But it’s still soccer

I was inspired by yesterday’s thread over at The Volokh Conspiracy to pen some thoughts on The World Cup, at least ostensibly (my essay will no doubt meander to baseball). VC’s long discussion yielded up some interesting tidbits for one not particularly knowledgeable of or interested in soccer, or as one facetious fellow called it, “metric football.” For example, who knew that one’s passion for soccer was directly proportional to one’s love of The New York Times Style section or The Daily Kos? Funny, though surely overstated, right? However, time and again, observers who posted responses on the VC’s message board noted crowded bars watching soccer matches in large East Coast cities and California, while for posters from places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Washington state (one imagines outside Seattle), The World Cup might as well be a really large jockstrap.

I will admit to watching an occasional World Cup match. The Germany-Poland match was especially good viewing, despite the all-too-predictable 1-0 score. The match was entertaining for the most part, and even to the soccer novice such as myself, it was painfully obvious that Germany had the superior team, but of course, what really made the match fun was the historical bad blood between the two countries (remember, Germany wiped Poland off the map in 1939 after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Stalin). But for all that, I’m finding it difficult to sustain interest in the event and would really rather just watch the Dodger game at my local watering hole.

One poster in VC’s discussion thread made a really astute point: “In soccer…you often see a team dominate play, show better skills, athleticism, and organization, and still tie or lose. It creates an air of futitlity [sic] that is not consonant with American culture, where we like to believe that virtue is rewarded, in contrast to our more pessimistic and cynical overseas friends.”

While I wouldn’t go so far as to view American sports through the lens of Horatio Alger, there is something to the notion that, in soccer, too often the superior team doesn’t win the match the way its level of play would suggest; and too often, it doesn’t win at all. Take the aforementioned Germany-Poland contest that ended with the Germans winning 1-0. Nearly the entire match (or so it seemed) was played near the Polish goal, and while I didn’t see the match statistics, surely the Germans had many more shots on goal. In short, they dominated play, but won only by the skin of their teeth. The analogy would be a baseball game where one team records ten hits and the other just one. It’s possible the team with ten hits might win the game 1 to nothing, but much more likely, the ten-hit team will score several runs and win the game comfortably. There seems to be a more direct relationship in baseball and American football between disparities in level of play and disparities on the scoreboard—not always—but many more times than not. And as the poster observed, this just seems to square with my idea of merit (yes, it does exist) and just desserts. Is it particularly American? Who knows....

Some of the posters who were not soccer fans were rather rude (and creative) in expressing their dislike for the sport. I don’t dislike it the way some folks dislike, say, root canals or backed-up sewers, and I certainly can appreciate the skill involved, even if I don’t completely understand the game. And it seems unsporting to denigrate a game one doesn’t understand. But I’ve also discovered that lack of understanding prevents me from taking much interest in the World Cup or soccer. I know there are subtle things going on that I can’t notice, and unless something overtly dramatic or visually captivating is happening, I find watching soccer on television to be like watching a foreign film dubbed into English by a four-year old.

I’ve watched who knows how many thousands of hours of baseball; I’ve played hundreds more, and I bring that frame of reference, that literacy, if you will, to every game I see. When the casual fan watched, say, Derek Jeter’s famous defensive play in the 2001 playoffs against Oakland, he might have said, “Hey, that was fun.” I watched it realizing that I just witnessed a once-in-a-generation type of play made by a truly great baseball player (and I don’t even like the Yankees). I find it hard to sustain any interest in soccer knowing that such plays could be made right under my nose and I wouldn’t be the wiser.