Noel Villaflor
Footnote

IT’S Independence Day tomorrow in the United States but tourist Darrin Cook doesn’t seem to be in a celebratory mood when discussing football.

His demeanor actually has something to do with my column last Thursday, “The US: never good enough?,” which tackled the United States team’s place in the global arena, and Cook, an American vacationing in Cebu City, e-mailed me to share
his insights on the subject:

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“I read with interest your article on the sorry state of American soccer.

Although I was on the soccer team in high school, and I see huge numbers of kids in the US playing soccer on the weekends (leading to the term “soccer mom”), I think most Americans simply don’t care about soccer.

I don’t watch the World Cup, never have, don’t know anyone who does, and am simply not interested. With this sort of disinterest, it shouldn’t be surprising that the US does poorly.

I think the root of the problem is that soccer is a poor spectator sport. Although I enjoyed playing soccer, I am bored watching it. Few Americans will watch it, and I hardly see how it can compete with other sports like football, basketball and baseball. Americans will not sit for more than an hour to see a 0-1 game.

Of course, viewership drives revenues, and until soccer can draw the American viewership of football or basketball, there won’t be teams of high caliber.”

Cook is spot on regarding America’s lack of interest in the World Cup, the US football team, and soccer in general.
But it’s hardly football’s fault that Americans are bored watching it. If football is such “a poor spectator sport,” why does everyone else enjoy it?

American rugby, basketball, baseball, even golf may be stimulating to some but are just as tedious to others. It is that subjective. And surely, boredom is not the issue.

It is tempting to dismiss spectators in the United States as mere automata whose pleasure systems are wired to the scoreboard, and whose measure of fullness is large numbers.

Or that they belong to a hyper-attentive generation who have short attention spans, seek high levels of stimulation, and cannot tolerate boredom, whatever that means. (How could they appreciate a game of football, which, like a good book, demands deep attention, all 90 minutes of it?)

But it would be prudent for me to refrain from solely pinning US soccer’s miserable state on the spectators’ inability to focus.

There are many reasons America harbors a peculiar attitude toward football, some bordering on the absurd, as some astute football observers have discovered.

For example, in his book “How Soccer Explains the World,” American writer Franklin Foer cites the mainstream “anti-soccer lobby” which not only derides the sport at every opportunity but regards any football activity as “anti-American.”

The English writer David Goldblatt reiterates this in his book “The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer:” “Football continue(s) to be suffocated by the mainstream belief that it (is) just not American.”

More than this, however, Foer and Goldblatt agree that football in America has serious class issues: it is deeply regarded as a middle-class sport.

In his essay “The People’s Game,” the novelist and football fan Salman Rushdie echoes that sentiment: “Soccer is working-class self-expression.”

All three writers suggest that for the sport to have an authentic, massive fan base, the United States must reach out to its minority and working-class communities.

Otherwise, America would remain to be the only place on earth where the “away” crowd outnumbers and outhustles national team supporters, while the domestic league will continue begging for spectators.

And that would prove our American tourist Mr. Cook was right all along, on one point, at the least.

(nsvillaflor@gmail.com)