Is Soccer Ruining America?

Carlos Caso-Rosendi

A response to a dumb tirade

This is my response to How Soccer is Ruining America: A Jeremiad, by Stephen H. Webb, some egghead that writes for First Things. His rants indented in blue for clarity.

Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return.

Well. I fail to see the cause and effect here. But first some background. I played soccer steadily form age 5 until I was 28. Soccer is a British game, although it is called football in the rest of the world. The British use the word soccer to make rugby and football into one, therefore the British Soccer Association combines the players of both sports in one group. Churchill, Fleming, Montgomery, C. S. Lewis, T. E. Lawrence, J. R. R.Tolkien, John Lennon, to name a few, were soccer players. They played soccer (plus rugby, cricket, runners, etc.) and they were definitely not dumb. I have read extensively on the history of the British Empire and so far I haven't read any historian that blames their decline to the evils of soccer.

If you think there is no competition in soccer it is because you haven't looked carefully. I have played full-back and right wing and I know the sting of defeat going both ways: failing to defend and also failing to use a good opportunity to attack. There is plenty of individual responsibility (to your team, and to your girlfriend watching the game). The game is fast, strategic decisions are made in fractions of a second, team work is of the utmost importance. But to know that much, you have to know how to play. To watch soccer is entertaining—like with most sports—only if you know what's going on. Eggheads can relate to American football (a great sport, by the way) because it is slow and it gives them plenty of statistics to think about. Soccer is for fast brains, mounted on a set of fast legs, equipped with the right pair of lungs and a good heart. Don't forget the keen eyes to see and evaluate the 21 other players in the field while you run.

What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.) The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.

Buddy, watching American football is not exactly the most exhilarating experience. In its modern form, it is played in bursts of just a few minutes or even seconds. Of course, you have to sell commercials for TV, and the constant interruptions to the flow of the game are a good opportunity to sell potato chips, and vacuum cleaners.

It is obvious that you have no idea of what's going on in a soccer game. The later American generations seem to have a problem learning new things, like the metric system. Any Bolivian mechanic can tell the difference between a .10 thread bolt and its closest SAE equivalent. He grew up managing two systems (plus the standard Spanish system of cubits and leagues) and his brain did not explode. He is not dumb. Neither are Brazilians, Argentines, Chileans, Peruvians, etc. most of them can also speak more than one language. I grew in a neighborhood where Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and other languages were used. I learned Italian as a kid and I don't even remember a time when I did not speak it. I also learned to play chess, soccer, backgammon, basketball, rugby, and a host of other sports and games. I would have learned to play American football and baseball but those sports were not popular in those places at the time. Players from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or Puerto Rico are proof that the Spanish can learn to play American games very well. When I was growing up, the only American game available to us was basketball.

Soccer is not "linear" it is three-dimensional. You have to be able to chew gum and walk down the street to understand how to

• run (1 to 5 m.p.h),
• keep the ball under control,
• look at the field ahead of you,
• look at the guy coming up behind you,
• see who is better positioned to receive your pass,
• see if your adversary's goalie is covering the goal completely,
• be able to skip the full back coming at you,
• and make sure you are not off-side

Once can hardly call it a "linear" job. And I am only describing the job of a wing or a center-forward. Full-backs and center-fielders have a lot more to do and they cannot fail.

For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.

Quantity is not quality. I know a 36-22 score looks like something happened during the game, but then remember that points are remembered for ages in soccer. The goal scored by Cardenas against the Celtic in 1967—a masterful shot from behind half-field that passed the goal line right at the left angle, giving Racing of Argentina, the first World Cup ever to be obtained by an Argentine club. Or that goal by Pelé that gave Brazil the World Cup in Mexico, 1970. There are many other glorious moments like that. We remember them the same way that you remember that pass by Doug Flutie when he was playing for the Patriots. Check this out.

1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.

Limitations are natural character builders. They teach you to exercise self-restraint. When Picasso decided to paint in one color (blue, pink) for a while, he was voluntarily restraining himself to develop his style and definition of form.

