American innovation has delivered better alternatives, even ones where you’re allowed to use your hands and can frequently score more than three points.
As a sporting event called the “World Cup” is currently ongoing in the Persian Gulf country of Qatar, Americans will yet again be pressured by our moral superiors to pay attention to “football,” or as Americans call it, soccer, so as not to confuse it with, you know, football.
Today, Team USA played Wales, which has not been an independent country since 1535. The final score was (you guessed it) 1–1. If you’re on Twitter, you might be under the impression that most Americans care about soccer, but, as in so many other areas, Twitter is not real life. Soccer remains the “sport of the future,” as it has been for multiple generations in the U.S. A poll from earlier this year found that only 7 percent of Americans consider themselves avid soccer fans, which is the same percentage who say they are avid golf fans.
David Harsanyi wrote a Happy Warrior column for the November 13, 2017, issue of National Review in which he reminded us that, despite the best efforts of soccer boosters, the sport never catches on here. He wrote of the North American Soccer League, which could fill a stadium for a little while in the late ’70s. But, Harsanyi wrote, “The downside of attracting big crowds of Americans to watch soccer is that they eventually have to watch soccer. By 1984, the league was kaput.”
There was Beckham-mania about 15 years ago, when the celebrity of David Beckham playing in Los Angeles was supposed to propel the sport to popularity, but that didn’t work either. “Beckham went on to score an average of three goals per season — or approximately one goal per $2 million [of his contract],” Harsanyi wrote.
So consider me skeptical that a Team USA tie with a country that’s part of another country will make much difference in the sport’s popularity, especially after Team USA didn’t even qualify for the World Cup the last time around. Fox Sports, which bet hundreds of millions of dollars on soccer’s just-around-the-corner popularity, lost money on broadcasting the 2018 World Cup after a Team USA loss to global powerhouse Trinidad and Tobago meant there would be no Stars and Stripes in the tournament.
When the USA women’s national team (which, unlike the men’s team, is very successful in international competition) is prattling on about social justice, conservatives roll their eyes. While it is annoying that the media insist that Americans care about the women’s team’s progressive politics, it’s more annoying that the media insist that Americans care about soccer players.
Soccer was likely very fun when it was created as one of the first organized sports and people first had free time because they didn’t need to work on a farm all day just to stay alive. A relatively small number of Americans still enjoy watching soccer, and our panoply of subcultures and idiosyncrasies is one of the things that makes us great. But, as it has done in many other areas, American innovation has delivered better alternatives, even ones where you’re allowed to use your hands and can frequently score more than three points.