PDA

View Full Version : Good article on US Soccer in general



MannyIsGod
06-17-2006, 04:47 AM
Overhyped, overrated and over here, USA find Europe hard to conquer

ALEX MASSIE IN WASHINGTON
THE United States football squad arrived in Germany in determined mood. They knew their task was as simple, to gain the respect of the European soccer establishment. The Americans knew only too well that European football followers do not view the US as the emerging power it so very earnestly hopes to be. The Americans also knew that their fifth place in the FIFA rankings was universally ridiculed.

They were all too aware that few people in Europe expected Bruce Arena's squad to come close to equalling their 2002 achievement when they reached the quarter-finals. The truth was that the United States had never performed in Europe. Not when it counted. Respect and, perhaps, just a little bit of love was what they wanted.


Then they took the field. And everything fell apart. A bafflingly lethargic performance against an admittedly impressive Czech Republic side resulted in a comprehensive 3-0 drubbing and complaints from sports fans on the western side of the Atlantic: ''We waited four years for that?' Where was the game plan? Where was the passion? What was going on here?'

Asked what needed to be improved before the US play Italy today, Landon Donovan, the LA Galaxy midfielder from whom so little had been delivered after so much expectation, was blunt: "Everything."

Though soccer aficionados always knew that a group containing the Czech Republic, Italy and Ghana would be more than challenging and that a repeat of 2002's heroics was less than likely, the great mass of the American sporting public was not so prepared for potential disappointment. FIFA's rankings, impenetrable and preposterous to football insiders, sold the idea to the sport's new American audience that the US was a superpower on the brink of glory, waiting for its moment to assume its rightful place amongst the world's great powers.

This, alas, was exacerbated by ESPN's promotional campaign boasting that this was the greatest American side ever to depart Uncle Sam's shores. Even if true this was still an assurance that, like so much advertising, promised more than it could reasonably be expected to deliver.

So when the Czechs cashed in, thanks to American sloppiness, the headline writers felt free to lament the 'embarrassment' of this 'reality Czech'. Writing in the New York Times, columnist George Vecsey should have known better than to simultaneously repeat the FIFA rankings canard while suggesting that the US was unfit to play with the big boys. The pace of Czech's play produced "the effect of somebody speeding up the treadmill in the gym when you are not looking. This is what happened to the fifth-ranked team in the world yesterday. It flew off the treadmill".

That is an over-reaction. The US were never world-beaters but nor are they now hopeless and hapless. They are what they were a week ago: a decent, well-organised, excellently prepared team that lack the creative spark - Landon Donovan notwithstanding - that can truly unnerve more skilful opponents. With luck, they might have - and may yet - reach the knock-out stages, but few would have made them favourites to do so before the tournament started (and even fewer would now).

In 2002, the Americans defeated Portugal and drew with hosts South Korea in the group stages, beat their arch-rivals Mexico in the second round and performed creditably in defeat against Germany. No wonder expectations were high that they could wipe away the embarrassment of their last World Cup visit to Europe when they lost all three games at France '98.

Too high in fact. Though the Americans have more than matched Mexico in recent years, their only significant victories against non-CONCACAF opposition in the past two years were wins at home to Venezuela and a 4-0 whipping of Poland in March 2004. Just as significantly, the US played only three matches in Europe in the two years before the World Cup (including a 1-1 draw with Scotland at Hampden). Though Arena brought an experienced squad to Germany, they had not been tested in the furnaces of either demanding group competition or hostile enemy territory in friendly encounters.

Equally, for all that Major League Soccer is firmly established (crowds of 15,000 plus, expanding next season with a new side in Toronto, franchises selling for $75 million plus) it remains a league whose predominant style of play disdains physicality or the pacey counter-attacking style of play that so frequently thrives at international level. As a training ground for the World Cup, it leaves something to be desired.

Though television ratings for the World Cup have exceeded those for ice hockey and tennis, football will remain an upwardly mobile second-tier sport for the foreseeable future. Some 17 million Americans played soccer at least once last year, but not all of them are fans of football played by people they're not related too. MLS is here to stay and, in time, it's reasonable to suppose that the US will, with all its energy and determination, improve steadily.

Today, however, all eyes are on the Italians. There is a stubborn hopefulness about American fans today, based principally upon the belief that their team cannot play as feebly against the Italians as they did against the Czechs.

Arena put it well (before the Czech debacle), "There are no excuses. If we're not successful, we're not good enough."





The author has us pegged.






http://sport.scotsman.com/football.cfm?id=888942006

Ariel
06-17-2006, 05:00 AM
Interesting article. The more I read, the more I'm convinced that those truly outclassed are not American soccer players, but American soccer jornalists. Embarrasing.

