound. It's not what Phil Spector had in mind. Because soccer promotes this coordinated chanting like no other sport, the profanity is generally much clearer and more easily noticed.


Which is a problem when uptight tourists visit a stadium containing passionate rowdies, and do so expecting a quiet family-friendly day of watching their favorite foreign powerhouse club. There are a lot of Manchester United fans, for whatever reason, and when the Red Devils come Stateside for the first time in years, those fans flock in droves. As moths to the overpriced flame, they're simply appalled (APPALLED!) when those disgusting local fans - dressed in the colors of the lowly MLS team whom they value their real connection with - yell out a resounding "F**k You!" or "You Suck A**hole!"


How cute, those delicate sensibilities.


Whether or not it's right for those fans to curse, or whether their use of the language is a touch...basic, is a debate for a different day. The former is a matter of taste and what one expects from fans at a sporting event. There are lines that shouldn't be crossed, and fans should be careful not to cross them. I don't see simple cursing as that, usually. There are times when it's not called for and repetitive use is distasteful; more than anything, it just grates on the ears to hear fans resort to profanity to express themselves rather than create something clever. American soccer crowds too often lack for creativity.


But if Philly fans, at all sporting events, curse, why should we want or expect anything different at a Union match? Screw soccer exceptionalism, I want my American soccer crowds to be just like their football, baseball, and hockey equivalents but with that little bit of extra flair. Soccer crowds should be unique because they're soccer crowds; that doesn't mean they should be watered down versions of crowds at other sporting events, it means they should be the exact opposite. Louder. More coordinated. A better representation of the passion they have for the sport and their team. Since we're talking Philly, they should be more Philly.


I'm not advocating more cursing. I'm advocating that they use it wisely to its greatest effect and they stay true to their Philly-ness. American soccer culture is American sports culture with a twist. And it should be.


Now that I've bored you to tears will all of this, I should reveal the source of my inspiration. After attending the Union-Manchester United game, someone decided to lambaste Union fans for their choice of words. Most of it is uptight nonsense. Subsequently the author apologized for mistaking a non-profane chant for "F*ck You!", which takes much of the sting out of the "controversy." If I didn't know better, I'd think the entire thing was a concoction meant to rile up Union fans and set off a firestorm. The post is certainly getting a lot of attention, with links from more bloggers than you can shake a stick at.


The retraction doesn't change my feelings on the issue, and I'll defend the fans' right to use any words they choose that aren't racist, homophobic, or make light of a tragic loss of life. In fact, I almost wish the Philly fans had been chanting what the writer thought they were chanting.


More bothersome to me than the objection to perceived bad words is the idea that an American Manchester United fan should feel an obligation to apologize to the English fans in the crowd on behalf of their countrymen. What? There are almost no words to describe how ridiculous this is, both from a visiting-fan perspective (forget where the fans individually came from; Manchester United were the visitors, which makes their fans the visiting fans) and because it indicates a tragically mistaken view on the niceties of football. Here's the truth: there are none. Even as we speak, MLS is slowly shedding the family-friendly soccer mom label it embraced for too long; professional soccer matches around the world, and yes, also in England, are attended by adult supporters who curse, curse often, and curse loudly. There's nothing for which the Union fans should be ashamed. Britain is not populated by a race of super-polite cheery gents who never curse and will always invite you over for tea. Sports can be crude and impolite, and this is part of their appeal.


Think of soccer in American like you would any other sporting event, consider the locale you're visiting, and prepare accordingly. If you find yourself with even the smallest doubt about the level of behavior at the game, don't go.


For a similar take to mine, see Aaron Stollar's at Fighting Talker.

It's Monday, and forming a coherent piece that draws a conclusion is proving to be extremely difficult; instead, my brain is producing a lot of half-baked thoughts. It's a ramble.


And so, I bring you these American soccer thoughts directly related to the United States' loss to Canada in the gold medal hockey game in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.


My apologies in advance if this isn't coherent or is a little more haphazardly presented than my usual fare.


The American hockey lads came very close to beating the Canadians at their own game. I say that, of course, because hockey was invented in Canada and is without question their prevailing national passion. Many, perhaps most, kids in Canada learn to skate almost as soon as they're able to walk, dreaming of one day playing hockey on the biggest stage. American kids dream of sporting glory as well, though the sports we choose in large numbers vary a bit more; for every Little Leaguer hoping to make the Majors, there are almost as many kids in Pop Warner and rec league basketball dreaming of playing in the NFL (and sometimes they're the same kids). I'm not sure of the actual statistics (and I'm not sure they matter), but the point holds; with 300 plus million people, a high quality of life standard, and a population spread out across thousands of miles, the US produces top-level athletes in a variety of sports and on a massive scale.


