Paper #3

Jair Steven Piñeros Briceño EWRT 2

Why I love My Football and Why You Hate It:

An Inside Look of why Football is Loved Everywhere Except the U.S.

When I came to the United States, one of the things that I missed the most from my country was

“football” or, as it is known in the U.S., soccer. I remember one time one of my new friends invited me to go

to a bar and watch a game of football, to which a replied, “Real football? The one that is played with a ball

and your feet? or “eggball” what you guys call football?”, to which he promptly retorted, “What country are

you in?”, implying that on this soil his football was the real football and mine was just soccer. In response, I

asked him, “What planet do you live on? Football is a widespread sport that does not make distinctions

between economic status - it can be played in a great stadiums as well as in the dirt with no more than two

stones to demark the goal and something that resembles a ball.” This exchange with my friend is

indicative of the difference between the cultural significance of soccer in the U.S. and much of the rest of

the world. Soccer has characteristics that, once analyzed, reveal trends of history and values within the

cultures where the sport is popular. The following analysis will shed light on why soccer is popular in so

many countries worldwide but relatively marginalized in the United States.

Perhaps one of the most distinct characteristics of soccer is the unchallenged authority that the

central referee has. Even though there are cameras and thousands of eyes watching a particular play, the

referee has seconds to decide to call a foul or not, and once it is called, there is no reversing it. It does not

matter whether he was right or wrong; once the foul is called, the decision is set in stone. This

authoritarian aspect is accepted and many times celebrated among the culture of soccer, perhaps because

it somewhat reflects the historical experiences of individual countries to which this sport is precious. For

example, England, the motherland of soccer, was under the power of an omnipotent king or queen for

many centuries. This same figure of despot authority that commanded and dictated what was fair and not

was transmitted to soccer in the form of a referee. While kings and soccer were not contemporaneous in

many countries, there are still figures in the history of these countries who held incredible power

analogous to the tyrannical hand of a king - dictators all over South America, or totalitarian governments

in Asia, or even the notion of an omnipotent God in the Roman Catholic church (as opposed to the more

democratized Protestant Church dominant in the U.S.) These are powerful figures who, like the referee in

soccer, arbitrarily dictated what was right and wrong, and who not be contradicted by people/players.

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The idea of having a despot president or having a king is very foreign to the United States, “the land of

freedom.” For this reason soccer my not have caught on in the U.S. – the omnipotent arbiter of the sport

does not sit will with the American public heralding of democracy

The power given to a single man or women in this game of 22 players also reflects the unfairness

of life in many countries where soccer is popular. The role that human error plays in the game mimics the

injustices that are present in the lives of the people in countries where there is an uneven distribution of

the wealth that is as old as the country itself an example of this could be Colombia according to the World

Bank Data 34.1 % of the population live under the line of poverty. These two characteristics of soccer,

unfairness because of human error and an unchallenged figure, play a key role in answering the question

of why this sport is loved in many parts of the world, but not in the United States. A totalitarian authority

and an asphyxiating and asymmetric distribution of the wealth are two conditions that were historically

not as present in the U.S., which has a history of a democratized political system and a relatively equal

economy of small farmers.

The insight that soccer might not be as popular in the U.S. because of its historical dissimilarities

with the rest of the world provides us with an interesting opportunity to test this hypothesis given the fact

that now the U.S. has some of the worst wealth disparities among rich counties. During the last decade

soccer has become more and more acclaimed on American soil, a trend that correlates with increasing

wealth disparity. The U.S. national team has had decent participation in international tournaments, so

much that in the last World Cup it classified first of its group, which included the historical English

powerhouse. In addition, teams like Los Angeles Galaxy or New York Red Bulls are investing their money

in renowned players in order to put, as it is called here, “soccer in the podium” alongside other American

sports. All this has happened while the United States was experiencing the deepest economical recession.

People could relate to the sense of powerless that one feels when life is just not just, as was demonstrated

during the many protests that started bursting at the end of 2011.

