“It Is What It Is”: Why So Few Americans Follow Soccer

Whenever the subject of soccer comes up – usually around World Cup time – one is sure to be treated to a Snark Parade on all sides.  Some Americans brusquely dismiss the game as frustrating, slow-paced and boring to watch, while Europeans and others counter that Americans are too [insert your favorite cosmopolitan putdown here] to appreciate the game’s virtues: unless there’s lots of scoring  and/or violence, they insist, Americans can’t fix their attention on a game.  The one thing I can’t recall having read about the matter is the most obvious: the good old US & A has long been saturated with a variety of sports and just doesn’t find it a worthwhile proposition to get passionate about another one.  We already have baseball, football, basketball, tennis, and golf (along with a few others – auto racing, horse racing, etc.), each with lots of participants and followers.  Soccer is more popular than it used to be, but it isn’t now and, as far as I can opine, probably won’t become as mainstream as the others. 

And this is where the unflattering (if unfair) characterization of the game as boring comes into play: soccer might catch on better in a saturated field of games if it were more fast-paced and less grounded in the perpetual spectacle of watching each team frustrate the other’s efforts.  It’s a hard sell, in other words – not something you’d expect to catch on like wildfire with people who already have lots of faster-paced options to which their sensibilities are attuned.  My own attempts to watch a few soccer games are probably typical of American attitudes: I appreciated the athletic skill involved in the matches, but just couldn’t get into them enough to make a habit of following the sport.  I prefer basketball and baseball when I’m in the mood to watch a game, which isn’t often – I usually just watch the playoffs and finals of those two sports.

Europeans and others outside the USA grow up watching and playing soccer – I get the sense that it’s their main game and that they don’t have as many major sports as we do.  The Brits have rugby and tennis, but mostly they’re soccer fanatics, right?  It’s probably similar with a lot of other countries: for them, soccer is the sport.  So of course Euros and Africans and Latin Americans are going to develop a feeling for the finer points of the game, and will perhaps draw a life lesson from the showcasing of frustration built into a typical 0-0 or 1-0 match where we Americanos only see paint drying or milk turning sour.  We don’t have the intimate, youth-up connection to soccer that they do, so it makes sense that we don’t appreciate it and don’t see why we should bother learning to appreciate it, either.  The game isn’t deeply rooted in our consciousness, and I doubt that its popularity with recent immigrants and their kids is enough of a phenomenon to tip the scales in its favor nationwide.  It will probably always seem somewhat of an implant here, and any national interest occasional.  Perhaps over decades that will change -- one cannot know for certain, of course.

In sum, there’s no need for all the snark on either side: the game is a fine one, and it’s neither inferior nor superior to American sports; people outside the USA aren’t fools for following it with a passion, and Americans aren’t grands imbéciles for not much caring about it.  The whole situation, as participants in those ridiculous post-game press conferences say when they have nothing to say, “is what it is.”