Soccer

SOCCER

SOCCER. Despite its organized origins at East Coast universities in the 1860s, soccer—"football" in its birthplace, Britain—has never truly flourished in the United States. Crowded out of the national sports culture by the "American" sports of football, baseball, and basketball, soccer has also suffered from a succession of failed domestic leagues. Between 1930 and 1950, and again in the 1990s, the U.S. national team had some success in soccer's premier tournament, the World Cup. However, since the 1970s, women's soccer has been more important than the men's game in the United States.

Although Americans often think of soccer as a "foreign" sport, its American roots extend back to 1869, when the first organized soccer match in the United States was played between Rutgers and Princeton universities. In 1884 the American Amateur Football Association was formed, the first such organization outside Britain. Ten years later the United States became the second country in the world to introduce professional soccer. However, these impressive statistics disguise serious early difficulties that determined soccer's marginal role in American sports history. In the 1870s Harvard University opted for a rugby-style "handling game" over the "kicking game." As other universities followed Harvard's example, the handling game developed into the native form of football, at the direct expense of the game Americans (in a telling example of sporting exceptionalism) would call "soccer."

In the late nineteenth century soccer also had to compete with baseball. Although baseball derived from Britain's cricket and rounders, boosters utilized the Abner Doubleday myth to promote baseball as a native-born sport, nothing less than the "national pastime." As the ideology of American nativism accelerated during the 1890s, immigrants realized that playing and watching baseball was an ideal opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance to the United States. By contrast, soccer was viewed as un-American: ominously, the first professional soccer league of 1894 disbanded within months amid controversy over the importation of British players.

In 1921 the American Soccer League (ASL) was formed. The ASL benefited from the economic affluence

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and increased leisure time that precipitated a general boom in organized sport during the Roaring Twenties. Crowds at ASL matches regularly outstripped those at games in the nascent National Football League. However, organizational ineptitude, a lack of native talent, and the Wall Street crash of 1929 all contributed to the ASL's demise in 1931. Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman have argued that, as in other industrial capitalist nations, American "sport space" was established and cemented between 1870 and 1930, and that the failure of the ASL sealed American soccer's long-term fate. The game would never attract the blue-collar base of players and fans that powered the "Big Three," baseball, football, and basketball.

Despite these domestic tribulations, in 1930 the national team reached the semifinals of the inaugural soccer World Cup. Twenty years later the United States recorded the greatest upset in World Cup history, beating England 1–0 with a goal by Haitian-born Joseph Gaetjens. Yet it was testimony to the parlous state of American soccer that, while the result was decried as a national disaster in England, it was barely reported in the American media. Having participated in three of the first four World Cup finals, the United States would not qualify again until 1990.

On a domestic level, organized soccer remained distinctly minor league until 1975, when the struggling North American Soccer League (NASL), founded seven years earlier, was transformed by the New York Cosmos' signing of Brazil's Pele. The greatest soccer player in history brought thousands of spectators through the turnstiles, and his presence (along with massive salaries) helped to attract other soccer superstars to the NASL. However, after Pele's retirement in 1977 it became clear that the NASL's sudden success was a mirage. Audiences tired of a sport in which fading foreigners (Italy's Gianni Rivera memorably termed the NASL an "elephants' graveyard") outnumbered and outshone the few, mediocre American players. The NASL collapsed in 1985.

The league did leave one distinctive legacy. By marketing attendance at matches as a family affair, the NASL helped to establish soccer as an amateur sport among the white middle class, even though this interest has so far failed to evolve into a fan culture for the professional game. By 1997 more than 18 million Americans were playing soccer in some form, particularly organized youth soccer, which flourished because suburban parents perceived the game as nonviolent, coeducational, and multicultural. However, soccer's "yuppification" has compounded its marginalization from America's mainstream sports culture. The soccer boom has largely excluded the working-class and African American constituencies that dominate the professional teams and fan cultures of the Big Three.

In 1994, the United States hosted the World Cup. Beforehand, international commentators expressed outrage that a nation with no significant soccer history or culture would be hosting the apex of "the world's game." However, the tournament proved a great success on and off the field. The United States registered its first World Cup finals victory since 1950 by beating Colombia 2–1, and gave a creditable second-round performance in the 1–0 defeat by Brazil, the eventual champions. Yet the tournament's success failed to translate to the domestic game. The United States Soccer Federation (USSF) secured the World Cup upon the condition that a new national league would be established, but by the time Major League Soccer (MLS) began in 1995, the cultural effect of the World Cup had already waned. Attendance and viewing figures for televised matches remained disappointing. Indeed, until the USSF can convince the networks that soccer—with its few, infrequent scores and single "halftime" break for commercials—is television-friendly, the Big Three will continue to dominate American sport.

After a disastrous display in the 1998 World Cup, the United States exceeded all expectations in the 2002 tournament by beating Portugal and Mexico during a run to the quarter-finals, where the team was unfortunate to lose 1–0 to Germany. However, despite this impressive achievement, the most positive development in U.S. soccer history has been the astounding boom in the women's game. Since the 1970s, soccer has been promoted as a sport for girls—an idea that remains anathema in the male-oriented soccer nations of Europe and South America. In 1997,39 percent of soccer participants in the United States were female. This base helped the United States win the first women's World Cup in 1991 and the first women's Olympics tournament in 1996. In the 1999 World Cup, the victory of the United States as host nation secured the highest-ever domestic television audience for a soccer match and made national heroes of players like Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kuper, Simon. "Short, Dark, Americans." In Football Against the Enemy. London: Orion, 1994. Entertaining assessment of the state of American soccer among women, immigrants, and white suburbanites prior to the 1994 World Cup.

Markovits, Andrei S., and Steven L. Hellerman. Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Definitive sociological approach to soccer's troubled history in the United States.

Murray, Bill. The World's Game: A History of Soccer. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Sugden, John. "USA and the World Cup: American Nativism and the Rejection of the People's Game." In Hosts and Champions: Soccer Cultures, National Identities, and the USA World Cup. Edited by John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson. Aldershot, England: Arena, 1994. Thorough account of how soccer has been perceived as "un-American."

Martyn Bone