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Soccer is un-American? Thank God!

In the throes of moving from one house to another this month I dug deep into boxes to find one labeled SPORTS JERSEYS in anticipation of this year’s World Cup matches. Back in 2002 I purchased a Slovenija (that’s Slovenia for you newbies) jersey, in part due to my heritage and in part due to my contrarian nature.

Slovenia is the little guy on the World Cup stage, a nation that slipped away from Yugoslavia and Slobodan Milosovic in the early 1990s to establish its own economy and eventually become part of the European Union. It’s a story not that dissimilar from the United States more than 200 years ago.

The night before the US-Slovenija match I wore the jersey to a local sports joint to watch game 7 of the Lakers-Celtics series with some friends. It’s green and white to match the Celtics’ colors. My wife quipped that wearing a Slovenija jersey could be considered un-American, to which I replied, “Soccer is un-American.”

To the ears of a soccer thump this would be akin to heresy because they wouldn’t think of the positive connotations of such a statement.

Every four years at World Cup time we enter into some type of national debate about the prominence of soccer in the United States. And every four years we end up in the same place: Soccer is relegated to a secondary sport on the national scene once we rev up for American football season and the baseball playoffs.

But that’s not a bad thing.

Deep down, even though they won’t admit it, our country’s staunchest soccer advocates aficionados freaks like it that way. And it’s the best characteristic about soccer in this country.

Over the past 20 years we’ve gotten away from roots sports in America. NASCAR was once a regional acquired taste confined mostly to the South; now it struggles for ratings as the circuit’s leadership has abandoned its base. The NHL remains strong in its traditional cities but has been weakened by a desire to force it upon markets in the Sun Belt to the point that the idea of moving a team back to now viable set of Canadian markets is a non-starter for the league’s management. The recent near-collapse of the traditional college football conference arrangement might have meant more short-term financial gains but would have likely eroded over the long-term the sense of pride that many non-professional sports markets and states have in their college programs.

The soccer establishment in the United States shouldn’t want that to happen to the sport, as it most likely would be co-opted by these same “market” forces were it to ascend to one of the top four or five slots that Americans tend to reserve for their sports passions.

In the early 2000s I had the experience of working as a sports writer and covering two seasons of professional sports in the Chicago region. Being a life-long fan of Chicago teams (sans the Pale Hose) I had the time of my life spending summers at Wrigley Field, working the Bears’ clubhouse following a game, and covering the Bulls in the House that Jordan Built.

But I found the most pleasure in covering Major League Soccer games and the Chicago Fire at Soldier Field. The players were real. They were approachable. They were friendly (except when stepping on Hristo Stoichkov’s shower shoes). It also didn’t hurt that the Fire were also the best professional sports team in Chicago in that era.

Former international stars (Stoichkov and Piotr Nowak) and future members of US World Cup teams (Carlos Bocanegra and DaMarcus Beasley) could walk around downtown Chicago and nobody would notice them. Heck, the sportswriters covering them had a hard enough time picking them apart when they were down to their skivvies.

In 2010, Major League Soccer has quietly evolved into a stable professional sports league in the United States. They strategically pick their markets and know where they can fill a niche. Try getting a Seattle Sounders ticket these days when they open up 35,000 seats at the Seahawks’ Qwest Field.

There were seasons in the 1990s when MLS teams were chastised because they played in 80,000-seat NFL palaces and the place looked empty when they would only sell it to 25% of capacity. Few people stopped to think that a professional sports team drawing 15,000 to 20,000 fans a game was on par or greater than some NHL or NBA franchises. Now many MLS franchises have their own stadiums with a seating capacity in this range. Portland, Oregon, is in the midst of a debate about whether to turn over its Triple-A baseball stadium to a MLS team and drop-kick America’s pastime right out of town.

So ponder this:

If soccer was quintessentially American then we would be bombarded with two months of speculation related to how companies were jockeying to buy 30 seconds of ad space (or small patches of jersey space) for millions of dollars leading up to whatever version we would have of a soccer Super Bowl.

If soccer was American to-the-core then we would have to succumb to lengthy commercials during the course of play that would be disguised as timeouts instead of the pleasures of more than 45 minutes of unimpeded strategy.

If soccer was the American Dream we would have to subject ourselves to its version of Dick Vitale, the Pittsburgh Pirates, LeBron-mania, Tiger Woods, and Jerry Jones.

If soccer was like Chevrolet and apple pie we would have to sit patiently through several games per year on ESPN so they could focus all of their attention on a MLS rivalry directed solely at TV markets in the northeastern United States.

Soccer is un-American. And that’s a very good thing.

© 2010 Teflon Don Sports.