Soccer: The World’s Least American Game

Think of the great accomplishments of civilization: skyscrapers reaching toward heaven, bridges joining divided peoples, dams powering ambitious societies. How many have been built by human beings using only their feet?

Not many, right?

So, as we bring the mind-numbing boredom of another World Cup to an end, please explain our nation’s new fascination with soccer.

Civilization took off when our ancestors stood upright, developed opposable thumbs, and learned to use tools. The hand fashioned the spear, raised the cathedral, laid the railroad, split the atom, and put a man on the moon. Human beings stopped merely living in the world and began shaping it to their intentions.

Soccer responded to our magnificent evolutionary ascent by prohibiting the use of the hand.

After millions of years of progress, soccer asks humanity to put its most useful equipment in its pants pocket.

Here is a game in which modern human beings voluntarily surrender their principal biological advantage and spend 90 minutes trying to maneuver a ball with the precision of a bear opening a refrigerator.

In American sports, effort usually produces some identifiable result. Football measures achievement yard by yard. Baseball records every pitch, hit, run, and error. Basketball rewards successful action so reliably that the scoreboard routinely reaches three digits, unless we count the WNBA as basketball. American sport operates on a simple assumption: If extraordinary athletes exert themselves for several hours, something should be accomplished.

Soccer makes no such rash promise. And it frequently delivers.

A soccer match can conclude 0–0, a score traditionally associated with a game that has not been played. A 2–0 result is considered an exciting blowout. Fans can watch nearly two hours of strenuous activity only to discover that neither side has achieved anything. Soccer remains stubbornly unwilling to happen.

Except, of course, for the penalties. There is true drama only when a player is brushed by a passing breeze. Down he goes as if plugged by Dirty Harry. He grabs his leg, rolls across the grass, and pleads to the referee. Thirty seconds later, the performance is over. He’s back on his feet, running as if nothing happened.

This theatrical suffering is not incidental to soccer. It is part of the strategy. Because goals are so scarce, an official’s ruling can matter more than ages of athletic effort. The referee reviews the collision. Video officials review the referee. Television analysts review the video officials. Millions of spectators then wait for a ruling from soccer’s administrative state.

In an elimination match, a tie may finally be settled by a penalty shootout, a ceremony only loosely related to the original contest. It is as if the Super Bowl ended in a tie and the championship was decided by a game of beer pong. The soccer authorities award a victory; the players do not earn it.

This explains why soccer doesn’t fit comfortably within the American imagination.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier helped shape the American character: individualism, practical ingenuity, restless energy, and a determination to overcome obstacles rather than be their victim. Turner’s theory describes something recognizably American.

The frontier did not reward elegant suffering. It rewarded people who crossed the river, raised the barn, harvested the crop, and made it over the mountain.

American games reflect that inheritance. They divide territory, measure advances, record individual contributions, and produce winners. Their statistics are not just decorations. They express a national conviction that performance should be measured, excellence recognized, and achievement rewarded. A scoreboard is America’s incentive system celebrated in lights.

Soccer comes from a different world. Its admirers praise its accessibility, and they have a point. A child does not need pads, helmets, bats, baskets, or a manicured diamond. All he needs is a ball and a patch of ground.

That simplicity helped make soccer the world’s game. But scarcity is not an American virtue. Our nation did not escape poverty by romanticizing it. We triumphed by inventing tools, increasing productivity, rewarding accomplishment, and refusing to accept a scoreless afternoon as adequate.

“The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” goes the famous observation credited to the Duke of Wellington. The historical attribution is a little shaky, but the larger idea is sound: The games a culture plays help form the habits it carries into the future.

If that is true, give me the playing field where progress is visible, achievement is rewarded, and somebody wins.

Give me the game played with hands.

***

Alex Castellanos is a co-founder of Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm, and appears regularly on Fox News.