Michael Makin, University of Michigan



Soccer Moms, Football Father:

Association Football and the American Middle Class

Michael Makin, University of Michigan

Unless you have children between the ages of five and approximately twenty-five, or you grew up a fervent sports fan in a country outside of the top four fifths of North America, it is possible that you may have missed something approaching a revolution in U.S. sports that has taken place within the last twenty years. As it happens, I fit both profiles – I have two small sons; I am an Englishman (and sports fan). Moreover, I’ve lived in the U.S. for twenty years. So I feel particularly authorized to explore what has happened in America to the world’s most popular sport, and to provide some speculative commentary on its future here.

Association football is undoubtedly the world’s dominant spectator sport, and surely the most popular participatory team sport too, notwithstanding the intense popularity of cricket in the world’s second most populous country, and the widespread love around the world for that unique American export – basketball. But the foothold of the association game in the U.S. has traditionally been small and insecure, as even terminology seems to suggest. “Football” means unambiguously one thing to the peoples that have borrowed both the word and the sport from the English (for example, the French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russians). But, in its native language, it is actually a rather elusive term. Like “corn” (which usually designates wheat in Britain, but sweet corn in the U.S.), it tends to indicate the dominant type in a particular locality. So, to a Welshman the term might well indicate Rugby Football, to an Australian, Australian Rules Football, to an Irishman Gaelic Football, and, of course, to an American it means the gridiron game. In the U.S., the Beautiful Game (by the way, that phrase was coined by the great Pelé, who used it in the title of his autobiography) generally goes by the term “Soccer”. Unbeknownst to most Americans, “soccer” is actually a British popular term, coined to distinguish the association code of the game (so-called because it was the first to have a codifying association – hence soccer), from the game out of which American Football developed – Rugby Football, commonly known as “Rugger” in its fifteen-man version. So, it turns out, even the language which, in the U.S., relegates the sport to a lesser status, comes from somewhere else.

Most middle-aged Americans without young, athletic children, probably think of soccer largely in terms of the 1970s North American Soccer League, a glorious but ultimately failed experiment, which brought many (often ageing) foreign stars to the U.S. and Canada – among them Pelé himself – but which could not survive long term in an environment dominated by other, and very different sports. Soccer was, in the end, “not athletic enough”, didn’t have enough scoring, wasn’t suitable for U.S. TV, and, after all, wasn’t American. I remember, as an adolescent, reading an article in the British press on the situation of soccer stateside during the brief flowering of the NASL. Or rather, I remember a few details of that article. The traveling party of English journalists admired much about the new league, but observed with regret one thing: nowhere – on no street corner, in no back yard, in no city park -- did they see a casually-formed group of boys performing what, to the journalists, was the most natural of sporting actions: kicking a ball about. That, they opined, was an alarming sign for the future of the sport in America. And they were right.

A generation later, anyone conducting amateur ethnographic research on the game in the U.S. would see exactly the same thing. With the possible exceptions of Hispanic America, you’d be very hard pressed to find a group of children “having a kick-around” (or, as many Americans would probably put it, unintentionally illustrating again the paradoxes of the game here, “playing pickup soccer”). Nonetheless things have changed dramatically in America, both for young people and for the world’s greatest sport. Look again, and you will see very striking signs of the sport’s penetration into American life. Every second SUV or minivan seems to have attached to it somewhere a sticker proclaiming affiliation to a local soccer club. And those vehicles are quite likely to be carrying one or more players, decked out in the finest uniforms, nervously clutching balls, in advance of developmental exercises, practices, or games. The supermarkets of suburban America are full of children in football kit (or, if you prefer, soccer uniform), anxiously looking at watches and thinking about game time while parents – most often mothers – do the shopping on the way to playing fields. Parents tell you that they can’t make a particular social event because one of their offspring “has soccer” at the same time. Parents even announce that they’ll be coaching their children’s teams.

