A Century of American Soccer Anxiety

Sunday’s match between the United States and Portugal was a certified hit: ESPN reported that it was the highest-rated soccer match of all time in the U.S., and that it was the “most-viewed non-football telecast” in the history of the network. (Football, in that case, meaning the American version.) This information is normally reserved for ad-sales meetings and high-fiving in executive suites—big jumps in all key demos!—not the kind of thing that fans ought to bother themselves about. Yet, when it comes to soccer, we’re used to worrying about how many Americans are watching—and, perhaps, what that number says about us. Sportswriters have spent more than a century fretting and fighting about the game and its place in the culture.

In 1912, as the United States was on the verge on being accepted into the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced the pending news with the headline “Tardy Recognition Given to American Soccer Football.” The paper’s editors volunteered “the sweeping prediction that a few years hence soccer football will be recognized in the United States as the same thing in winter, fall and spring that baseball is in the summer.”

Yet a few years later the Philadelphia Public Ledger ran this headline: “AMERICANS SHY AT SOCCER, AS WITH ALL ALIEN SPORTS.” The story described soccer’s obscurity in the U.S. as compared with England. “No game is really popular unless the spectators and followers have some vital interest in it,” the paper said. “This interest is usually the outgrowth of a liking which had its inception in the participation of the game itself.” This would become a familiar argument: soccer would grow as a spectator sport only if it grew as a participatory one.

Around the same time, J. B. Sheridan, in the Ogden (Utah) Standard, trumpeted the benefits of playing: “Soccer develops a very fine and useful type of man along the line of the infielder or outfielder in baseball, a man not too large, but fast on his feet and quick to think … A slow man has no business in soccer. It calls for speed and catlike dexterity with the feet. Beefy boys cannot play soccer.” The counterattack, he added, was “one of the most stirring and inspiring spectacles known to sport.”

Soccer was fast, purposeful, and never dull. It was only a matter of time until it became the national sport. Unless, instead, it was slow, desultory, and often boring—and would never catch on.

That’s what Walter Camp, known as the “father of American football,” told the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, in 1914. “The main trouble with soccer is that it lacks definiteness,” he began. “By that I mean that every play made in soccer does not represent a maximum of effort. You know that on the soccer field the ball is often dribbled and many short kicks are made. Now, the average American wants to see every play in a game performed as though it were the deciding one of the game.”

The rest of Camp’s analysis sets the parochial framework for the way that American critics would talk about soccer for years to come:

I once saw soccer played by amateurs in which there was a young fellow playing for all he was worth. On one occasion he threw himself in front of a man who was about to kick the ball. He received the full blow of his opponent’s foot, and in two days from that time he died from peritonitis.

Is this a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of soccer? Not exactly:

Now, an American likes that kind of a game where the players are constantly taking chances, but the Englishman does not care for it particularly. Few professional soccer players would have taken the chances that that man took. They would rather allow the man to kick the ball and make a goal than dive in where there was a chance for injury. Such a chance as the one taken by the player I have just been talking about is taken a hundred times a season by the American football player. That’s why the people like the American game and also shows why soccer is not more popular.

America’s uncertain dance with soccer continued. A circuit called the American Professional Soccer League debuted in the Northeast, in 1921, fielding teams in industrial cities with immigrant populations, including Fall River, Massachusetts; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and New York. The United States team placed third in the inaugural World Cup, which was hosted by Uruguay, in 1930, and then played again in 1934, in Italy. At the 1950 World Cup, in Brazil, the U.S. pulled off one of the great upsets of all time, beating a massively favored England in the group stage. The A.P. noted that the loss had brought Britain’s sportswriters to tears. American writers and fans were less moved. Reuters called it “a day some Englishmen consider the greatest in the annals of American sport”—the implication being that Americans would beg to differ. The Americans wouldn’t play in another World Cup for forty years.

Still, soccer was being played widely in the U.S. The North American Soccer League was formed in 1968, and flourished briefly in the seventies. In 1975, the Brazilian hero Pelé, diminished by age but still occasionally majestic, was signed by the New York Cosmos, causing a Beckham-like media frenzy. When the Cosmos won the league championship, in 1977, they returned home to a crowd at J.F.K. that Anthony Hiss described in our pages as rivalling the one that greeted the Beatles in 1964. “Girls love the Cosmos, because girls can play soccer, too,” Hiss wrote. “Sports haters love the Cosmos because they’re not sure that soccer is a sport.”

