Re: Baseball, do you mean that the game has the *potential* for "high scoring"? Seems to me there are plenty of 1-0 baseball games. AND, isn't the zenith of stellar baseball play the no-hitter?

I rest my case.

I just got turned on to World Cup soccer, so I empathize with people who don't get it and choose to trash it. As with any unknown thing, education helps widen acceptance. More seasoned fans of a given sport complain when the announcers explain plays that they think are self-evident. They're not doing that for the seasoned fans, they're addressing the casual observer who plopped down on the couch and wondered what the big deal was about [sport name here]. ESPN's lethargic announcing of the World Cup isn't attracting new fans to the game. Heck, Univision got me excited about soccer, and I don't speak Spanish!

Hmmmm, not sure I'm buying that one. Americans watch hockey, low scores. They watch boxing, no scores. They watch golf, lots of scores but lower is better. The real kicker though is American football, where the scores are indeed much higher than in soccer, but the scoring? The number of touchdowns in a football game, which lasts about 3 hours, is pretty comparable to the amount of goals in a fútbol game. Sure their are field goals, but how exciting are they?

Not only that but there are tons of Americans watching the world cup, and loving it. All sports are boring until you learn the language, not just of playing them but of watching them. And American's have very little oppurtunity to learn that language of soccer. Why? Plenty of reasons, but I'd point a finger toward the lack of commercial breaks. If it's only on TV once every 4 years it's not going to be that big is it?

I dunno, Ethan, Abe -- boxing may have no numerical scores, but it has one of the most dramatically manichean single-bit win-condition possible of any sport: One guy unconscious on the ground, one guy standing, crowing, above him. You literally cannot get any more American than that, heh. And sure, the no-hitter is considered the gold standard of baseball -- but it doesn't preclude the winning team from racking up a healthy score to make the loser's defeat all the more stinging.

Are "tons" of Americans really watching the World Cup? Doesn't seem that way to me. The audience is bigger than it's ever been, but it's still a pale shadow of that for baseball, football, or basketball. You're quite right that learning the ruleset of a sport -- and apprehending what's brilliant about its design -- is key to enjoying a sport. But it's nontheless true that some sports are much more popular in certain countries and less so in others, and I don't think this is solely a matter of education. Even someone who's well educated about a variety of games will enjoy the rulesets and play of some better than others ... and national culture definitely plays a role in conditioning you as to what type of rulesets you'll like.

I think the Weekly Standard article has their point about soccer's scoring system half right (unsurprisingly). It's not the lack of scoring that irritates Americans about soccer. *It's the lack of Hollywood pacing and the lack of Hollywood endings.* American games are structured remarkably similar to the famous three act structure of Hollywood movies, with pauses for exposition, then a rising action, setbacks accompanied by a dramatic pause, and finally, a rousing finale. Non-Americans often complain about how the action in US-created games of football, baseball, and basketball is broken up so much with time-outs, innings, etc. but they're missing the point-- these interruptions are important to increase the dramatic tension. They're analogous to moments in Hollywood movies where, say, the embattled GIs bunker down and apprise their situation. These pauses give the audience time to grasp all the factors at work, and build up the "What can they do *now*?" tension.

At the same time, it's the near-impossibility of Hollywood endings in soccer that also annoys Americans. In soccer, it's insanely difficult for the losing team to turn around the situation during the last few minutes and win the game. The best they can usually hope for is a tie. American sports games, however, are exactly opposite-- they all have scoring and pacing systems which offer *abundant* opportunities for the loser to make a last-minute, rousing, Hollywood-style triumph.

This is why, I think, American games are popular internationally, but the most international game of all is not popular in America. It's pretty much for the same reasons Hollywood movies are popular across the world, but international movies rarely are in America. Most soccer matches resemble European war movies-- long, dragged out, little dramatic action, a sense of futility about the whole thing, and after two hours, it ends in a stalemate.

Totally superb point. Yes, the last-minute turnaround -- the victory of the plucky upstart -- is another core American self-mythology!