Indeed, according to statistics from the U.S. Youth Soccer Association, player registrations grew from 100,000 in 1974 to 2.1 million in 1994 to more than 4 million in sanctioned leagues ten years later. And that is just for the more or less serious junior players – surely millions more play in recreational and developmental programs.

Soccer has even gained the ultimate accolade – it provided the social identity of a political phenomenon: the “Soccer Mom”, that supposedly crucial figure in the election, twice, of Bill Clinton. The choice of sport for the term is enlightening: not a “traditional” American sport, but a booming sport of the 1990s; not a sport that would be unambiguously in the domain of fathers, but a sport where mothers might have the key role; not a sport, by implication, for boys, but a sport for boys and girls equally; a sport associated with the new life of the American suburban family, with its crowded schedule of “play dates”, children’s athletic events, and other organized activities; a sport, moreover, that carried all kinds of values that might seem positive for the 1990s. For example, soccer was global, apparently gender-blind, perhaps not even favoring unduly the “athletic” in the American sense (big, strong, fast); it might well look less “physical” to the casual observer than other available options such as Ice Hockey and American Football; it was a sport, in short, which every boy and girl could play. Moreover, even very little children could play it (unlike American Football, Ice Hockey, and even Baseball or Softball, for which the tedium of T-Ball is an early substitute). In a word, to spend a significant part of whatever free time you had ferrying your children to soccer engagements in your late-model SUV or Minivan had become a sign that you were a caring, family-oriented mother with the right kind of attitudes and values (and, for other reasons, a highly sought-after voter).

Above all, this political term identified the sport’s American heartland – middle-class, even upper-middle-class suburbia. And that identification helped to explain what was different – there were, indeed, no traditional associations at all to fracture the picture of the new voter: no images of Friday nights in small towns where the High School football team could be carried to victory by boys from the wrong side of the tracks (or even the racial divide); no images of run-down inner-city parks where poor boys perfected great moves while swapping elbows with other tough, poor boys; no century-long, aestheticized romance as “America’s past time”; and, of course, no need for ice. Soccer truly was representative of the new America. And if you looked a bit more carefully at that new America, you would, indeed, see everywhere carefully maintained soccer fields, often enthusiastically voted up by local communities, flourishing indoor facilities where children could continue their love affair with the game during winter months in northern states, and, yes, even goals – often quite expensive goals – installed on suburban lawns. You still wouldn’t find a spontaneous kick-around, not even around those backyard goals, where you might see, at best, a group of family members practicing, but you would certainly see abundant evidence of the hold the sport, or rather playing the sport had taken on young America.

Yet, if you had grown up with the sport, if you were familiar with all the stories of great players too poor to own football boots (“soccer cleats”) until they signed their first professional contracts, if you admired the men who had played barefoot on the streets of third-world slums before they captivated the world in stadiums that held a hundred thousand, if you just recalled your own childhood efforts on muddy fields, where the likeliest instruction from a watching relative – if such there was -- would be “get stuck in!”, or yet if you remembered the brutal games played on streets and school playgrounds where only the strong survived – then this American image of the sport could seem more than a little odd, even comic.

Over a decade ago, I got a powerful impression of this American novelty. A colleague invited me to the annual “Soccer Night” in the university town where I work. Her son (not born in America, incidentally – quite characteristic for the period, I suspect) was keeping goal for one of the two city high schools which would face one another at one school’s (American) football stadium for the annual contest for local bragging rights. What we would call in the U.K. a “local derby”. Since I loved the sport (and, at that time, had very little access to it as a spectacle), I agreed to go and support my colleague’s son. I will never forget two things about that night: to my astonishment, the stadium was packed – there must have been at least three thousand people at the game, which would be a respectable attendance at a lower-division professional match in Europe; and yet almost no one among the adults in the stadium seemed to know the rules or even understand the game. For example, most of the crowd seemed to think of the goalkeepers as stars, who bore the principal duties in defense (what was this, I asked myself, Ice Hockey?). They certainly didn’t seem to applaud or groan when I expected (good moves, great recoveries, defensive lapses, that sort of thing). A clear generational gap was delineated for me on that night. One that, while being eroded now, is still to be seen in every club and most middle class soccer families in the country.

