SPORT One evening last year, I found myself sitting beside a lake in Norway with
the two foremost experts on US suburbia. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, the brilliant cartoon send-up of the suburbs, were attending the same conference as me. At one point we talked about soccer in the US. Yes, this really happened.
That evening comes back to me as David Beckham packs his many bags
for Los Angeles. As the new boy at the LA Galaxy, Beckham has been handed the task of popularising professional soccer in the American suburbs, the real-life equivalents of South Park. In the words of the cliché, he must “put soccer on the map” in America. He will find that impossible, because soccer is already on the map in America. The US has a strong soccer culture. It is simply different from any other country’s soccer culture and will remain different despite Beckham.
Contrary to popular opinion, American soccer has been a phenomenal success. Although the US already had four big team sports and had no need
of another, the game has come from almost nowhere since the 1970s to conquer American childhoods. Today more American kids under 12 play soccer than baseball, football and ice hockey combined. Admittedly, they rarely watch it. By the lake, Stone said that despite playing the game all his childhood, he could never have named five professional soccer players. In fact, he hadn’t even been conscious of the professional game’s existence. His was
a very American suburban story. “It became a standing joke”, writes David Wangerin in his book Soccer in a Football World, “that the reason so many Americans played soccer was that it enabled them to avoid watching it.”
Nonetheless, soccer has penetrated most branches of the country’s entertainment industry, from The Sopranos to presidential elections in which “Soccer Moms” are considered pivotal figures. And whatever else you think of immigration, it has been great for American soccer. More than 35m inhabitants of the US were born abroad, perhaps a third of them in soccer-mad Mexico. No wonder that last year nearly 20m Americans played soccer at least once. Possibly only Brazil has more participants.
Many of America’s ethnic groups follow foreign soccer. So does what Stone called the game’s “geek cult following”, a growing American demographic that bunks off work in mid-afternoon to watch Champions League matches. During World Cups, even some suburbanites switch on. Nearly 17m Americans saw last year’s World Cup final – 4m more than watched an average game in the NBA finals and almost as many as saw the average World Series game in 2006.
However, hardly anybody follows the Major League Soccer that Beckham will now adorn. As the author Dave Eggers notes: “Newspaper coverage of the games usually is found in the nether regions of the sports section, near the car ads and the biathlon roundups”.
Some TV ratings for MLS games “are in the realm of – or even, in some
cases, actually below – tractor pulls, skateboarding competitions, and bass fishing tournaments,” writes Andrei Markovits, professor of comparative politics at the University of Michigan. Beckham’s job is to bring the MLS to America’s many South Parks.
Yet the people who hired him to do that don’t understand why soccer is loved by suburbanites. The game has thrived as a pastime for the likes of Matt Stone precisely because there is no big soccer in America. The Soccer Moms are glad soccer is not a big professional sport such as basketball or American football. Many Americans are fed up with their big professional sports, whose stars do lousy and unethical things like shooting their limousine drivers.
By contrast, the Moms tend to see soccer as an innocent game, free of certain aspects of modern America:
not violent, not drenched in money, and not very black. Most American soccer professionals earn modest salaries – one of Beckham’s teammates is on basic pay of $12,900 a year – and tend to be middle-class white college boys. That plays well in South Park.
In every other country, Markovits observes, soccer is a male “realm of unquestioned virility”. Only in the US has the absence of big male soccer allowed women to claim the game. Half of American players are females – another mark of what Markovits calls the US’s “soccer exceptionalism”.
The US is a soccer country but different from all others. Many Americans like soccer but very few watch American soccer – and they don’t need to. In the age of globalisation, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to follow Manchester United on cable TV and the internet while ignoring their local professional team, which might in any case be 500 miles away. Only a tiny minority of Americans watch soccer in the stadium but then so do only a tiny minority of British or Italian fans. For almost all fans everywhere, soccer is a TV game.
The MLS may already be too late to woo American fans away from foreign soccer but that barely matters. The MLS is not American soccer, just a tiny piece of the mosaic. Beckham might well find that more Americans watched him play for Real Madrid than ever will at the Galaxy.