SPARKY
06-17-2006, 05:14 AM
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SDPSVJD

Lexington
The odd man out

Jun 8th 2006
The Economist

America's coolness towards football is another example of American exceptionalism

http://www.economist.com/images/20060610/D2306US0.jpg

FOR the next month the world will be engaged in the closest thing yet found to a universal religion—watching football (or soccer, as Americans call it). From the mansions of Pimlico to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, everyone but a few eccentrics will stop what they are doing in order to watch teams of young men trying—usually without success—to get a ball into a net. The World Cup will be broadcast to 5 billion people in 189 countries.

Amid this global fervour the United States will stand out like a temperance preacher at a Bierfest. Football is not quite the non-sport that it once was. The American team is not bad. There are a few pockets of football enthusiasts, mostly in posh suburbs and Latino-crowded inner cities. Fans will be able to follow the game without resorting to Spanish-language channels. (Oh really? In prime time?) But football still remains a distant also-ran behind American sports such as baseball, basketball, hockey and American football (don't forget lacrosse and bowling) (in 2002 only 3.9m Americans watched the World Cup final, compared with 95m who watched this year's Super Bowl). The country that dominates the world's popular culture is hopelessly marginal when it comes to the world's most popular sport.

America's marginality is underlined by its failure to export its own sports. Baseball is popular in Japan and Central America, and basketball has recently become a craze in China (Yeah, basketball isn't big elsewhere. Dumb Brit.); but that is a pretty poor record compared with the British Empire's success in exporting one of the world's most idiosyncratic games, cricket. (Dude, cricket, the only sport with a bat and ball more boring than baseball) The National Football League has singularly failed to convert Europeans to American football, despite decades of investment (this year's World Bowl attracted only 36,000 spectators). At a time when the world is obsessed with such icons of American popular culture as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, nobody outside America gives a damn about Barry Bonds (hey, I'm in America and I don't give a fuck about Bonds) or LeBron James.

America is perhaps the only country that greets the World Cup with an orgy of football-bashing. In 1986 Jack Kemp took to the floor of Congress to contrast “European socialist” soccer with “democratic” and “capitalist” American football. In 2003 a blogger even pointed out that a leading al-Qaeda terrorist had been a European soccer player: “You don't see any former NFL players or Major League baseball players joining al-Qaeda, do you?” (Looks like someone's been reading AHF's blog.)

This year is no different—though, for the time being at least, the focus of moral outrage has shifted from hooliganism to sexual depravity, with commentators fixating on Germany's willingness to provide “sex garages” and “mega-brothels” to slake the lusts of depraved football fans. On June 6th Tim Parks, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argued that the competition was “born out of cheating” before giving Uncle Sam a pat on the back: America finds it hard to get involved in this game of “world domination” because it is too busy with the “real thing”.

Yankee hostility to football draws on deep wells of both patriotism and populism. The history of assimilation has been one of abandoning foreign sports (primarily football) in favour of American pastimes. The sons of football-playing parents knew that they had become good Americans when they could quote the batting average of left-handed Yankee players in losing seasons. More recently, football has become embroiled in the culture wars. The most prominent supporters of football, apart from new immigrants, are overclass parents who want their little darlings to play a civilised foreign game rather than the lumbering American performance that bears the same name. (Man, the overclass sound pretty cool).

If the World Cup is an opportunity for football-bashing in America, it is also an opportunity for America-bashing in the rest of the world. Budweiser has tried to make a joke of America's weakness as a football power with the slogan “You do the football, we'll do the beer”. (er, um, ugh). But for many Europeans football is not a joking matter. Andrei Markovits, a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of “Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism”, argues that Europeans are in a mood of “constant irritation” when it comes to America and football. Americans, they grumble, either fail to embrace the “beautiful game” or, when they do, get it wrong. How dare they turn it into a women's game! And how dare they insist on calling it “soccer”! (They're afraid that one day the US will start to care and take that over too). Germany has been in high dudgeon for months over the fact that the national coach, Jürgen Klinsmann, is an Americanophile who lives in Los Angeles and has employed American fitness-trainers and a psychologist to help prepare the team.


The offside rule

Behind all this lies a bigger debate about America's cultural idiosyncrasy. Americans like to think of themselves as global trendsetters and standard-makers. But a raft of opinion polls since the Iraq war have demonstrated that America is not so much a trendsetter as an outlier—more individualistic, more religious, more nationalistic, more anti-government and more gung-ho about the use of force than other countries. (Dude, this article was about sports.)

This evidence of American exceptionalism has provoked a fierce debate within the United States between “red” Americans, who are proud of their country's oddness, and “blue” Americans (mostly Democrats), who think that America should pay more attention to the rest of the world. It has also provoked an even fiercer backlash in other countries against America's “weird” values, such as its support for the death penalty and its predilection for unilateral action. (So that's why the US cares more about Arena League Football. I get it.)