But I didn’t really start to understand the game as played in the States until I had children. In fact, until I had sons. When my future (Russian) wife and I discussed, as soon-to-be-married couples love to, our yet-to-be-conceived offspring, I recall vaguely that she – like me, a lifelong sports fan – announced that “our sons will play ice hockey and our daughters will be figure skaters”. Rather than dutifully reply “Yes, dear”, I think I had the temerity to ask, “What will happen if the boys are figure skaters and the girls hockey players?” Even before marriage she had learned to shoot me withering looks, and, on that occasion, she did: “That will not happen”. Indeed, it didn’t, because the birth of son caused an outbreak of athletic atavism in me. My firstborn, while still in a baby carrier, had headed a ball I picked up from a supermarket shelf – at least, I let it bounce gently off his head, accompanied by my ecstatic commentary: “Makin – a bullet header – it’s there – a hat trick – and England’s captain will be holding the World Cup tonight!” As soon as he could walk, he had a ball at his feet, and an infant-sized replica kit (of the team I support in England) to wear. I might never have been much of a footballer myself, but my boys were certainly going to play the game. And they have.

When that firstborn, Gordon, was four, I signed him up for the recreational program organized by our local school district (his brother, Neil, three years younger, has subsequently followed a similar path). Ever since this first experience of organized sport, our weekends, and now significant parts of weekday evenings, have been scheduled around practices and games (no wonder “soccer Mom” was such a positive term – someone who puts her children first). The American system is beautiful in its efficiency. Almost every child tries a bit of “rec. and ed.” soccer; many go on to developmental programs run by clubs; the more enthusiastic and talented then try out for travel teams, and the best of them, by the time they’re in their teens, play on elite teams that fly to tournaments all over the country and beyond. The system has a lot in common with what happens in other team sports in the U.S., and, perhaps more significantly, is not unlike the elaborate pyramid system that made the Soviet sports infrastructure so very efficient. Unlike the Soviet system, however, it’s the parents, not the state, that pay.

The rec. and ed. programs, sometimes run by local clubs, but with a coaching staff usually provided by parent volunteers, in which most American children start playing the game, also have much in common with local equivalents for basketball and baseball, except for one crucial difference, as I would soon learn. In his first organized games, my son was coached by someone who had never played the sport, even at the most elementary level. “It’s a good job they don’t use the same policy for swimming classes”, I joked to other parents on the first day of the program. They looked at me politely, but without comprehension. Then I stood on the touchlines, staring at the giants produced by American nutrition and all those hormones in the milk, anxiously briefing my slight-looking four-year-old: “It’s going to be a challenge; play your hardest; if you get knocked down, don’t complain, get right back up and play on; tackle hard but fairly…” At that point I was interrupted by a hostile-looking matriarch, who announced that she “didn’t want my son tackling her daughter”. I was so taken aback that I did not have the presence of mind to reply that I’d forgotten the special dispensation from the rules of the game, otherwise applied to hundreds of millions worldwide, which FIFA had issued for that one little girl in Dexter, Michigan, who could not be tackled – even fairly and cleanly -- during games. It wasn’t the last time that my use of the perfectly normal and surely unobjectionable term “tackle” caused problems. In a club developmental program, a coach asked me not to praise children for “good tackles” or call for a defender to “tackle”, since it upset other parents. At first I agreed to circumlocutions such as “challenge” and “dispossess”, but in the end I had to stand up for the game and for myself. I objected that the term was standard, and if other parents could only think of it as applied to the gridiron game, then it was about time they worked on their athletic vocabulary. I wasn’t popular (remember, this is the all-inclusive, non-physical, nice middle-class sport).

