Alas, there's one thing that's not to be said for Offside: reading it, you'll never know why someone might become a fan of the sport in the first place. Whether here in the U.S. or anywhere on the planet, the book doesn't convey just how someone might come to love soccer, and that to me is a weakness. I'm reviewing this book as a fan, and this shortcoming jumps out at me. Granted, part of the problem may stem from this book being written by academics for an academic audience. By reason of convention, the prose style has the effect of placing distance between the readers, the researchers, and the subject. That works fine when someone's writing a philological tract on the runic origin of the letter "K" or when a church historian tries to narrate the events surrounding Pope Clement XI's condemnation of certain Jesuit practices in 1715, but if you're approaching any sort of popular culture, the drawbacks become clear. When writing about the popular, the most essential elements are distorted when passion (no matter how stupid) is neglected. Something inevitably gets lost in the translation when authors write in a detached way about things that people are strongly attached to.
That tendency makes the early chapters of Offside a chore to people who have little patience for academic protocol. These readers might be put off by lines in the preface like "Thus, my study on soccer's absence in American culture complemented the existing scholarship on other American exceptions, notably--of course--the Sombartian thesis of socialism's manifest absence in the United States." If you're a sports fan and accustomed to "prose" of the sort that's designed solely to accompany pictures of glaring jocks in ESPN The Magazine, you might be stretched by the range of associations required to comprehend that sentence and others like it. But there is some payoff after the early chapters where the authors lay out their argument. Here is the key observation that sets the stage for their study: "Nearly all modern industrialized countries feature soccer as the unquestioned hegemon in their respective sports spaces. Many also have a second and sometimes even a third sport--though often not of a team variety--that clearly qualifies as a culture . . . . Yet none have three major national team sports (baseball, football, basketball) plus another important one in key regions (hockey) that have shaped a country's sports culture for at least a century, as in the United States."
Well, leaving aside the fact that Australia would fit the bill as well as the U.S. (Aussie Rules Football, Rugby Union, and Cricket, with Rugby League being immensely popular in parts of the country, are all much more popular than soccer there), it's hard to argue with the premise. Before turning to the conclusion, it's worth noting the authors definition of "a culture" (which I elided above): "more than a mere activity in that people follow it passionately, are interested in it on the professional level, talk about it at their place of work or while socializing, and bestow stardom on its successful practitioners in the usual manner of adoration while rewarding (or punishing) them with immense publicity and constant attention." This is a good definition in that it applies to sports, movies, music . . . just about anything that we consider "popular culture."
How is it that soccer operates on the margins of this process, while the sports the authors call "the big three-and-a-half" are clearly at the center here in the U.S.? Essentially, soccer's problem is that U.S. culture, exported all over the world, remains isolationist and insular. Thus, soccer's association with things British helped it get crowded out of the sports landscape from the 19th century on, first by baseball, and then by American football, basketball, and (migrating down from the north) hockey. Because it was perceived as "foreign" during various periods of intense nativism and nationalism, soccer suffered from the stigma of being an "immigrant's game" much as socialism was perceived as an immigrant, foreign ideology.
The back cover of Offside advertises it as an entry in the series "Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology" and it is labeled under 3 genres: "Sports | Sociology | American History." As a sports book, as I've mentioned, it lacks the passion that accompanies sports. As sociology, this book is... well, sociology, a genre of writing which, outside clinical settings, can easily lead to mistaken diagnoses of narcolepsy. As History, though, this book rocks, narrating a compelling series of events (and tying them together intelligently) in a way that fans and non-fans might find enlightening.
Next page: Soccer Graveyard