We Americans, perhaps because of our varied cultural histories, don't focus too well. Baseball may be the American "national pastime", but it long ago stopped being our national passion. American football might be the national passion, but because we're the only ones playing the game in large numbers, it doesn't connect us to the larger world.


Hockey does. Basketball does. Baseball does. And soccer does.


Because there's no sport here with the overriding importance that hockey in Canada or soccer almost everywhere else carries, we sate ourselves with trying to be the best in a multitude of games. We care because the teams wear "USA" across their shirts, not because they're playing a game that really matters to us as a nation. It's nice that USA basketball is back on top, but it wouldn't have cast a pall over the country if they had failed to win in Beijing two years ago. The US has failed to win an international championship in baseball since an Olympic gold in Sydney ten years ago, and even that victory was a blip on the collective radar. Hockey becomes a big deal every four years during the Olympics, but remains a niche regional sport otherwise.


To put it bluntly, Americans are spoiled. Without caring nearly as much (the way Canada does with hockey or Brazil does with soccer), we are good enough in most of the world's biggest team sports (with apologies to rugby and cricket), to contend in almost every competition. The hope is that one day, that will be true in soccer as well. I think most observers believe that eventually, it will happen.


Does that make us spoiled and greedy? Would you forsake the success of Americans hockey, baseball, and basketball for the USMNT being consistently among the best in the world? It seems like an easy question, but I'm really not sure.

or, Where's the Scoring? A Response
or, Goals Are Overrated
or, The American Double Standard
or, If You Score It, They Will (Supposedly) Come

You know that old argument that soccer doesn't appeal to Americans because there isn't enough scoring? Well, I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that it's crap; but just in case there are a few non-soccer people who might wander by here accidentally, or if you happen to need a few responses the next time a soccer-hating (or dismissing) friend of yours comments that the game is "boring", I thought I would lay out a few of my thoughts on the matter.

The impetus for this post was Fulham and Arsenal's entertaining 0-0 draw yesterday, an end-to-end match filled with chances for both sides. Despite the lack of goals, the game never failed to engage me. After checking with a few knowledgeable parties (hi Twitter friends!) just to be sure that I wasn't the only one who found it enjoyable, the thought hit me: this match is the perfect example of why the "not enough scoring" argument is less viable than one might think.

Now, as a soccer junkie, I'm admittedly biased. While the game held enormous entertainment value for me, perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions by saying that Americans are shortsighted in their position on scoring in soccer. Let's take a step back and look at the sports that Americans hold most dear: baseball and American football.

Baseball glorifies the pitcher's duel, the shutout, and the no-hitter. While home runs are seen as crowd-pleasers, tradition loves "small ball", sacrificing, and hitting behind the runner. One hundred forty plus years of history have made baseball an American institution; hence, for the Americans indoctrinated with the sport, the total scoring in a game is independent of its entertainment value, something as true today as it was during the Dead Ball Era, or the pitching dominated 60's. Even today, "Web Gems" are a celebrated part of every game, with today's modern athletes making defensive plays that amaze fans every night. Home runs, and scoring overall, has trended downward in recent years thanks to the fallout from the steroids scandals still affecting the game, yet attendances and television ratings have gone up, and revenues are higher than ever before. Runs scored matter less to fans than fantastic performances or victories by their favorite team.

Football glorifies the impenetrable defense, the tough-as-nails linebacker, and the defensive struggle. While high-octane offense is a crowd-pleaser, tradition loves ball-control, time-of-possession, and winning the field-position battle. Ninety years of history have made football the foremost American passion; hence, for Americans indoctrinated with the sport, the total scoring in a game is independent of its entertainment value, something as true today as it was during the era of the Doomsday Defense and the Steel Curtain. Even today, stingy defense is a celebrated part of the game, with a Super Bowl champion known more for defense than for scoring points. Even if scoring dropped thirty percent in a single season, football would still reign as the king of American sports; points matter less to fans than a competitive game or victories by their favorite team.

As modern sports fans, we're told so often that points make the game that we've forgotten that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Passionate football fans love a classic defensive struggle, with two teams battling it out to a 7-3 result. Baseball fans are often entranced by a pitchers duel, with two dominant hurlers shutting down the opposing team's hitters one after the other. Every sport has its stinkers, boring games with no scoring and little intriguing action, a situation that has nothing to do with scoring and everything to do with the individual teams.

Chances in soccer can often be just as exciting as actual goals. Keeper saves, missed sitters, balls that hit off the goal frame: all of these add to the entertainment value of a soccer match. It's this nuance of the game (although I almost hesitate to call such an obvious thing a nuance) to which most Americans seem oblivious; argue with them that an American football game is boring without touchdowns, and they'd likely point out big hits, sacks, fumbles, and a litany of other events that have little to do with actual scoring. The same can be said for baseball, where situational tension, rather than any actual action, adds significantly to the level of excitement.