My son enjoyed his rec. and ed. times, even if the other parents didn’t seem to like me. My idea of the game, not just its vocabulary, must have seemed so strange to them. I well remember the moment when my son and another boy had a clash of heads in the middle of the pitch (there’s another term that irritated the locals). An anxious mother dashed out to tend to her fallen son before play had even stopped; I dawdled on the touchline hoping that my son would get up on his own, only walking out to him when the mother turned from consoling her own son to mine, evidently thinking that he was suffering from a shocking soccer-mom absence. I ambled out to midfield, where my son sat, rubbing his head; I stood over him, and spoke: “Gordon, do you remember the story I told you about Paul Ince, captaining England in the crucial World Cup Qualifier at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome?” My son nodded, bleary-eyed: “Remember – he was in a clash of heads, blood poured from the wound, they patched him up but he still bled through the bandage non-stop, as he led his country to glory?” [in fact, he led his country to a crucial nil-nil draw, which took England to the World Cup Finals of 1998]. My son nodded more enthusiastically. “Good, then get up and play on!” The horrified mother backed away from me as if I had just confessed to beating my child every day he failed to make his bed. But play on he did, scoring another hatful of goals. Of course, it wasn’t hard to score at will, because so many of the children signed up for the sport looked as if they had never played before at all – not even in their backyards, as we did every warm day. Lots of little children ran away from the ball (within a year, those who stayed in the program would all run to the ball, wherever it was and wherever they were supposed to be, but that is another story), others ran the wrong way, but with the ball; some picked flowers or sat down in the goal. My frustration was nothing on my son’s. He remonstrated with those indifferent to the state of play and complained bitterly on the way home about those who wouldn’t tackle or couldn’t shoot.

My wife had a rather uncharitable explanation for this puzzling phenomenon – parents signing up children who didn’t want to play, children turning out for a sport they seemed never to have heard of. “They know that soccer is the middle-class sport, so they want to prove that’s where they belong”. In fact, while there might have been some truth in this, once my sons started playing baseball I understood that the system was essentially the same as in other team sports (and there were plenty of daisy-pickers in baseball, too). In America, you found out if you liked a sport not by playing it with your friends in your back yard or on a street, but by going to an organized program. What was different was that the parents didn’t know what their children were supposed to be doing. Hence the aggravation over my use of the word “tackle”.

Somewhat to our surprise, the program for the smallest children run by the main soccer club in the university town where we worked turned out to be rather similar. Lots of little children “having fun” in drills barely related to the basic skills of the sport, often indifferent to the game or the exercises, while parents, grandparents, and older siblings sat far away, chatting (often on cell phones). Smaller siblings sat and played beside their families, too, whereas our younger son had to be physically restrained from running on to the pitch to join in with his brother. To the other families, it seemed, the weekly hour of soccer class was simply a large “play date”, good for getting children exhausted in the fresh air, my wife suggested. She and I, standing on the touchlines, applauding and making remarks about “tackles”, “distribution”, and the like, seemed to disconcert families and coaches alike. Our son complained bitterly about the “play date” aspect of the sessions, and asked coaches all the time when the “activities” would be over and the game would start. And when one match ended in a 2-2 draw he – at the age of five -- asked the coach why there wasn’t going to be a penalty shoot-out.

I remember one early summer afternoon in particular. It was raining, but, as I had often told my sons, “it’s a man’s game” (another highly provocative remark in the U.S.), so there would be football. When we got to the fields, there were, in fact, no coaches, no goals, and no football. It later turned out that there was no class at all that week because of some public holiday or other (the few parents who understood my suggestion -- that the cancellation must be so that everyone could watch the UEFA Champions League Final broadcast live on TV that afternoon -- simply laughed). Still, I was not alone in turning up with eager children, now disappointed. Some fifteen families were sitting in their cars by the time class should have begun, staring at the wet, empty pitches. I lowered my window and started talking to the parent in the next car -- a South-Asian mother with an athletic-looking eight-year old boy. We exchanged the usual casual remarks common among immigrants (“how long have you been here?” “is the rest of your family here too?”, and so on), while my sons grew restless in the back. Finally, despite the rain, I gave in. “OK, let’s get the ball from the back and go and have a kick-about”. My sons leapt eagerly from the car, followed by our neighbor’s son. We grabbed some water bottles and the like to make goals, and started to play. Gradually, nervous children emerged from other cars. I shouted for all to join in, and soon a group of small and not-so-small children was playing energetically, if not with any particular skill, under my extremely amateur player-coaching. Other parents stood and watched. Worried that I might not be doing the right thing with the adults, I invited all the parents to play too. Perhaps they didn’t want to get wet and muddy, but only two soccer moms decided to participate -- they both kept goal. Our informal game lasted an hour. The children laughed and played with real enthusiasm. I wound the game down at six, just when class should have ended, declaring the number of minutes of injury time showing on the fourth official’s board, and then concluding the game with the announcement that it was a tie. Parents thanked me effusively, as if without me there would have been no substitute for the class. And, probably, there would not have been. Spontaneous football is not on the American agenda.