It is possible that American exceptionalism may wane in the next few years, particularly if the Democrats can recapture the presidency. (So a Democrat wins in '08 and the US becomes a fubol power). Unilateral action is out of fashion, thanks to the Iraq mess. But when it comes to sport, American exceptionalism looks more enduring. It is hard to imagine America's indigenous sports being forced to cede much ground to soccer, short of a dramatic victory by the national team in July; and it is impossible to imagine the rest of the world abandoning their beloved footballs for pigskins or baseball bats. (yeah, they're too busy hitting the hardwood).

MannyIsGod
06-17-2006, 05:45 AM
Thats a stupid article, but I don't understand what point you're trying to make posting it. It would be pretty difficult for the games to be on during prime time unless they played in the middle of the night over in Germany.

I understand most Americans don't get soccer and that this journalist was an idiot, but I still don't get the point of your post and the comments in it.

SPARKY
06-17-2006, 05:47 AM
Well, this thread was about the state of "US soccer in general", no?

Ariel
06-17-2006, 06:26 AM
That second article may or may not be relevant to the matter at hand, but it's anything but stupid.

MannyIsGod
06-17-2006, 06:30 AM
:lol

Well, I think Sparky and I disagree on how much we like soccer, but I think we'll both agree that the second author wasn't very bright. But then again writing about sports for The Economist was bound to have a political slant in some way.

Gerryatrics
06-17-2006, 06:38 AM
I guess American soccer journalists aren't the only ones outclassed. Americans will be powerhouses in the World Cup only if we elect a Democrat as President?... of course, that makes perfect sense. And it always amazes me how these stuck-up sticky-beak football elitists like to mock Americans for calling the game soccer instead of football, when it's an English term and is short for "Association Football". Sorry for being too specific? Guess we could call it "that one game where you kick the ball around, no, not that one, the other one" so there's some ambiguity as to which of the five or six various types of "football" we're referring to.

SPARKY
06-17-2006, 06:39 AM
I just found some parts of the article amusing but otherwise it covers the basic state of the game in the US decently. It is a little slanted and noticably deficient in regards to discussing the impact of basketball globally. I guess the Brits like to ignore what's happening on the continent.

SPARKY
06-17-2006, 06:47 AM
So soccer never has really caught on in a big way in the US. Well, it happens. I'm not sure this is intrinsically a bad thing. Ultimately the sports one grew up playing and following as a young child are the ones that are exciting to us. For those on the outside looking in, there is bound to be a mixed reaction. I guess true football afficianados are aghast when they see a NFL game, but hey, we took the ball, made it oblong, added passing and pads and we have one hell of a game.

The article criticizes American provincialism in re sports but also demostrates a wee bit of it.

Extra Stout
06-17-2006, 09:58 AM
The Scotsman article was really good. The Economist article was ridiculous.

MaNuMaNiAc
06-17-2006, 01:13 PM
The second article may sound ridiculous to you, but it definately has some truth in it. Still I think it is a discussion better left for the political forum.

I think the Scotsman article was top notch

Extra Stout
06-17-2006, 01:21 PM
The second article may sound ridiculous to you, but it definately has some truth in it. Still I think it is a discussion better left for the political forum.
Having "some truth" is not terribly impressive for an article in The Economist. The author comes off as having spent very little time in the U.S.

MaNuMaNiAc
06-17-2006, 01:29 PM
Having "some truth" is not terribly impressive for an article in The Economist. The author comes off as having spent very little time in the U.S.
true

nbrans
06-17-2006, 02:01 PM
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SDPSVJD

Lexington
The odd man out

Jun 8th 2006
The Economist

America's marginality is underlined by its failure to export its own sports. Baseball is popular in Japan and Central America, and basketball has recently become a craze in China; but that is a pretty poor record compared with the British Empire's success in exporting one of the world's most idiosyncratic games, cricket.

Hmm.. let's see, cricket is popular in India, Australia... maybe we should take a cue from the Brits and colonize some more countries. That sure worked well! What a great and proven way to export sports! Then we can go and brag about how well we've done in as condescending a way as possible.

TDMVPDPOY
06-17-2006, 02:08 PM
bruce arena is australias version of frank farina.

dont get me wrong, frank was a good coach, just that the players have never lived up their hype and it never showed on the scoresheet when it matters in really good competitions. Guus change that.

USA needs a change imo. sumone that can bring more tactics, etc....u guys can afford that right?

Manu'sMagicalLeftHand
06-17-2006, 02:48 PM
The second article is a very good sample of what happens when a sports writer who failed to get a degree on Sociology, Psychology, International Relations, Political Science and Economics, tries to explain anything.