Conclusion? The scoring argument is crap, but more specifically, Americans are simply using it as a cop-out, a way to denigrate soccer by pointing out what seems to be an obvious "flaw".

This went way longer than I intended, and the format is not what I originally planned; I may try to present a challenge-response version of these points sometime in the future. I also wanted to work in actual statistics, but that's not really my point. Needless to say, the differences in "scoring events" for the sports I'm comparing here (using only touchdowns for football) aren't as big as you might think.

American sports fans are spoiled. We have more sports options than any other nation on the planet, and are never without an in-season product to follow at any point during the year. Football (both professional and collegiate), baseball, basketball (again, pro and college), hockey, soccer, etc., make up a sporting landscape that is more crowded in the U.S. than anywhere else. Leagues and teams are all vying for the attention of the public, while television, Internet, radio, and other media outlets bombard fans with discussion, rumors, opinion, and advertising. While it could be argued that the number of sports we have in the U.S. is an indication of a voracious appetite, and it's also true that a large population and a varied cultural makeup allow many sports to succeed, there may be a limit to how much one sports culture can support.

The "major sports" as they exist in the minds of most Americans are: football (the American kind), baseball, basketball, and hockey. While hockey's profile has taken a hit in the last few years, the sport still maintains its de facto place in the "major" quartet. Of the team sports currently played on a professional level in the United States, only soccer and lacrosse do not rate as "major" (I'm ignoring variants, i.e. arena football or indoor soccer). This is obviously not the case around the world, as soccer is most often the first (and sometimes only) sport that qualifies as "major". The sports landscape in the developed nations of Europe and South America most often consists of soccer (or football if you prefer) and perhaps one or two ancillary sports; no other nation in the world has four major professional leagues each playing a different sport that draws the attention of the populace on a large scale. Potential soccer fans in the U.S. are forced to wade through this flooded environment, and without direction (i.e. proper marketing) from soccer's leading entities, they simply never find their way to the game.

Americans, numerically, typically have more sports passions than their peers around the world. While fans in England, Italy, Germany, Brazil, etc. often support their soccer clubs with their full attention and effort, a majority of Americans split their passion between two or more teams in different sports. Media coverage of sports abroad is emblematic of this; while more attention is paid to soccer and soccer related news than in the U.S., the lack of a major secondary sport gives more room for individual sports that are given significantly less attention in the U.S. on a daily basis (i.e. tennis, golf, auto racing).

If we take a look at the sports news sites of a few major outlets abroad as compared those of a few American outlets, the differences in sports cultures are clear:

BBC



Sky Sports



I used BBC and Sky simply for language reasons, but both are good representations for European sport. Football (soccer) dominates as expected, cricket and rugby are represented but clearly secondary, and there is more of the individual sports than one would see from an American outlet (although I'll give BBC a bit of a pass with the Andy Murry headline; the Brits obsess over Murray and his tennis fortunes).

Let's contrast BBC and Sky to two major American outlets, ESPN and Sports Illustrated:

ESPN


Sports Illustrated


*NOTE* Click for larger images if you cannot see them clearly

It is important to remember the timing of these snapshots, and to put their content in the seasonal context; if we keep this in mind and focus purely on the peripheral stories rather than the headlines, we see that no one sport receives a majority of the coverage. American football is king in the U.S., but less than a week before the biggest game on its calendar, it still does not dominate the websites of these major sports news outlets (or serve as the headline for Sports Illustrated). While the individual sports that the BBC and Sky featured so prominently are also present on the ESPN and SI pages, they are surrounded on all sides by news from the major American team sports. In addition to the professional team sports stories, major college team sports also make the cut for front page inclusion; another group of competitions that splits the attention of the American sports fan.

These snapshots give a small indication of the overall sports culture, how news is reported (i.e., which sports are given preeminence), and what may be important to the target audience of these media outlets; they do not, however, exhibit the depth of the flooded American sports landscape.

Here are the top ten professional sports leagues in the world by attendance (per Wikipedia):


(Sorry about the quality of the table)

Note that 4 of the top 5 are American leagues; even if we take the size of the population into account and focus on average attendance, it's clear that Americans support professional sports over the course of a season on a scale not matched anywhere else in the world. MLS, while attempting to become culturally relevant, is forced to compete with other popular professional leagues for the attention and commitment of the consumer. This situation is unique to the United States, and makes the task all the more difficult.

As fans, the love we hold for our sports teams creates very personal connections. Our emotions are tied to the success of our teams; our greatest personal moments are often those related to great victory or a glorious championship. These connections begin in our childhoods and grow into our adulthoods, becoming essential parts of our lives. While people from cultures around the world focus their passion on their football club and identify themselves soley with that club, Americans form bonds of the same intensity with American football teams, baseball teams, basketball teams, hockey teams, etc., all at the same time. Americans are masters of sports multi-tasking; we follow several sports at once, transition from season to season with ease and support multiple teams with our money and our passion on a scale most in the world could not imagine. We have the ultimate sports culture, but the question still remains: Is there room for soccer?

