The Un-American Game
By Bill Kauffman

Americans do not speak Esperanto or measure in meters, but a third insidious agent of homogenization—soccer—is making alarming headway among our youth. Patriots, arm thyselves with baseball bats.

Teams of savages have kicked balls (or enemies’ skulls) toward goals since time began, but the English codified soccer in the mid-nineteenth century. The game then was spread throughout the world by British tradesmen, soldiers, missionaries, and imperialists. In India, Egypt, Korea, South Africa, and elsewhere, soccer was taken up by local elites eager to mimic the Brits. Indigenous games fell before the sinister black-and-white ball. Soccer, as sports historian Bill Murray writes, was the British Empire’s "most enduring export." The fabled "sport of the dispossessed," as P.C. apologists call it for its popularity in the Third World, is in fact a legacy of British imperialism.

In the Middle East, the game was introduced by British oil workers. The Shah of Iran pushed it as a tool of westernization. The Boer War established the game in South Africa, where, some years earlier, hundreds of Zulus had quite sensibly ripped a soccer ball to shreds after watching British sailors play a game.

Yet the virus never infected Americans. Soccer was played in a few immigrant-heavy New England textile towns in the nineteenth century, but the sons of these immigrants learned to play wholesome American sports such as baseball and real football. In 1924, Thomas Cahill, secretary of the U.S. Football Association, predicted that his European game soon would "rank only second to baseball as the leading pro game," but Americans remained so indifferent that Cahill’s association eventually gave up its preferred name and accepted the demeaning term "soccer."

Why did soccer fail in our land? Setting aside the obvious fact that it is an excruciating bore, the usual explanation is its foreignness. Local clubs of the 1930s and ’40s had such unlovely monikers as the Chicago Croatians and the San Pedro Yugoslavians. Not exactly the Yankees. Even today, prominent "American" players are often foreign mercenaries or the pony-tailed sons of college professors.

In 1943, Time asserted that the "U.S. lack of interest [in soccer] is due mainly to U.S. distaste for sitting outdoors in wintry winds and sleet," which does not explain why Green Bay’s Lambeau Field and Buffalo’s Rich Stadium are packed on December Sundays.

In 1952, the secretary of the National Federation of Secondary Schools ventured, "It’s hard to interest American kids in a sport in which they can’t use their hands." Why Americans should be more attached to their hands than other people he did not explain.

Two U.S. professional leagues were launched in 1967. Fewer than one percent of the players in the larger of the two leagues were American; teams sent their players and coaches to Berlitz classes to learn English, but their efforts were for naught. cbs actually broadcast several games, but the handful of fans were aghast when it was revealed that players had been instructed to feign injuries in order to make time for commercials.

The North American Soccer League prospered for a mayfly’s life in the 1970s, thanks largely to the aptly named Cosmos team of New York City (actually New Jersey), which featured the legendary Brazilian Pelé. The likes of Elton John and Henry Kissinger promoted the nasl, but provincials snubbed the cosmopolitan sport. As one Tulsa cabbie told a reporter when asked why he didn’t follow the nasl’s Tulsa Roughnecks: soccer is for guys "in short pants, a Communist game, too slow and boring."

World Cup 94, the first soccer championship played on American soil, was a colossal flop, despite the corporate subsidies lavished by Coca-Cola, Mastercard, and the usual suspects. The title game, a thrilling 0-0 tie in regulation between Brazil and Italy, did not win millions of new fans.

Today, Washington, D.C. consultants imagine that American roadways are filled with sport utility vehicles driven by harried lawyer-moms carting the kids to soccer practice. Not where I live. Admittedly—and distressingly—more and more kids are playing organized soccer. But on the gloriously disorganized playgrounds, baseball, basketball, and real football still reign—for now.

Still, it can’t be denied that soccer has gained a toehold in this country that was the first to expel the Brits. So now is the time for all good sports to come to the aid of their country: Blissfully ignore World Cup 98, and reintroduce your children to the distinctly hands-on American game of baseball.

—Bill Kauffman

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE, MAY/JUNE 1998