If you have the ability to restrain yourself you won't be punching or kicking walls like a brutish idiot. In the golden era of soccer, when English gentlemen played it, the game was a way to teach young men to respect the rival and win the games on wit and physical endurance, always remaining a perfect gentleman. Raising your foot over the level of the chest of your opponent is considered foul play even today. Rules, team play and gentlemanship are what soccer teaches you, and for that matter, what every sport should teach. Did Jesus taught His disciples about "destroying your opponent with insurmountable power" like you write? I must have missed that part of the Gospel.

2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.

Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, “Hey batter batter!” as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.

Comparing two very different sports and concluding that one is better is, frankly, stupid. Baseball is a wonderful sport. I would have never thought of it is as a way of "breaking kids". Joe Di Maggio seemed to me the paramount of coolness. I don't think anyone had to break him to make him the great player that he was. The bleachers behavior that you describe is nothing compared to what you hear from the fans any Sunday in England. Your comparison is dumb, insulting and uninformed.

3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.

I am not a fan of penalty shoot-outs but that is a way to untie a game when defenders and attackers are well matched. The fun is in playing, not in scoring only. Also, when a player faces a good goalie on a penalty kick, he has seven meters to place his shot (about 23 ft. for you), while the best goalie can cover about five meters. The kicker is only twelve steps away. That can be a dramatic moment, a combination of psychology, strategy and geometry that can be pretty exhilarating. Again, you have to be smart enough to know what is actually going on to enjoy it, Stephen...

4) And then there is the question of gender. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.

Your daughter should kick you for passing her bad brain genes. With a little luck she got your hair and not your dim powers of observation. Again, destroying your opponent is not a masculine business. Showing restraint in the use of force—and—being able to achieve your goals is a more preferable way of doing things. Otherwise any second century Roman could call American football players a bunch of sissies for not killing off their opponents at the end of the game. If Pelé looks feminine to you, you should see his wife. She is really good looking.

By the way: did you read St. Augustine on bloodlust? Quite a shocker he disagrees with you. He does not consider that a virtue.

Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.

The left is enjoying its heyday in America today because of sloppy, misguided thinkers like you. I miss the days when Conservatives could listen to William F. Buckley instead to the drivel you have presented us with. By the way, good old Will grew up in Mexico and he could kick a soccer ball pretty well. I suppose that turns him in to some kind of a commie mole, according to your system of thinking.

Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and [t]elevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.

Soccer is of the same "foreign" origin as the music of the Star Spangled Banner, Vivien Leigh, Rolls Royce cars and Bob Hope. The fact that you cannot play or are not intelligent enough to understand it, does not constitute a national security issue. Face it, you are not exactly a quick-witted jock, bud.

I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me! Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. “Why not,” she asked? “Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? “Not at all,” I replied, “I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end.” That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.

I pity your students, and your daughter too. It is pretty bad to have a jackass for a father. I bet you don't know how to dance either.

The problem with most American Conservatives lately, is their incompetence born from a long time of not having to achieve anything through effort. This country needs a nice prolonged war followed by a period of real economic depression. That will clean up the chaff and bring up real values, real thinkers, real managers, real teachers and writers who can think a subject through, instead of whining like pussies about the unfairness of things they cannot master.

What is ruining America is not soccer, it is soft-brain academicians, pharisees with no character or guts to get things done.

Notes

Stephen H. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. His recent books include American Providence and Taking Religion to School.


Carlos Caso-Rosendi is a 54 year-old ignorant Argentine-American who used to play soccer and rugby in his youth. Since he was a little boy, he has been a fan of Boca Juniors, the many-times World Champion club from Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his lifetime he had the privilege to see many great players perform, among them the greatest soccer player of all time: Edson Arantes Do Nascimento, Pelé, the greatest right-wing ever and a gentleman, both in the soccer field and in the greater and nobler field of life. He was a real world champion, unlike others that play among themselves and call the whole thing the "World" Series. Ha!

Reactions:

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