I think there is, but it's going to take a lot of work on the part of a lot of people. The American appetite for sports seems insatiable, and despite the economic situation, soccer can absolutely become one of the "major" sports. I know it's already "major" for me.

Soccer's uphill battle in the U.S. is acknowledged by almost every observer, both by those who support, play, or watch the sport, and by those who have no desire to see it succeed in the American sports landscape. That uphill battle seems all the more daunting when we step back and take a look at that which has conspired to make up our American sports identity.

The sport Americans call "soccer" is the world's most ubiquitous game. It's played in every corner of the globe, by kids from countries that are economic super powers on pristine pitches under the watchful eye of highly paid coaches, as well as by kids from third-world nations suffering through disease and civil war on dirt streets with makeshift balls made from garbage. The sport's reach is unlike that of any other singular creation of man, thanks to British colonialism and the relative simplicity of the game. Americans, however, seem immune to the obsession that so clearly infects the rest of the world. We set ourselves apart, not only because of our influence and power, but because of our "independence", born from two centuries of cultivating an innate desire to "lead" rather than to "follow".

Americans see soccer as an intruder, a foreign game played by foreigners with foreign names in countries we see as "inferior" to our own. While this superior feeling has had political ramifications through the decades, its shadow has also been cast across our efforts to play the world's game. Early efforts to play soccer on a widespread professional level in the U.S. was met with some early success, but ultimately failed due to competition from "native" sports. That shadow remains to this day, strengthened by generations of Americans passing their sporting passions from parent to child, the makeup of which rarely includes soccer.

Football and baseball benefit from a deep-seated root system which can be traced through the years back to the beginnings of what is viewed as the ideal American upbringing. While the world went mad over FA Cups, Scudettos, and World Cups, we focused inward on home-grown sports like football, where schoolboy participation became the essence of American adolescence. The quarterback, not the striker, sits at the top of our social food chain, and a whole subset of American life was created through the high school version of the game. Male and female ideals came to be embodied by that most visible of football players and the girls that rooted them on, the cheerleaders. Baseball retains its place as "America's Pastime" through an almost mystical connection the followers of the game seem to have with it. The romance that the English transferred to soccer went in this country instead to baseball. These long histories are the backbone of each sport's prominence in the cultural lives of their followers. Soccer in America is faced with the daunting task of overcoming or adding to this history, while attempting to place itself alongside those passions already so deeply entrenched.

Basic xenophobia seems almost too obvious a reason for the reluctance of Americans to embrace soccer, but it is certainly the essence of that resistance. The common stated reasons for ignoring soccer, like "not enough scoring" or "it's boring" are just masks, behind which we hide our xenophobia. As a people, Americans are hard-pressed to admit that something from another part of the world could be worthwhile, unless it is presented in a palatable package that minimizes its foreignness and makes it seem almost American. Even then, we might resist that which we see as forced upon us, either because those doing the forcing we deem less-American than ourselves, or because our mistrust of that which is foreign clouds our ability to see the benefits of acceptance.

In a world where political-correctness and acceptance of others is now so highly prized, it would seem there should be an opening in the closed American sports culture, a narrow gap through which soccer could make inroads. As of now, this opening has yet to appear. The American sports media continues to make only cursory efforts to recognize the game (both domestically and internationally), while some elements of said media continue to voice an outright disdain for the sport. These actions embolden those for whom soccer is a whipping boy, and validates those who choose to ignore it.

With a spotty history that was never able to significantly impact the American consciousness, soccer continues to remain on the periphery, rejected by those who see it as either a threat or an annoyance. It seems some choose to reject soccer simply as a way to reassert their "American-ness" by declaring its inferiority to a more established sport (be it football, baseball, basketball, etc.), or by dismissing it as the pastime of bland suburban youth whose participation is seen as evidence of soccer's irrelevance. While decidedly irrational, the general attitude of the American sports fan (often embodied by the American sports writer) is a reality that soccer-loving Americans and those from abroad who wish the see the sport succeed must face. Without a concerted and wholly united effort to smash through xenophobic barriers backed up by a soccer-less history, the sport will always remain on the edge, a funny foreign sport played by men in shorts on fields most American see as more suited to American football.


Soccer's place in the pecking order of American sports is never more clear than when discussing the U.S. defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup. Despite occurring thirty years before Lake Placid, the U.S. upset of England is given a name derivative of the U.S. hockey team's shocking win: "The Miracle on Grass". That annoys me to no end.