For instance: I'm a fan of Major League Soccer, the top league in the United States. I also watch games from the lower leagues (in descending order the A-League, Division 3, and the Premier Development League). When I was a kid, I was a fan of the Chicago Sting in the North American Soccer League (RIP, 1967-1985). Had I been alive in the 1920s, I suspect I would've been a fan of the American Soccer League (which in its day drew better crowds than the equally-fledgling National Football League). But you get the drift: The United States is a graveyard for soccer leagues, each of which seems to shoot itself in the foot with alarming frequency. And while I still have hopes for the survival of MLS and the other leagues, I wouldn't be surprised if they also limp off into the sunset carrying a smoking pistol and leaving a trail of blood.
But in the 1920s, an era which solidified baseball and football as American passions, soccer was fairly well represented, drawing crowds between 6 and 10 thousand to various New York and New England stadiums in the dead of winter! But the league's members bickered among themselves and couldn't (or wouldn't) figure out how to expand interest in the sport farther beyond the confines of various immigrant communities In 1928, the league appointed its first commissioner--Bill Cunningham, a former Dartmouth gridiron football all star who knew nothing of the sport and who was unable to provide leadership necessary. The league split, with some teams folding and some joining the Eastern Professional League, which was pretty decent, but no better able to survive the Great Depression than was the ASL, which officially bought the farm in 1931.
A second ASL appeared in 1933 and survived as a semi-professional league through 1983 (in a way, part of the ASL-II sort of continues in the A-League, but one would need to be a forensic anthropologist to discern exactly how.). Chillingly for me, they too hired a non-soccer man (in this case Boston Celtic great Bob Cousy) in the 1960s. Cousy meant well but was unable to negotiate the demands facing soccer in the US. This is chilling because a couple years back MLS hired as its commissioner a man named Don Garber, who admitted upon taking the job that he knows nothing of the sport. His previous job was commissioner of NFL-Europe, a gridiron football league that plays games in soccer stadiums during the summer when they're not in use. If not for free tickets given to American servicemen and women, no one would go to those games... so in short, MLS hired a man who governed the only league on the planet that regularly plays in front of more empty seats than MLS. But he means well. In Garber's 2 years at the helm, MLS has increased attendance and kept its TV deal with ESPN/ABC, but it has lost two teams to contraction and bumbled its cable TV deal that made all games available to fans who bought the package. Of course, only an American soccer fans can be paranoid about a pattern of history repeating itself like this, but that's the way it is.
That's the sort of anecdotal history that jumped out at me. Others will be more interested in stories about the game in 1926 that attracted 46,000 fans to watch reigning Austrian champions Hakoah of Vienna play an ASL all-star team. Or some might be interested to know in the 1920s a player could make more money playing soccer in the U.S. than in England. Or they might like to make connections themselves and realize that, really, there has never NOT been professional soccer in the United States since the turn of the 20th century. Or they might be astounded to find out that, during the 1994 World Cup hosted by the U.S., the U.S.'s 2-1 victory over Colombia was watched by more people on ESPN than watched ANY baseball game on the same network that season. In short, the real question isn't "why is there no soccer in the U.S.?" It's, "why do so few people in America know about soccer?"
One reason proposed by the authors is that soccer, for whatever reason, hasn't found a widespread identity beyond a series of small, isolated communities. They attribute this to soccer's status as foreign import, etc., and suggest that if professional soccer finds a way to achieve some level of identification with and for fans in various cities, then it will succeed. I think that's right. When the Fire become Chicago's soccer team much as the Bears are its football team, then soccer will have arrived. But it's going to take a long time to establish this identity. In fact, it might never happen given that earlier leagues didn't make any headway over the years. And unmentioned by the authors is the fact that when the Chicago Sting won the NASL championship in 1979, nearly a half million people turned out for the victory parade. This fact is forgotten by all but my fellow Chicago soccer fans, washed away by the Bears' victory in Super Bowl XX and 6 NBA titles for the Bulls.
Some argue that success of the national team at the World Cup would make soccer more popular, and point to the success of the U.S. women's team in the 1999 Women's World Cup (the most watched soccer match on American television was the final between the U.S. and China). I doubt if the U.S. men's team winning the World Cup would have a long-term effect for a variety of reasons. First, because it's not going to happen. Second, because even if it did, the real exceptionalism in America is American-style patriotism. Few people identify with "the country" as a whole because it's so darn big. Most people who claim they "love my country" identify with (okay, worship) something called The American Way of Life, which has more to do with individualized opportunities for consumption than with anything even remotely communal and collective. In other words, most people who consider themselves patriotic Americans and claim to love their country seem to hate at least half the people in it. As a consequence, American sports fans will always save their most exuberant celebrations for victories of their local sports teams, and will have little use over the achievements of national teams, whether it be in sports like basketball, hockey, or soccer (and I'm not complaining about these individualized opportunities . . . since that's how I can be a soccer fan while living in a town where I know only one other person who cares in the least about the sport, and everyone else lives and dies for high school football).
The authors are guardedly optimistic about the future of soccer in the U.S., though I for one would not be surprised to find myself, if I'm around in 50 years, following a league that hasn't even been conceived yet, but which will have succeeded the two leagues that tried to replace MLS. But regardless of whether their optimism is warranted our not, Offside is interesting throughout, and fascinating in places, and worth reading for anyone who sees sports as crucial for any understanding of popular culture.
Next page: Some Recommended Reading