One of the odd points of soccer is that the way scoring works the reliability with which the better team wins is very low. Basketball, by contrast, has pretty good statistical significance in each game. If two teams will on average reach a score of 80-100 in basketball, the chances of the underdog winning are very low, while if two teams have an average score of .8-1 in soccer, games will typically end in a score of 1-0 with the winner being decided by something rather close to a coin toss. Combine that with single elimination tournaments, and you have a situation where practically any team can win practically anything.

W.J.A - if you don't think soccer has Hollywood endings, I assume you haven't been watching the Cup. Germany's PK win over Argentina today followed your story arch pretty closely. Australia's 3-1 win, with all of Australia's goals in the last 15 minutes or so, comes to mind as well. Though wins in regulation time do officially lack the pauses you described, I don't see how they lack chances for the losing team to make up the difference any more than any other sport. Any shot could produce a goal, and few games pass w/o a relatively significant number of shots.

Also, are American sports popular in other countries? Baseball in Japan maybe, and basketball seems to be relatively popular in Europe, but I don't think the generalization works.

A British guest on the NPR show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" suggested that the reason soccer hasn't caught on in the US is that it's all about the players whereas US sports depend heavily on coaching. That difference rings more true to me than other arguments I've heard. Both basketball and football rely on play calling, and managerial decisions in baseball are some of the most exciting moments. Substitutions do figure prominently in soccer, but unlike basketball and baseball, only 3 are allowed. What that says about American national character v. the rest of the world, I'll leave for others.

Slate.com's had an interesting series of essays up about the World Cup, and one of them points out that soccer's greatest inroads with anglosphere Americans is with the intelligentsia - partly for the writing, partly for the style, but particularly for the Europhilia. (A nice touch is with the comment that few of the intelligentsia lean to the Republicans, but some of them may well root for European club teams with fascistic supporters...) Naturally, what "freedom toast" eating patriot's going to cheer for a sport that practically requires you to play-act an injury, much less delay your satisfaction?

To back up lanier's point, I recall a piece in "Newsweek" several years back discussing the same issue of managerial corporatism dominating the spirit of American Football. Oddly, hockey has approached a similar level of over-coaching without it gaining States-side attention. One pundit blamed hockey's lack of popularity on the amount of protective gear blocking the fans from seeing the athletes. If so, the NFL should be languishing while FIFA and beach volleyball dominate the sportscape...

American sports are globally popular, certainly more popular than soccer is in America. Michael Jordan, for example, is known and universally admired on every single continent. Ask Americans to name a single contemporary soccer star, and you'd be lucky if 20% come up with Beckham and Ronaldo. (Come to think of it, those are the only two *I* can think of offhand.)

> W.J.A - if you don't think soccer has Hollywood
> endings, I assume you haven't been watching the
> Cup. Germany's PK win over Argentina today
> followed your story arch pretty closely.
> Australia's 3-1 win, with all of Australia's
> goals in the last 15 minutes or so, comes to
> mind as well.

Actually, I *have* been watching it a fair amount, just as I do every World Cup, and this time like all the rest, I'm left wondering why the games leave me so unsatisfied (apart from a few great moments in between vast chunks of meandering back and forth) and trying to figure out what's missing. I'm now confident it's structurally the poor pacing and the game's structural bias against last-minute conclusive endings. (Clive, I think the cultural Americana of "underdog wins at the end" is only a part of it-- the *design* of Hollywood movies and American sports is American in character, but has a universal appeal, as evidenced by their global popularity.)

The Germany and Australia World Cup games only partly resemble a Hollywood narrative arc, because again, there's not a rising action interspersed with dramatic pauses-- i.e., time outs-- and apart from that, come-from-behind wins are still fairly rare in soccer. Not only does a losing team need to tie the game in the last few minutes, they need to score a winning point. Very difficult, certainly more difficult than, say, shooting a last-second 3 point jump shot in basketball, or catching a Hail Mary pass in football. But yet again, it's the *pauses* leading up to those moments that are so important-- the time-outs where you're exquisitely held in suspense.

