‘win at all cost’ situations.”
This was typical of the thinking of a generation of post-’60s parenting theories, which were an extension of the counterculture spirit—Theodor Adorno’s idea that strict, emotionally stultifying homes created authoritarian, bigoted kids. But for all the talk of freedom, the sixties parenting style had a far less laissez-faire side, too. Like the 1960s consumer movement which brought American car seatbelts and airbags, the soccer movement felt like it could create a set of rules and regulations that would protect both the child’s body and mind from damage. Leagues like the one I played in handed out “participation” trophies to every player, no matter how few games his (or her) team won. Other leagues had stopped posting the scores of games or keeping score altogether. Where most of the world accepts the practice of heading the ball as an essential element of the game, American soccer parents have fretted over the potential for injury to the brain. An entire industry sprouted to manufacture protective headgear, not that di¤erent-looking from a boxer’s spar-ring helmet, to soften the blows. Even though very little medical evidence supports this fear, some youth leagues have prohibited headers altogether.
This reveals a more fundamental di¤erence
between American youth soccer and the game as practiced in the rest of the world. In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class. Sure, there might be aristocrats, like Gianni Agnelli, who take an interest, and instances HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS
like Barca, where the game transcendently grips the community. But these cases are rare. The United States is even rarer. It inverts the class structure of the game.
Here, aside from Latino immigrants, the professional classes follow the game most avidly and the working class couldn’t give a toss about it. Surveys, done by the sporting goods manufacturers, consistently show that children of middle class and aºuent families play the game disproportionately. Half the nation’s soccer participants come from households earning over $50,000.
That is, they come from the solid middle class and above.
Elites have never been especially well liked in postwar American politics—or at least they have been easy to take swipes at. But the generation of elites that adopted soccer has been an especially ripe target.
That’s because they came through college in the sixties and seventies, at a time when the counterculture self-consciously turned against the stultifying conformity of what it perceived as traditional America. Even as this group shed its youthful radical politics, it kept some of its old ideals, including its resolute cosmopolitanism and suspicions of middle America, “flyover country.”
When they adopted soccer, it gave the impression that they had turned their backs on the American pastime.
This, naturally, produced even more disdain for them—and for their sport.
Pundits have employed many devices to sum up
America’s cultural divisions. During the 1980s, they talked about the “culture war”— the battle over text-books, abortion, prayer in school, aªrmative action, and funding of the arts. This war pitted conservative defenders of tradition and morality against liberal defenders of modernity and pluralism. More recently this debate has been described as the split between “red and blue America”— the two colors used to distinguish partisan preference in maps charting presidential election voting. But another explanatory device has yet to penetrate political science departments and the national desks of newspapers. There exists an important cleavage between the parts of the country that have adopted soccer as its pastime and the places that haven’t. And this distinction lays bare an underrated source of American cultural cleavage: globalization.
II.
Other countries have greeted soccer with relative indi¤erence. The Indian subcontinent and Australia come to mind. But the United States is perhaps the only place where a loud portion of the population actively disdains the game, even campaigns against it.
This anti-soccer lobby believes, in the words of USA Today’s Tom Weir, “that hating soccer is more American than apple pie, driving a pickup, or spending Saturday afternoons channel surfing with the remote control.” Weir exaggerates the pervasiveness of this sentiment. But the cadre of soccer haters has considerable sway. Their influence rests primarily with a legion of prestigious sportswriters and commentators, who use their column inches to fulminate against the game, especially on the occasions of World Cups.
Not just pundits buried in the C Section of the paper, but people with actual power believe that soccer HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS
represents a genuine threat to the American way of life.
The former Bu¤alo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp, one of the most influential conservatives of the 1980s, a man once mentioned in the same breath as the presidency, holds this view. In 1986, he took to the floor of the United States Congress to orate against a resolution in support of an American bid to host the World Cup.
Kemp intoned, “I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist [sport].’’
Lovers of the game usually can’t resist dismissing these critics as xenophobes and reactionaries intoxi-cated with a sense of cultural superiority, the sporting wing of Pat Buchanan’s America First conservatism.
For a time, I believed this myself. But over the years I’ve met too many conservatives who violently disagree with Kemp’s grafting of politics onto the game. And I’ve heard too many liberals take their shots at soccer, people who write for such publications as the Village Voice and couldn’t be plausibly grouped in the troglodyte camp of American politics. So if hatred of soccer has nothing to do with politics, conventionally defined, why do so many Americans
