[quote]Claudan wrote:
"American sports culture exist in a different temporal universe to soccer. Because soccer is something fundamentally different to what Americans are used to, it creates a comletely different paradigm in watching the sport. American sports are all very structured and procedural, with standardized plays that can quantified into statistics, and the narrative of the sport is largely told through statistics. We cheer when a quantifiable number is achieved, we find excitement in that which results in a number indicating success. Soccer is completely unlike this, it doesn’t provide the standardized plays but complete free-form gameplay with only one giant milestone that is difficult to achieve (scoring a goal). To create a gaming analogy, American sports are like turn based games (Civilizations) while soccer is like a RTS (Age of Empires).
If an American watches say 5 minutes of soccer and 5 minutes of football, in the 5 minutes of football he will see on average 21 seconds of gameplay and lots of downtime and commercials (which European frequently cite as one of the reasons American football is boring to them), but critically to Americans that 21 seconds will result in quantifiable achievement, the team will gain or lose an X number of yards, and every player will be granted a plethora of statistics on exactly what he did in every second of gameplay. Football, like all American sports regiments and segments the game into a series of small statistical gains, which are tabulated and compared to previous standardized segments. Soccer is completely the opposite. In soccer, a 5 minute stretch may include the ball moving for several kilometers with players performing a many passes, feints, dribbles…etc yet none of that will be quantified to create a sense of linear progression. Soccer players cover by far the most ground in team sports compared to American sports and perform the most physical action, but none of that action follows a procedure with clear results except the goal. While the rest of the world gets excited by plays like this that don’t result in quantifiable achievement because of the skill and creativity, to your average American its “just kicking a ball around”.
That’s why you hear Americans say things like “soccer is boring because only 1 or 2 goals are scored”.
To most of them, the only exciting part of soccer is when a team scores, because its the only time soccer stops and a number on the screen increments and tells us something has been achieved.
Even the more freeflowing American sport of basketball is still segmented by design into 24 second parts (with a shot clock), and provides a plenty of statistics because of how repeatable the actions. Its guaranteed that every 24 seconds, you’ll get a shot, a rebound by one team or the other and likely an assist. These can be tabulated and a narrative formed around these numbers. Its largely why rugby and hockey have had a very hard time in America, hockey is largely regional and depends heavily on the North where there is cross border influence from Canada, and rugby has largely been absent from American TV.
But even if soccer was somehow to be segmented and quantified into a standardized set of actions with clear linear progression, there is also the question of identity. In many ways, sports are like religion, we tend to follow those that are dominant in the local culture and tend to view others coming from foreign cultures with a sense of rejection. So while the changing demographics and a more globalized culture in America will continue to drive soccer upwards in popularity, it will never truly be embraced since it will always be an outsider sport.
However there are many encouraging signs. This year 31 million Americans watched the final day of the Premier League across the NBC network family and MLS just signed a $720 milion deal with ESPN (despite being only the 4th most watched soccer league in Amerca, behind the Premier League on NBC, Champions League on FOX and Liga MX on Univision) and the Brazil-Croatia game yesterday got TV ratings on part with NBA Finals, more than double Stanley Cup finals. These are all healthy signs of interest and growth, but even if it doesn’t evolve past that, there’s nothing wrong that. Whether soccer becomes genuinely accepted in America as equal to American football and baseball no longer hurts American soccer fans ability to watch soccer since its commonly shown on TV now.
And in the end, soccer as sport needs no validation from America. Soccer already completely dwarfs every other sport in every measure of success, it has more fans, more revenue and more TV viewers than all American sports combined. It has never needed America, so it will never change to assimilate into what Americans are used to watching."[/quote]
Fantastic post.