Which reminds me, has FIFA ever considered introducing a 2 point goal for shots taken past 25 meters, for example? That would be a huge step to making soccer more popular in the US, I think. That, and a tie breaker that's way more conclusive and satisfying than those stupid penalty kicks. Why not a sudden death 10 minute tie breaking round *played without goalies*? That'd be way better, I'd think.

I forgot to mention that hockey has the same low-scoring problems, in basically the same way, as soccer does, and has had the same history of evolution of strategy.

If there's any game which has the hollywood structure tied into it, it's tennis. If tennis were solely about who is the better tennis player, a match would be a single 100-point tiebreak. But we want tennis matches to be interesting to watch, so instead we have the whole game/set/match thing.

Once more with citations... WJA, the role of the global market for Hollywood productions is a relatively recent phenomenon - namely, the product of the post-"Star Wars" blockbuster mentality - as various books like Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" and Shone's "Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer" have explored. (The later is celebratory, of course, and a fun read.) It's really not until the rise of bombs that break even or make profits (like "Last Action Hero") that Hollywood's attention really turns overseas. Are movies still quantifiably "Western" or "American" if they're being denuded of character and stripped down to easily translatable action sequences? Comedies, incidentally, still make the majority of their money in North America - at least those dependant upon wordplay. Ever wonder why fart jokes and juvenile humour is so readily greenlighted?

I shan't quibble with the global appeal of basketball, but I will note that it's rather ironic that more management-driven, system-oriented play (almost like football and hockey?) has begun to be the winning international style, frustrating latter "Dream Team" incarnations. One has to wonder what will happen domestically as this "American" sport becomes further internationalized - if there's sufficient attention to these changes in US basketball, that is. As for the Americanization of an international game like association football (i.e., 2-point goals, larger nets, empty nets), it would simply lead to something as legitimate as "Slamball" - or, for a rugby fan, as legit as North American Football. Sure, it might happen - but the possible gain in fan support won't offset the limitations this would pose for the US soccer team. Riffng on another slate.com essay (this one on hockey), soccer's better off as a niche sport anyhow - advertisers can find a cosmopolitan athletics crowd, and fans work a little harder to find their fix.

> the role of the global market for Hollywood
> productions is a relatively recent phenomenon -
> namely, the product of the post-"Star Wars"
> blockbuster mentality

That speaks to a totally different phenomenon-- Hollywood's economic dependence on the growing international market to recoup productions costs. But that has nothing to do with the larger point in relation to soccer: since pretty much the industry's inception, Hollywood films have been as/nearly/more/much more popular abroad as the local product, Hollywood the leading exporter of films abroad, with Bollywood and Hong Kong a distant 2nd and 3rd. (I believe India is the only country where the local films are generally more popular than American imports, and that was true only for a very brief time in Hong Kong during the mid 80s/early 90s when Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan, John Woo, etc. were at their creative peak.) Vis a vis soccer, it's really irrelevant that Hollywood's films have been somewhat de-Americanized in content in recent years, because even then, they're still following the three act structure developed in Hollywood's golden age.

If it's Hollywood endings and high scores the American sport public go for, then why isn't cricket popular? In a world class cricket game, such as the one played at the beginning of 2006 between Australia and New Zealand, each team scored in excess of 340 runs and Australia won by only 3 runs. That's Hollywood and high scores if ever there was an example.

I'm going to go with the 'set pieces' and 'three-act drama' arguments over the 'high scores' one. Followers of the big three American sports appear to 'get' a Beckham free kick more than they do a sequence of attacking play, because there are greater parallels to the discrete confrontations and called plays of their native sports. Even a half-court NBA offense is more scripted than a midfield buildup.

There's also the issue of clock management, which is more or less absent from association football. While a winning side can run down the clock, a losing side can't stop the clock. The 'last minute' in a NFL or NBA game can last half an hour, with the audience aware of every tenth of a second.

"Why not a sudden death 10 minute tie breaking round *played without goalies*? That'd be way better, I'd think."

Or how about making the players swap their boots for clown shoes? If you're going to turn a sport into a circus act, go the whole hog.

I'm going to agree that it really is all about the ludology, compared to domestic ball sports.

