World Cup Confessional

I’ve been railing against the evils of soccer for many years. My friends can tell that I’m at least half joking, mocking more the McCarthyist than the world’s biggest sport. As it turns out I’m not the only one who perceives the communist menace in soccer. So even as the engines of American crass commercialism canablize soccer with the same blood lust that’s turned the NBA into an extended Nike  advertising vehicle, it still breaks my heart to see good American kids playing an unAmerican commie sport.  After all, we have best sports in the world right here in the good ol’ US&A. And don’t get me started on Soccer Moms as a conservative political coalition. I’m certain that in hell, Sarah Palin is parked outside a soccer game in her SUV.

However, as someone who has made a documentary film about the social impact of sports, I’d have to be more xenophobic than Avigdor Lieberman not to appreciate the cultural meaning of soccer. Important works such as Franklin Foer’s “How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization” examine the global meaning of soccer covering similar themes as Bend it Like Beckham, and my very own “First Basket”.

So it is within this global cultural commentator excuse that I can admit having gotten a little bit caught up in World Cup fever as team USA tied the mighty UK as well as the more footloose Slovenians, and staged a dramatic upset over the heavily favored Algerians. The draw against the heavily favored Brits filled me with a particularly deep feeling of patriotic sports vindication.  I lived in the UK for a year during grad school, and on more than one occasion, Brits randomly stopped me on the street and asked me if i was a Yank (American, not NY Yankee). Before giving me a chance to ask how they could tell, they would go on to explain  that soccer was a better sport than American football because in American football the clock stops between plays. This enraged me because American football is the greatest sport in the world. Never mind that by British logic then, marathon running and cricket are far superior to soccer.

Team USA ignited the wick of American soccer hope. As John Oliver and Jon Stewart duked it out on the daily show, US fans seemed to have more of a fighting chance with every new tournament.

So it is with this sense of national hope and competitive pride that my quadr-annual mild soccer interest ended with the inevitable heartbreak (albeit quite minor, compared to those dished out yearly by the Mets) of our loss to the far more capable Ghanaians.

But does our decent into soccer necessarily mark the abandonment of those sports and sports values that made us great as a nation?

Welcoming America to the Third World, John Oliver summed up our progress rather well, “For the most powerful country in the world, we’re in “pretty bad shape” but “for a third world country,” we’re “easily in the top five”. Our soccer standing is now in synch with our “abysmal math scores”.

So, as I ponder this as a rationale to further trash soccer, I have to come clean. Even if it is an unAmerican commie sport, it’s still the most popular sport in the world. (And I’m no tea-bagger myself….). My aversion to soccer is not because it’s different or unknown, it’s because it requires too much running, and as a competitive kid I had a hard time keeping up with the ball. Having confessed my sins against soccer, I now have a clear conscience to boldly root for the day envisioned by Jon Stewart, when the USA wins the world cup, and “the whole rest of the world has to then refer to the sport as soccer.”

John Oliver’s American Soccernomics: