Most Americans it seems do not give a hoot about the World Cup starting in Germany next weekend. That is a shame, because they have a good team and a chance of making it through to the second round. They may not be the most talented team in the world but they are very good at making the most of what they have got.
That is in stark contrast to Australia, where it seems that despite not knowing much at all about soccer, the country is going over the top with enthusiasm with an over-inflated idea of the national team’s chances. Team USA has a hard group, but with Italy in turmoil, the way is open for an American ambush. They have the ability and nous to do so.
Much of the credit for that can be credited to their manager, Bruce Arena. The New York Times has done a interesting feature on him, and his team. You’ll have to be quick to read the full story given how quickly the NY Times shoves things behind its firewall, but here’s a taster…
“I get the sense that Arena truly appreciates the predicament of the American soccer player,” says Andrei Markovits, a professor of German studies and comparative politics at the University of Michigan and the author of a book on the development of American soccer. “These are great athletes, but they are disrespected by their peers around the world and unknown by their own countrymen. Arena understands this, and I think it gives him tremendous legitimacy.”
Sitting on the deck of his home in northern Virginia in April, Arena listened to this assessment and said he agreed with it. “I’m not willing to say we can’t beat anybody we play,” Arena said. “At the World Cup, we’re not going to be the dominant team. It doesn’t mean we can’t be the better team.” And: “I don’t want to blow a lot of hot air… but I’m pretty successful at what I do. There’s reasons for it.”
The primary one, perhaps, is a recognition of frailty, an honest appraisal of flaws and limitations. Arena’s approach to coaching the national team begins with this acknowledgment: “We don’t have the best players in the world.”
In particular, the Americans lack a dominant goal scorer and lyrical playmaker. The last time Arena checked, Ronaldinho played for Brazil and Wayne Rooney wore the red, white and blue of England, not the United States. Basketball is played with jazzy improvisation in this country, but soccer’s suburban orientation often creates a fife-and-bugle regimentation. This is why Arena bristles at suggestions by columnists and by officials within the United States Soccer Federation that the Americans should play artistically like the Brazilians or hire a Brazilian coach.
“One of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard,” Arena said, noting that the MetroStars, now the New York Red Bulls, didn’t exactly set Major League Soccer afire when Carlos Alberto Parreira, Brazil’s current coach, was in charge there.
“What we’re good at and why we’ve been successful is that we know what we are,” Donovan, the American playmaker, told me. “A lot of countries pretend to be something they’re not. A lot of teams like to pretend they’re like the Brazilians. Well, you don’t have the athletes the Brazilians do. You don’t have the soccer knowledge and skill they do. We understand that. We’re not the most talented team in the world, by far. But we are one of the most competitive, with the best spirit, the fittest, and with some of the best athletes. And we use that to our advantage.”
When Arena chews on the matter of American soccer style, he appears to have bitten into something bitter. For him, the country is too big, the melting-pot influences too various, the youth development system too disconnected from professional clubs to say that this is the way the Americans play soccer. Style will have to develop over time, if at all, Arena says. “Europe is kind of the size of the U.S. Is there one playing style in Europe?” he asks. “If we were the size of Holland, it’d be a hell of a lot easier.”
But, he adds, “one day, when we get it right and become the best, it’s because we did it our way, no one else’s way.”
The American style, as Arena sees it, is defined by an ability to adapt, to shape strategies and formations according to various factors: the players available on a particular day, the opponent, the weather. Style depends on the qualities his players possess, not on predetermined notions about how they should play. In the 2002 World Cup, the Americans sat back and counterattacked in the wilting heat against Mexico, using three backs to cope with players’ injuries and suspensions, and then charged hell-bent at Germany in the next game, certain that the Germans were not the better team.
My twin-brother friends have been watching soccer their entire lives, and playing it too. They’ve noted with appreciation how the American team has become better and better through the years and is finally emerging.
But really, most Americans start caring when they think we have a chance of winning. America loves a champion, a winner. Period.
For that reason, you’ll see America start to really tune in when our men’s team gets to the level at which our women’s team arrived several years back with Hamm and Chastain and the rest of the crew.
The American women’s team excelled at soccer the way that men’s soccer will excel when they mature a bit more (especially since soccer has really taken off at the youth level in the US over the past decade (soccer moms, anyone?), which has set the foundation for something bigger.
And the way they’ll excel is precisely what was outlined in the article. Our strength is in flexibility and dogged determination when we know we can win… exactly the way we play all our other sports. If you get nothing else out of watching American baseball and football and other team sports, check out the way teams adapt to new opponents and play styles and combinations of player talent and injuries. It’s all about adaptation.
Anyway, my two friends have got the soccer bug under my skin now. This is one American who’ll be watching.
There’s only one football: and it’s just about to start its international competition now.
American “football” (wherein the ball is actually only kicked about half a dozen times in three hours) isn’t anything by comparison.
When does the EPL start the 2006/7 season?
In late August, as it always does!
The EPL sucks though. Chelsea will win it, we know this already. Until the Russian snuffs it or sells it, I’m just going to follow the Champions’ League.
I’ve followed my local club team, The Columbus Crew, since inception. The first major league futbol stadium in the U.S. is 15 minutes driving distance from my house.
I love American Football too. Never understood the competition between the two — they are apples and oranges apart — both a great spectacle for different reasons.
My heart will always be with “The Beautiful Game” and unlike many fair-weather Americans, I’ll be watching Arena and the U.S. National team wherever they go.
USA, USA, USA!
Well I as a Welshman will certainly be cheering England on next week.
I tried to develop a theme over on the Rottie around the time of the European Cup that the reason American forign policy is so skewed, is because they don’t play the same games that everyone else does as a national sport and are obsessed with winning all the time.But it turned into a bit of a patriotic “who can pee the highest competition”, along the lines of one linebacker is worth two prop forwards etc.
We Brits have invented damn near every game on the planet. At least the most popular ones and we regularly let the World beat us at them.
This has been our cunning little ploy for many years now. Whilst we quietly get on with the real business, and it makes them all so happy!
Even if the US team does well in the World Cup I doubt that soccer will ever really take off over here. First of all the market is saturated with sports, Football, Baseball Basketball Hockey are the big four, but then there are things like NASCAR and golf and so on. Even when Americans do well at something like tennis or sking they don’t crowd out the big four or the others.
Secondly the success of women’s soccer and the way that suburban moms have taken to the sport has produced nothing but scorn for it on the part of most male sports fans. The Soccer moms like it because its relatively safe, can be played by gender neutral teams and has a vaguely foreign fashionable flavor to it.
The players on team USA are certainly fine athletes, and I hope unrealistically) they win, but on the whole, over here, its a game for quiche eaters.
A slight modification: Brits and North Americans of British descent invented the most popular games. Basketball, probably the second or third most popular sport in the world, was invented by a Canadian of British descent living in New England. Baseball – a sport taken seriously by far more people around the world than both rugbycodes put together – and (ice) hockey are also North American, though obviously British derived sports.
Personally I hope football never becomes the dominant sport in either Australia or the US – don’t laugh, few of those tens of millions of new immigrants Bush wants to let in are going to follow traditional American sports. Australia and the US have their own rich sporting traditions and it would be a shame to see them become just like almost everywhere else with football being the dominant sport. Almost all globalisation leads to boring homogeneity. The more diverse and globalised a country becomes the more uniformity we see from country to country and less real culture. That’s what makes places like France so special: they want to remain French and won’t be bullied by corporate globalists into being the same as everywhere else. Vive le difference!
So let’s hope the Aussies and Yanks get thoroughly beaten and humiliated in the group stage then they can go back to not giving a damn about football.
See this is just what I mean!
This happened the last time!!
And I only needed a 9 irony to the pin
to win!!!
I disagree that futbol will never take-off in the U.S. The hispanic population, the growing youth enthusiasm, and the increasing success of MLS will win out. It just may take another 20 years to do it.
“It just may take another 20 years to do it.”
That’s what they said 20 years ago. And the 20 before that. It ain’t gonna happen. Not enough scoring, not enough specialized equipment. And the fans want to be aware of the strategy in real time. And to top it all off, soccer can be played by ordinary-sized men. Who wants to watch that?
“Baseball – a sport taken seriously by far more people around the world than both rugbycodes put together “… What possible evidence is there to support such an idea?
Soccer is associated with everything that is bad in Britain from lager louts, to gang rape (which players, as well as supporters, go in for), to New Labour.
Australia has Australian rules football – and for those people who do not like “the bounce” (as, I was once told, some people call it), there is both rugby and cricket. It is irritating to find that Australians now feel they have to be like everyone else and follow soccer.
Why should the culture of a country be the same as the culture of every other country? Just to make a world government less difficult, or what?
And what a culture for the whole world to be devoted to – soccer culture.
As for the United States. Those people who do not like American Football or Baseball should take up the national sport – which is (and has always been) shooting.
This has the advantage that almost anyone can actually get out and do it (whereas most other sports are about sitting in a chair watching a television screen).
It is true that British competitors used to beat Americans in many shooting events, but with shooting having been made basically unlawful in Britian (with all the various statutes) that may well change over time.
Soccer is not associated with everything bad in England though a lot of the bad things have associated themselves with it. Now that’s the last time I’ll type “soccer” because it’s football, even though several hundred millions of Americans may disagree, preferring their own delinquent version of rugby with body armour.
This is what the World Cup means to me:
Every morning as I walk down the street, I’ll see little Asian lasses in their saris kicking a ball about. If that ball comes back to me, I’ll pass it to them. The whole World goes football-crazy for a month every four years and forgets all other grievances. I love it.
The US has a tough group but I certainly wouldn’t bet against them. Bruce Arena knows his stuff and insists on the team being supremely fit (something that doesn’t occur to more sophisticated European coaches). I hope they do well. They’re my second team this time around (no Republic of Ireland), so Go USA!
They did pretty well in 2002, didn’t they? If only they’d beaten the Krauts…
Just to stir the pot…
I have always wondered about the claim about soccer being the world sport despite it being of little interest to the world’s two best sporting nations (US and Australia). If soccer was the only sport in the world, these two countries would contest just about every final with the US winning most of them.
Even if we (Australia) lose to Brazil in the next week or so, there will be no disgrace – we would thrash their g-stringed backsides in just about every other sport known to man, despite having 10% of the population.
Adrian,
Maybe, with the exception of beach volleyball. Those Brazilian asses in those little bikinis… ahhh (censored)
Adrian
Would you agree with me that Rugby Union and Cricket are the two most important team games played in Australia – Just remind me, who won the last ashes series and who are the current world Rugby champions?
Rob – you’ve set the bait, so I will bite.
The biggest team game is Australian Rules football. By a mile. I recall reading a few years ago that on a given weekend, Melbourne alone on average got a larger aggregate gate on a given weekend from 6 games than the entire English premiership did (10 games) on the same weekend. Given some larger stadiums in England I am not sure this still holds. But it gives you some idea of the insular passion. Very few people in Melbourne or Adelaide would realise that (say) Andrew Johns and George Gregan have never played in the same side together. I’m from a rugby playing state (NSW), so it is a mentality I don’t quite follow, though as a spectacle, Australian football is just fantastic.
Next is cricket (only true major national team sport). OK, we lost, but narrowly and in the context of the last 16 years or even the last 100 years a minor blip. In 200 more sleeps the ashes will be back.
Next is rugby league (kicking ass over the years though admittedly against fewer nations – and anyone who knows anything about rugby will tell you – the best all round rugby players).
In the rugby world cup, it took the best English side ever, representing the whole country, 99 minutes to beat hardly-the-best-ever Wallaby side which comes only from 2 states and one territory that has a smaller population than Sheffield. Since then we have put 50 points against England (2004).
And for the big ouch, wasn’t there a match between our 2 countries, say 2003 I think. Held at Upton Park. The final score was 3-1. Can’t remember which sport though…
Soccer sucks.
Population. VASTLY more people play and follow soccer worldwide that any other sport. The only other game with even a credible pretense as being anywhere near as widely popular is basketball.
Re, that Von Mises article linked:
I am not a great sports fan but I find that (admittedly subjective) view quite incorrect. I find American football and baseball quite boring to watch (I feel the same way about cricket) because it is constantly stopping and starting, it does not flow and develop like football (both soccer and rugby flavours). Soccer, at the professional level, it like watching a bunch of people tightrope walking in a high wind: scoring is dramatic in ways it is not in American footbal because it is hard to do.. the lack of scoring is not a bug, it is a feature!
But of course it is entirely a subjective matter of ‘what floats your boat’ as to which is ‘best’. Still, I think there is a reason the ‘beautiful game’ is so widely played.
You don’t need much to play football for a start, just a ball (doesn’t even have to be a football) and something to use as goalposts. No expensive kit, large green fields, etc, etc.
I really do not at all intend to set off a general bash about this, but I should like to point out one thing about baseball and then see if I can get out of here with my skin intact:
Perry: I find American football and baseball quite boring to watch (I feel the same way about cricket) because it is constantly stopping and starting, it does not flow and develop like football (both soccer and rugby flavours)…”
The thing about baseball is that it’s a head game. Every detail of the play bears on tactical and strategic contexts, all related to each other in scale from micro to big-picture, and which never lose their importance or integration even though they’re changing all the time. Like: with every pitch. Everybody on the field has to be thinking their way through it, all the time, to the practical effect of arranging decisions ahead of time — insofar as possible in a game with nine million possible plays — in order to execute properly against the paper-thin time constraints of a play in action. (Really: the ninety-foot dimension of the baselines is just about miraculous in its relationship to the limits of human performance on the diamond.)
This is how baseball can reach moments of really exquisite tension: one can see the whole future turn on something small with enormous implications. If you walked into a park at one of those moments, you’d see the same ol’ pastoral scene: a bunch of people sitting around watching nothing in particular happening — and biting their fingernails off. If you hadn’t had your head in the game to that point, you wouldn’t know why.
It’s not about “watching”, Perry, so much as thinking about what’s coming and how to deal with it. Baseball is, to my mind, the best mind/body synthesis of any team sport, and: it doesn’t subsume the individual in the team nearly so completely as other team sports. In this latter aspect, it’s a pretty good take on a proper relationship of individual and collective.
Wow Billy – and I thought it was all about the chewin’ and the spittin’.
Rob: “Baseball – a sport taken seriously by far more people around the world than both rugbycodes put together “… What possible evidence is there to support such an idea?
Just add up the populations of the countries that take each sport seriously – I don’t mean South Africa who appeared in the recent inaugural World Baseball Classic (WBC) or Japan or Canada who appear in every Rugby WC but obviously don’t take the sport seriously. (I live in a part of Canada that has produced 1 or 2 professional rugby players to the UK – by Canadian standards a rugby hotbed! – yet most people here don’t even know Canada has a team).
Japan (pop. 125 million or so) won the WBC against Cuba (pop. 11m) – the equivalent of the combined populations of the two biggest rugby playing nations, France and the UK (though baseball is a heck of a lot more popular in Japan and Cuba than rugby is in France and the UK).
I think S Korea (pop. 47m) and Dominican Republic (pop. 8m) – or was it Puerto Rico? (pop. 4m) – were the beaten semi-finalists. Those three countries cancel out rugby loving white and mixed race South Africa, Australia, NZ, Tonga, Fiji, and Ireland.
Baseball is the biggest sport in Venezuela (pop. 25m) and Nicaragua (pop. 4m) and must be widely played in Mexico (they knocked the Americans with most of their best players out of the WBC) and Canada. Those cancel out Argentina and not so rugby loving Italy and Romania – but I’ll include them just to be generous to rugger buggers.
Then there is this li’l ole place called the US of A. It alone has about as many people as the rugby countries all put together. (There may actually be more followers of American football than rugby in the world!).
Ice hockey might also be as globally popular as rugby. It’s the #1 or #2 sport in Russia, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Czech Rep., Slovakia, and Latvia. It’s also widely played and watched in about a dozen other countries. But, like baseball, it’s not big in Britain so the average Brit doesn’t think it’s truly international.
I’d venture to say cricket or maybe Formula One would be rivals to basketball for world #2 sport. In the case of cricket it’s almost entirely due to one country – India.
Slightly OT. The English introduced Brazil to cricket and football at the same time. As you know the Brazilians took to one and unjustly rejected the other. Obviously there is some kind of defect in the Brazilian character.
“Those people who do not like American Football or Baseball should take up the national sport – which is (and has always been) shooting.”
Paul,
Heheheheh… you’ve never been to my blog, have you? Try this department for size…
It’s good to watch a bunch of individualists argue with each other over which state has the best sport codes and that x nationality shouldn’t watch y code since they have their own culture.
Why can’t you just sit back and say I like z sport and be done with it? All this x sport stinks because of any number of reasons is pointless, when everyone will choose what they like and don’t like independently.
The football World Cup is a great event because it flows directly out of the natural popularity of the sport. I was at the Holland/Australia friendly yesterday and it rocked, the Aussies put up a physical game and the Dutch peppered the goals which were ably defended by Schwarzer. It might not have been a graceful performance and the game ended in a 1-1 draw, but it more than highlighted Australia’s ability to mix it with the more traditional strong football nations.
C’mon on the Socceroos!
Try living in the Southern U.S. and calling hockey an extremely popular sport. The fact that it involves ice makes it an almost unheard-of sport around here. Especially around where I live, Southern Alabama, where we see snow maybe an average of every 4 or 5 years, and when it does fall it’s only for an afternoon.
I would imagine it’s the same for other warm climates.
Rob wrote:
You forgot about the crotch scratchin’ and the cup adjustin’. 😉
Baseball and cricket have the best statistics. That’s largely because it’s easier to measure the individual contribution of players than in sports like basketball, ice hockey, or association football.
I heard a story that back during the Cold war,
The crews of two nuclear subs, one American and one British, both on global watch for the spawns of Satan, used to crash out of the Artic ice , once a year, Ice Station Zebra style and then the games would commence!
They apparantly played one game of cricket and one game of Baseball out there on the freezing ice.
Oh and the moral of the story is the Brits won both games every time.
Now if we were ever to take Baseball seriously (mentioned in a Jane Austen book) You Yanks wouldn’t get a look in!!
Billy Beck-All that is true, but the same can be said for football/soccer, and even more so considering the sheer athletic demands placed on the body. Even at the lowest levels, every player on the pitch has to be aware of the ball’s position, the relative speeds and strengths of every player on the pitch, open spaces etc.
Dribbling into the box and knowing without looking that a teammate is lurking on the flanks to cut in with a shot. Watching out for runners when you’ve just finished getting back on defense against a corner after sprinting more than 50 meters to block a shot.
