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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
It's World Cup time again -- when more than a billion people will be enthralled not just by the joy of victory and agony of defeat, but also by the mystery and despair that is championship soccer.
May 30, 2002 | Soccer is in crisis. Soccer is the unchallenged titan of sports, standing astride the globe like a colossus in shorts and shinguards.
On the eve of the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan -- and even the positioning of the two countries' names has been a negotiated issue in what may be the tensest international sporting event since the 1936 Berlin Olympics -- both statements are true. You could argue, in fact, that both statements are always true. World soccer occurs on such a big stage, amid such high drama, that it contains a kind of yin and yang, an ethic of creation and destruction. Soccer is so far ahead of every other sport in its global reach and dominance that it has to be its own worst enemy. Its guiding philosophy is more a creed of mystery and despair than of hope and victory, which may be the profoundest reason why Americans haven't much taken to it. (As a German coach once put it, the ball is round and the game lasts 90 minutes. Everything else is theory.) If all that makes soccer sound more like a religion than a game, well, it is a kind of religion, one practiced by all races on all continents (again, excepting those agnostic Americans).
The game itself is maddening and frustrating at least as often as it is enthralling; its ebb and flow can bog down into World War I trench warfare, an orgy of egregious hacking and theatrical diving, the kind of tactical defensive play British announcers call "cynical." Soccer bashers who don't understand the game may believe that fans actually like tedious 0-0 draws, but the opposite is true. There will be at least half a dozen endlessly dull matches in the 2002 World Cup -- which kicks off Friday morning, when defending champion France plays Senegal in Seoul -- that will leave fans, watching at peculiar hours around the globe, pounding their floors in rage and bitterness and vowing to swear off this hopeless team and this dismal game once and for all. Fans also know, of course, that you never know. Out of nothingness, out of the most boring game possible, lightning can strike.
With a single, searing volley from the top of the penalty box, French midfielder Zinédine Zidane, probably the best player in the world, turned this year's European club championship game (between his team, Real Madrid, and Germany's Bayer Leverkusen) from a mediocre match into a classic. Big games can be legendary thrillers, like the 1982 World Cup semifinal between France and West Germany (arguably the greatest game ever played), or duds, like the goalless final between Brazil and Italy at the Rose Bowl in 1994.
Soccer runs true to form most of the time, which makes its upsets -- France's improbable domination of mighty Brazil in the 1998 final, sending Paris into a delirium unmatched since the Liberation -- or its flagrant outrages, like Diego Maradona's "hand of God" goal against England in 1986, seem like the workings of irresistible fate. Yes, even 0-0 draws can be exciting, nerve-racking, action-packed affairs, although there's no point trying to convince non-fans of this.
Splitting the World Cup tournament between two East Asian countries that aren't exactly bosom buddies -- and that are multiple time zones removed from the soccer heartlands of Europe and Latin America -- was strictly a marketing notion, and perhaps not the brightest one ever conceived. But soccer will survive even this and thrive. FIFA, the sport's international governing body, seems to be enmeshed in a deepening corruption scandal. Professional soccer in South America is in ruins, and every pro league in the world -- with the partial exceptions of the star-packed leagues in England and Spain -- is facing serious difficulties on and off the field. (U.S. sports fans should take a hard look at the current state of baseball, basketball and hockey before they start feeling superior.) As usual, the standard of officiating is under attack and mavericks are calling for NFL-style video replay on goal-line decisions or for the abolition of the near-metaphysical offside rule.
(For non-soccer fans, the offside rule -- there's a less mysterious version of it in hockey -- prohibits an offensive player from running past the last defensive player until the moment the ball is passed forward. Its purpose is to prevent teams from simply trying to outrun the defense and punt the ball downfield. It is difficult for the officials to call because at the moment the ball is played forward, the offensive player is often almost exactly even with the defensive player and a considerable distance away from the passer.)
All that is background noise, the ambient Sturm und Drang that the soccer world seems to require when staging its monthlong quadrennial championship spectacle, the granddaddy of all media sports events. (No, Americans, nothing else comes even close: not the Super Bowl, not the World Series, not the Olympics.) Somewhere around a billion people will watch the World Cup final broadcast live from Yokohama on June 30, and if they have to skip work or get up early or stay up late, they will.
Americans mostly won't watch it at all, of course, but I don't propose to write another of those angst-ridden pieces about why we ignore the world's game and what that says about our national soul. Salon columnist Allen Barra recently wandered into this issue and wound up, like most other American sportswriters, unintentionally insulting the planet as a whole and demonstrating his soccer illiteracy in support of a valid, if obvious, argument: Soccer will never be as big here as it is elsewhere. (I don't know Barra and we don't work in the same office, but I consider him an astute, acerbic observer of baseball, basketball and other sports.)
Perhaps Barra's suggestion that other countries might like baseball or NFL-style football better than soccer if they could afford to play them was meant to be facetious; it was certainly hilarious. Then there was his claim that top-level soccer talent does not vary widely. Why then do a handful of nations like Argentina, Brazil, Italy and France dominate the international game, while the same club teams (Manchester United, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich) win European championships year after year? This is what comes from basing one's opinions on a vague impression: I mean, Shawn Bradley must be a better basketball player than Shaquille O'Neal since he's taller, right?
Still, Barra and other soccer detractors have a point. There's no Euro-style soccer culture in the United States, and there probably never will be. Soccer's future in the U.S. is as a widespread participatory sport that is very slowly gaining purchase as a niche spectator sport, thanks in equal parts to continuing immigration and the spread of soccer-mom culture in the 'burbs. Regardless of whether Major League Soccer, the troubled if decently competitive men's pro league, manages to survive, the game will most likely hold on to its spot in the sports hierarchy, somewhere a little south of hockey but north of lacrosse or arena football.
Despite its financial problems and microscopic TV ratings, MLS has given borderline young American players the chance to improve and has deepened and broadened the U.S. talent pool. It's no stretch to say that the United States has arrived in international men's soccer -- as a consistent, hard-working and mediocre team that tends to collapse in crunch time. (Of course, as the defending world champions, the United States is already one of the dominant forces in women's soccer. The next women's World Cup will be held in 2003.)