There's a few exceptions, but soccer does lack a lot of the "flow" that the domestic sports has. The game is jumpy, balls bounce around at almost random angles, and the number of truly great team plays in a game probably can be counted on both hands.

Soccer can be beautiful. But it can also be really ugly at times.

There's a funny John Cleese routine where he describes American football as a giant talkfest. There's like 15 seconds of play, then everything stops so the offense can huddle together and talk, while the defense talk amongst themselves, and the refs talk with each other. What he doesn't get is this is *exposition*, time for the audience to absorb the action and anticipate the next sequence, while the voiceover narrator (i.e., the newscaster) describes the bigger narrative picture. I believe basketball is the most popular American game internationally, and largely is because it has a similar structure, but unlike football, they're not wearing helmets, so during time outs and free throws, etc., you have time to do dramatic close-ups of the stars, and cutaways to supporting cast members in the team benches, the audience stands, etc. It works like almost exactly like a Hollywood film narrative, just that it's shot live and shown on TV. Soccer doesn't work half as well on television, it's all uninterrupted long shots and few dramatic pauses.

Re the comment that soccer is a game in which "Whole blocks of game time transpire during which absolutely nothing happens."

Consider American football. A typical game lasts something like three hours by the clock on the wall, though there are only sixty minute on the game clock. During those three hours the ball is actually in play for about twelve minutes on average. Talk about nothing happening. That is why we need "color commentators" and such, to give us the impression that something is happening.

perhaps someone has raised this but.... i reckon one reason soccer hasn't a large fan base (though it is the nation's most popular sport for the under 12s) is because network/cable TV hate soccer. any sport which cannot accommodate the "TV timeout" and demands 45+ minutes of uninterrupted gameplay is something which media moguls would have trouble with, no? and if it ain't on TV in america it's as if it doesn't exist...

What golem said above. The inventors of a game where you have to be in a stadium for three hours to watch 60 minutes of actual play, complaining about football (yes, football) being boring? It takes some nerve.

As for the popularity of american sports abroad, I'd have to say that basketball is the only one for which this is even remotely true, at least here in Europe. W.J.A., you deliberately picked the example that worked most in your favor, but try asking a non-american about Joe Montana or Curt Schilling.

Totally excellent conversation here. I have nothing to add, though lots of stuff to think about now ...

A great discussion - I felt so strongly about it that I did a little blogging of my own...

Very cool! Good post ...

Sorry, sorry sorry to have spotted this so late. Probably nobody will read this, but I have to leave my opinion of italian NON soccer enthusiast.

I am one of the minority of italians which recognized majour league soccer was all a big trick and started being bugged by people reading ONLY about soccer in a country that's facing disaster.

Now, for what concerns the topic, if americans don't enjoy soccer it's basically because they are not used to play it. Maybe it's not so apparent, but it's a very fun game to play.

Once you know the game you are able to appreciate a lot of things that simply don't hit the eye of the casual audience, like tactics. Goals are a plus and the expression "beautiful game, pity for the lack of goals" are common and non-ironical.

Pathos IS there. Have you seen the WONDERFUL Italy vs Germany yesterday? If that was not Hollywood... Maybe not "last action hero", perhaps a better movie...

Bram said "any team can win". It's not like that. Any team can LOOSE is the thing. But it's like that in every serious sport, right?

For the spot slots... Maybe in the states you get served what fits better with the tastes of advertising companies. In Europe we still have things that advertising companies sponsor because people like them. But it's changing fast, sadly...

As you can see I do love soccer in the end... I just can't stand to see it rottening with money, corruption, and showbiz.

I will not check for tipos (let's call them so) or other grammar horrors but I hope it's still readable (if someone ever gets down here...)

Bye,

Mario
(Rome - Italy)

Mario, great post, sir!

You make me flush... Eeer... BLUSH!

By the way, we won.
French team played better and maybe deserved more but we prevailed.

Also it's not nice to win at the penalty kicks.

But we've lost so many times when deservenig to win or/and at the penalty kicks that I think it's fair if we keep the cup for the next four years.

Oh, maybe nobody told Zizou, but do not play soccer if being called names is something that send you berserk... :D