This week, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa gets underway. Since the 1920's, when the cold war between the International Olympic Committee and the International Football Association began (primarily over amateurism issues), the World Cup slowly and surely supplanted the Olympics as the earth's largest sporting spectacle.
While the IOC worked long and hard to convince the sporting world that a modernized ancient Greek concept was a good idea, the rise (and genius) of FIFA can be credited to its basic success in tapping into a deep-rooted cultural instinct most of the world already had: the urge to kick a ball around with other people in an organized fashion. True love is always more powerful than shrewd marketing -- when taken from that perspective, it's no wonder that this single sport left all the other Games in its wake.
But ever since soccer was dropped from Los Angeles 1932, mostly for financial reasons and a lack of local interest, the sport grew up weird in the United States. For starters, it took on a different name in the 1940's, resulting in a sort of Babel-tower disconnect with the rest of the world. Other sports, like baseball and basketball and American-Style Football, became the national pastimes, and the "global game" spent most of the 20th Century struggling to stay in our top ten. The U.S. relationship with soccerfootyfootball has been bizarre all along, and it's not really getting any more stabilized or normal. In most countries, the sport Just Is, like the sky and water and particle physics. Here, the bond is loose, complex and highly theoretical.
We can't even just put the games on television and let them speak for themselves. In 2010, as ESPN rolls out unprecedented, multi-hundred million dollar coverage, it feels more like a political campaign than a television event. Like any campaign, there's a base audience to indulge and a separate population to persuade. In this particular case, there are those who "know the game," and those who still need to be convinced, after all these years, of how great it is.
I honestly don't know where I fit into that picture. Many in that first group are very difficult to be around, much less watch a match with. They talk and act a lot differently than folks I've met from places where soccer and humanity are symbiotically connected. I think it's because a lot of those first-groupers were, once upon a time, part of the second group, converted through a television set instead of on the pitch itself. (And this is a lie; I know at least 20 of this person.) So I'll be spending the next month avoiding people like this, and I'll attempt to enjoy the occasional peek at the matches in spite of them, and we'll see how that goes.
The American soccer superfan, often found speaking in vaguely Continental terms learned on television from Tommy Smyth, is not a newfangled stock character by any means. There was a lot of high-minded fake smuggery after the 1994 World Cup here in the States, and I took it all back then as classic American us-vs.themism. I also used to think that this behavior was a function of guilt, some hyper-liberal yearning to reparate to the world for 80-plus years of sporting ignorance. But I've come to the conclusion that this has nothing to do with sports at all, that it's more a need to take a chair at the table of a misunderstood minority. It's a sort of social disease, a benign version of "the clap," as in, the desire to be part of shared applause.
I speak from experience here. I have struck poses and thrown shapes. I was a Pavement fan in the early 1990's, a latecomer to The Sopranos and The Wire later on. Traveling with the Grateful Dead after high school only got me a bunch of (smelly) acquaintances who I don't keep up with anymore. "People just don't get it," the mating call goes. "When will they see the light and understand?"
But this kind of Light is a terrible place to be, a self-congratulatory orgy of false simpatico and passive-aggression. The binding force is arrogance, so discussions tend to devolve into contests about who knows the most about the subject. Deep down, everyone thinks everyone else is a jerk, and that's no way to make friends.
I don't See The Light, but I'm aware of it. I like soccer, I enjoy watching it, I have my teams, but it isn't in my blood. I played in high school, and I was an above-average goalie with decent reflexes, but I quit to focus on the school paper. I don't love soccer, and I can't pretend for the sake of social currency. Soccer will never be a part of my DNA, never was, and no amount of persistent marketing or 3D television coverage will ever change that. It's too late for me, and it might be too late for my generation as well.
Maybe it's just too late for my country. Perhaps 1932 represents some sort of Original Sin, and we'll never get back to the garden -- without a time machine and the British blueprint for a soccer/rugby/darts sporting culture, that is. America didn't grow with the game, the game didn't grow with us, and it's not in our country's essential fabric. Which is okay. It's a niche sport with excellent and diverse demographics... even without the evangelists, but there's money to be made off of them too.
Perhaps things will be different later on. All the sons and daughters of soccer moms might grow up to become an unstoppable economic force with unbreakable power, and they might demand the MLS instead of the NFL from whatever ESPN becomes in 20 years. It would be more in line with what they grew up with, after all, what they're comfortable with, who they are as people.
But I think it's more likely that they just won't care. The soccer subsection of generalized Generation Millennial-B will probably take its soccer where it can find it, gather together to speak the language with fellow true believers, and otherwise get on with its life.
People who truly love something generally don't feel the need to convert people who don't want that thing -- this is a dynamic currently at work with America's suddenly-marginalized pastimes. U.S. hockey fans who grew up playing and watching the game know where to find NHL/AHL/WHL contests and discuss the sport with their friends; for the most part, they've given up on sales pitching and are perfectly happy in the minority. The NBA has devolved into a sad, corrupt freakshow, but there are people who still love that for the right reasons. I've found that they tend to suffer together in silence, gathered in small support groups.
Personally, I can't think of anything that I've grown to love because it's been shoved down my throat by marketers. I've come to most of the things on my list of interests organically, I'm pretty sure of that. I'm definitely not saying this is a superior method, because it doesn't fit well within a "social media" construct where people define themselves with avatars, screen names and Twibbons based on their consumption patterns. Plus, scattershot dissonance in one's chosen pursuits tends to confuse rather than fascinate, so martyrdom is kept to a minimum. Martyrdom requires an audience.
The best-case scenario for the American 2010 World Cup marketing campaign, and perhaps the only scenario, is a few thousand more card-carrying members of the Soccer Snob Club. But among most of us in the 25-39 demographic powerzone, any near-term growth in soccer will be of the manufactured, false, disposable variety. By August, the easily-amused will be on to the next Big Event; as with anything else marketed like a salable garment, soccer will be back on a hanger in the storage closet. MLS stadiums will remain half empty, the women's league will fold again, the superfans will remain happily misunderstood, and folks will keep wondering why "selling the game" in the United States is such an endless, uphill battle.
Or maybe the battle will finally end in surrender. I certainly hope so.