Pelé played his last match for the Cosmos that year; by then, the N.A.S.L. had landed a national television deal. The league kept adding teams—too fast, it turned out. In 1984, the league went bust. Its legacy would be the schoolkids it inspired to take up the game. But that wasn’t yet clear. George Vecsey, long an open-minded booster of soccer, conceded that American fans might need to be placated with a trick of arithmetic: “7 points for a goal, 3 points for a corner kick, 2 points for each goalie save. Same game. Then fans could go home from a 37-34 game convinced they had seen lots of action.” The British journalist Sue Mott mocked the failed American experiment: “While soccer has become a respected aerobic work-out for suburban children, it does not answer the American lust for blood, scoring and thunder in sports arenas.”

In 1988, FIFA announced that the U.S. would host the 1994 World Cup. The next year, the American team qualified for the 1990 World Cup, in Italy. The U.S. side had just three major sponsors and lost all three of its matches. “The U.S. simply isn’t a soccer power, at least not yet,” George Vecsey wrote.

Less than two weeks before the start of the 1994 World Cup, more than ninety thousand people filled the Rose Bowl for a friendly game between Mexico and the United States—at that point, the largest crowd ever to watch a soccer game in America. Still, a Gallup poll taken around the same time found that sixty-six per cent of respondents didn’t even know the U.S. was hosting the World Cup.

The Times, like many of its peers, framed the ’94 World Cup as a crucible: “Whether soccer in the United States remains primarily a youth sport or is tugged from ignored backwaters to the sport’s mainstream may rest on a single game, the United States versus Switzerland on June 18 at the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit.” The match ended in a draw—there were no easy answers yet. In its second game, the U.S. upset Colombia. USA Today proclaimed, “U.S. soccer enthusiasts, a long-suffering breed, can only shout, ‘Hallelujah.’ ” The Americans made it to the knockout round, but promptly lost to Brazil on Independence Day. “Respect for U.S. Soccer Born on the 4th of July,” an optimistic headline in the Washington Post read. But the final game of the 1994 World Cup played to American stereotypes about the sport by ending regulation time in a nil-nil tie; it had to be resolved by the much derided shootout, with Italy’s Roberto Baggio booting it over the crossbar to give the trophy to Brazil.

In 2002, as the U.S. team was making its surprising run through the knockout stage during the World Cup hosted by South Korea and Japan, Ira Berkow, in the pages of the Times, offered further complaints: “It’s one thing for the scoring in soccer to be minimal, but when they do produce a goal, it’s as if they’ve overthrown a despot. They go berserk, ripping off their clothes, shrieking around the stadium and then, for good measure, piling on top of one another. ” Soccer was somehow at once too boring and too theatrical.

For years, soccer has been treated as a sport in desperate need of American innovation. In 2006, another pre-World Cup diatribe in the Times, this time by John Tierney, suggested that our resistance to soccer was American exceptionalism at its finest: “Instead of us copying the rest of the world, the rest of the world could learn from us. Maybe they love soccer because they haven’t been given better alternatives.”

Despite ESPN’s big viewing numbers, the derisive genre endures. This week, Dan Shaughnessy, a sports columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote, “Soccer takes away our hands. This makes the game incredibly skillful and exhausting, but also robs fans of much of the beauty of sport. Hands and opposable thumbs separate us from creatures of the wild.” As Deadspin pointed out, he’s been making the same argument since 1990.

Yet just as it is long past time for columnists to stop with the petulant-American routine, it may be time to stop treating every World Cup as the spark for the ever-coming soccer revolution. Attendance at Major League Soccer games has nearly tripled in the past decade. The U.S. women’s teamed is a sustained international success, and the sport is ever more central to the lives of children across the country. But these are the wrong things to fixate on during the World Cup. Each time that the World Series or N.B.A. Finals rolls around, fans of baseball and basketball aren’t compelled to defend their sports against all doubters. Major League Soccer is a stable enterprise, highly popular in some cities, and steady in others.

Haven’t we reached a point where it is enough simply to watch the games? Millions of people do, taking pleasure in seeing top-flight soccer and in the tournament’s distinctive global drama. For newcomers, it can be met with curiosity, even wonder, rather than contempt dressed up as national pride. We can be shy about soccer, but we don’t need to be afraid.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty.

[#image: /photos/59095114ebe912338a3726ac]See more of The New Yorker’s coverage of the 2014 World Cup.