The timekeeping in soccer is also reflective of many of the cultures where it is popular. In soccer,

there are two periods of 45 minutes each with a 15-minute pause in between each period. Although this

time is the official time allotment, the players rarely end up playing just for 90 minutes because the clock

does for subs or other interruptions. Instead, at the end of each period, the referee estimates how much

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the game has been stopped to call or deliberate plays and then compensates for this time by tagging a

couple extra minutes at the end of each period. This time is not recorded in any systematic fashion but

rather, is an estimation of what the ref feels to be the amount of time that was lost. This relaxed, almost

sloppy way of keeping time reflects the reality of how time is conceptualized in many countries where

soccer is popular - time is thought of loosely and not given as much importance as in the United States.

This same factor is one of the biggest contrasts with many sports in the United States, where the time is

kept with such a compulsive obsession that it boils down to the fraction of a second. These two ways of

time keeping are particular to each culture as well as the pace of life they each reflect. In the United States,

not only in sports but in life in general, the pace of life is extremely fast as the public obsesses over

maximizing time, squeezing it until you have last drop of possible productivity, being always busy, and

having a very routinized schedule. In contrast, in the majority of countries where soccer plays a big role in

the culture, life seems to be slower; the ever growing pressure of moving, moving, moving here in the U.S.

just disappears and time becomes this approximated thing that is there but at the same time seems absent.

The uniforms in soccer are also are extremely significant, holding much more meaning than in

other sports. On the world stage, they are the dreams of a whole nation; there is no other sport in the

world that incarnates the patriotism of so many nations as happens with the biggest soccer tournament in

the World Cup, which boast even more viewers than the Olympics. The uniforms of almost every national

team are inspired by the color of their flags (with exception of Italy) and the dominance of some national

teams over the U.S. disrupts the power structure of the current world order. It is known that there are

around eight to ten teams that are almost always the winner, and this is perhaps one of the reasons United

States just decided to ignore the biggest sport in the world. This is not a sport for a nation accustomed to

always being on the top of everything.

Advertising practices in soccer have probably also contributed to the lack of the sports popularity

in the United States. Advertising in soccer is big, but perhaps not big enough for the biggest advertising

consumer in the world, the United States. Other big American sports, such as football or basketball, are

propped up by big corporate sponsors interested in using the sport to promote their brand. There is

always a culture of commercialization that accompanies these American sports. It is for this reason that

out of 60 minutes in a game of football the action is actually just 11 minutes on average according to a The

Wall Street Journal article entitled “11 minutes of action”. The rest of the time goes to advertisements -

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commercials or watching replays where the background is filled with advertisements. With soccer, in

contrast, the continuity of the periods does not leave space for annoying advertisements. For a soccer fan,

it would be a sin to stop a match just to commercialize a product. Although many clubs have sponsors that

get to have their brands embedded on the jersey, many fans do not even notice when their teams changes

its sponsor. Recently, sponsors have tried to impose more commercialization on the sport, for example, a

new rule that forbids a player to take off their shirts or cover the team sponsor once he scores a goal.

Nevertheless, the sport and its players have resisted, preferring to receive this penalization than give up

the euphoria and the tradition of dedicating goals to the fans by taking their shirt off and throwing it into

the crowd.

It is true that soccer is not a top sport in the United States, but it is also true that this fact reflects

the differences between the historical reality and the value system in the U.S. as opposed to soccer-loving

countries. Yet it also its true that soccer is gradually increasing its popularity in the U.S., which reflects the

changing nature of the wealth disparities in the U.S. economy as well as a sense of injustice. In addition,

the intransigent hand of evangelical religion is gaining a spot in the American culture as an unchallenged

authoritarian power, something relatively absent before, and which makes the idea of an omnipotent

referee more digestible. As Scharnk brings to light in his essay “Sports and the America Dream”, the

United States is a country that morphs and picks a sport to love according to its status quo.

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Work Cited

Foer, Franklin. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Briderman, David. "11 Minutes of Action." The Wall Street Journal. N.p., 15 Jan. 2010 Web. 12 Mar. 2013.

Schrank, Jeffrey. "Sports and the America Dream." EWRT 2. Comp. Lydia Hearn. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 181-82. Print.

"Poverty Headcount Ratio at National Poverty Line (% of Population)." Data. N.p., n.d.

Web. 13 Mar. 2013.