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Get with the Program, Yanks!
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It's June, the loneliest month for a North American sports fan. Baseball won't get exciting until roughly Labor Day (if that's a word that ever applies to the game), the hockey ice is melting under the skaters in the NHL's interminable playoffs, and the overpaid giants of the NBA are just about all at their day jobs, hawking sneakers and soft drinks. It's enough to make you unplug your TV and take up gardening... or worse, start watching NASCAR.
No worries — if you can shake off a few decades of cultural baggage, it's time to get excited for the world's most important sports event, the 1998 World Cup. Yes, I'm talking about soccer, the sport that Americans just can't seem to get. We hosted the damned tournament just four years ago, but most Americans still don't know the difference between a yellow card and a red card.
It's about time you joined the rest of the human race and learned something about soccer, and this summer's the perfect time to do it. Here's why you should care:
Everyone plays soccer. Everyone. Cameroonians. Saudi Arabians. Koreans. Bulgarians. Iranians. Tunisians. Jamaicans. And those are just teams that qualified to compete in World Cup '98. FIFA (the governing body of world soccer) includes 172 member nations, which compete for the right to play in front of the entire world. (In case you were counting, there are 185 member nations of the UN. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which lamers haven't fielded teams.) Think that the Samoans have nothing in common with folks from Djibouti? Wrong — they're both in FIFA and they both play soccer.
Since everyone plays soccer, it's something of a universal language. Got a Nigerian cab driver in NYC? Ask him whether his hard-tackling Golden Eagles have a prayer against Spain's amazing ball handling. Alone in a bar in Monterrey, Mexico? Ask how the U.S. team managed a draw against Mexico in Mexico City in the qualifiers... but be prepared to defend yourself from thrown beer bottles. Seated next to an Englishman on a plane? Ask him if Steve Sampson's 3-6-1 formation is genius or madness. Your newfound friends will talk your ears off and you'll help combat the stereotype that Americans are idiotic boobs who don't know Maradona's Hand of God from Madonna's Book of Sex.
Soccer's tough. Baseball's for big-biceped babies. Basketball's for ego-inflated over-elongated wimps. Soccer's a real sport. It's a "non-contact" sport in the same way basketball is — people hit each other very, very hard — but there are no time-outs, not even for injuries. Two 45-minute halves of incessant running, and a "golden goal" sudden death overtime in the case of a draw. Plus, each team is allowed only three substitutions in an entire game, guaranteeing that at least eight players will be running for a minumum of 90 minutes. Envision for a moment Shaquille O'Neal running for 90 minutes straight. Or even Mark McGuire. Not a pretty picture...
One of the reasons soccer's such a bad-ass game is that there are no pauses — foul calls are rare, and they never stop play for more than 60 seconds. This goes a long way to explaining why you don't see a lot of soccer on U.S. television — there's very little natural ad space. The NBA and the NFL have worked hard to create ad space in their properties, introducing so many timeouts and referee involvement that the last two minutes of an NBA game feels more like the O.J. trial than a sporting event. Consequently, there are opportunities every two minutes to pitch to a captive audience. Soccer's different: Advertisers run banners during the game, more like billboards or Web advertising than TV commercials. Imagine network executives trying to swallow the concept of 45 minutes of television without a commercial — no wonder major American networks don't air a lot of soccer.
Soccer's about national pride. It's important to people in a way that Americans have trouble understanding. Honduras and El Salvador fought a war over a soccer match. Soccer riots make the atmosphere at a Knicks/Heat game seem downright friendly. Perhaps it's going to take a match with an "unfriendly" nation to convince Americans that soccer really matters... at least to the rest of the world.
Think about it: Does it matter that the U.S. economy's booming if we get clobbered by a bunch of guys from a war-torn region of the globe who suffer from a chronic shortage of vowels? How will we sleep at night if a South American nation with a reputation as a banana republic advances further than we do? Now is the time for all red-blooded American sports fans to support their team as it attempts to win a contest that most of their countrymen know nothing about! It's a matter of patriotism!
Ethan Zuckerman is V.P. of Research and Development at Tripod. He's planning on moving to Brazil, where it's not neccesary to rant like this.
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