[sarcasm]Yeah, baseball offers the best body/mind synthesis… when many baseball players would probably flunk any running test exceeding a kilometer. [/sarcasm]
As sports to be played for fitness and general reflexes, football and basketball are the best. Basketball is poorer only because it requires a hoop, while football only requires a ball, and sometimes not even that. A reasonably hard and durable plastic bottle can serve just as well. Ahh, fond memories there…
Baseball and cricket are nice spectator sports, but not actual fitness-type sports that is played by the general public. Football is so popular because it’s both, with the added advantage of being so easy to set up. You can watch it, and you can play it almost anytime to get fit. Not many other sports can say the same.
TWG points out that playing football requires superb fitness. Yet to play football well does not just require fitness and a great first touch (ball control), it also requires the player to be able to read the game. A good player must have a keen sense of his own position relative not simply to the position of other players as such, but more importantly to the opening up and closing down of space. Football is as much about a player’s ability to predict time and space by reading the movement and shape of the one’s own players and the other team as it is about fitness and ball control. The blend of this ability to read the game well with the ability to execute movements that successfully capitalise on this is what produces the moments for which football is known as ‘the beautiful game’. Or something like that anyway.
The USA team are not bad, but their FIFA world ranking (5th best team in the world) is patently absurd and the reason for this is that the USA national team regularly play against cannon-fodder teams – like the Jamaica team which was recently dismissed 6-0 by England for a little light practice. As more and more American players come over to Europe (mostly England) to play, they will improve and so to will the national team, but I can’t see domestic American football ever taking off. I have some American friends, but now that the World Cup has started I simply don’t want to talk to them at all (because football is pretty much the only thing I can think about other than work right now and because they lack that instinctive appreciation of my excitement that people from other countries have and also because they still talk about football as a game played with one’s hands!!!).
If people want to call soccer “football” they should at least get the name right – it is “Association Football”.
For all the talk of a the boy at Rugby school picking up a ball in his hands and running with it (which is true and did lead to the sport of rugby) the game of “football” in the middle ages had no rule against using the hands as well as the feet (it had few rules of any kind).
The game was allways associated with the worst sorts, “football” games were basically riots (and covers for criminal activity such as robbery) whereas decent sorts were busy practicing with the longbow.
I will grant that Association Football was a respectable game (from the 19th century to the 1960s – when things started to go wrong), but it has since gone back to its roots, with groups of players “steaming” young women and so on.
So I suppose it is “football” in the old sense.
I am glad that most Americans (along with Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Japanese and so on) do not think much of the game.
By the way, American football did not use to be played in “armour”, nor was there the unlimited subsitution that led to one group of players for Offence and another for Defence.
I beleive that Gerald Ford was the last President who played the traditional form of the game. As the used to say (when he blunded into something) “remember he played football before there were helmets”.
Australian rules football gives some idea of the game.
well i think today’s performance by team USA was not only a disappointment to our country and our team, but also to the world. so much pre-world cup hype was given to this team that we were expected to go far or atleast be a team of some competiton to our group. but now the world speculates if we are even capable of staying with a strong ghana team that atleast put up a fight with italy. but much can be overlooked and some encouragement must be given to this team. they are talented and some of the players one could call veterans but i am sure that no one is more upset or more disappointed than the 20-some players and coaching staff in germany. they didn’t attempt to make excuses in their post-game remarks and seem very down upon themselves. but having said all of this, we as a country need to believe, need to pray, need to hope, and need to continue to show our support. as quoted by ESPN analyst Woody Paige,” If we can pull together as a country to win 2 wars in germany, we can pull together and win a few soccer games.”
I don’t think that Bruce Arena did his job… After losing
3.0 to Zech, and he did recoupe the team. This is very embrassing for a USA nation. Let’s fire Arena, the USA team might do better…
Bruce Arena needs to be fired and disgraced. Actually getting his ass kicked is disgrace enough.
Arena should have shut his mouth. Now Australia go on to the next round and the usa proved to be one of the weakest teams of the tournament
thanks Bruce
I came here to say Arena has done a heck of a job. Surely the best he knows how. Our guys will be back and be large, that’s what the USA does. Pleeeease Jurgen give us a hand. We have the horses!!!