The coaches that year had worried me, and not only because they didn’t seem to know the rules of the game too well (most five-year-olds have relatively little interest in gaining an understanding of the offside rule -- a failing they share with a number of prominent professionals). What I found most disturbing was that, when they were not actively coaching, but just standing around waiting for their charges to finish a “water break” or get ready for the next exercise, they ignored the balls (best quality, of course) at their feet. But the next year, things changed. Every time my son’s coaches in the club program were inactive, they seem to fidget around the balls, balancing them, idly turning them with their studs, kicking them to one another. In other words, they looked like footballers. And no one told me not to use the word “tackle”. It says everything about football in America that the coaches that year were not middle-aged men, but young women.

At the very junior levels, boys and girls generally play together – another great positive for the new America; later “co-ed soccer” is mainly for fun. But the sport’s massive boom in the U.S. surely has a lot to do with the overall expansion of women’s sports -- and with Title Nine. The sport is, after all, exactly the same in its format and rules for men and for women. Of course, if that matriarch who didn’t want Gordon tackling her daughter had seen the bruises acquired by college level Varsity women in every match, she might have thought again about introducing her child to the sport. “It was kind of cool to watch my leg double in size”, one star of our university women’s team told me recently, describing the effect of removing her sock and shin guard from a leg which had suffered the impact of another player’s studs during a particularly rough challenge. Stamina, skill, and, yes, courage. Soccer at the competitive level lets a girl prove important things to herself, her brothers, and her world. No wonder many parents are ready to love it, bruises and all.

Back at the rec. and ed. program, things were also better the next year, because the local soccer club took over. Our son was coached by an American who had played a bit in Europe. In the first match of the season, Gordon scored eight goals, but his team lost 15-11 (this was a version of the game with no goalkeepers). The scorer of eight goals left the pitch in tears (he’s never taken too well to defeat). I felt acute embarrassment, and started to make remarks about sportsmanship and the importance of playing the game, rather than winning (even though I shared his distress at defeat). But since it was an athlete coaching, I needn’t have worried. He put his arm round Gordon, told him not to worry, then winked at me and said, “I love his attitude”. The clash between what we might call “athletic values” and those warm, democratic, middle-class values of the soccer mom can be felt everywhere in developmental and recreational programs. And the clash is not just inherent to the encounter of sport with family values. Stand next to two good friends whose children happen to be playing on opposite sides in a match between six-year-olds, and you’re very likely to get some feel for it. This is, after all, the country that staged an Olympic Games tarnished by a sponsor’s huge hoarding that, as I recall, read “Winning isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing.” At the Olympic Games, for goodness’ sake. No wonder Saline Sting vs Dexter Fire can be a tense occasion.

A season later, my wife said that I should volunteer to be an assistant coach in the local rec. and ed. program, so I dutifully put my name down on the registration form, but requested that Gordon have the same (head) coach as the previous season. I imagined that I’d be an adequate assistant – dashing around with water bottles, arranging the parental “snack roster” for games, comforting children unexpectedly hit by balls. When the day came for teams to be posted, we rushed to the Community Education building, and anxiously searched for Gordon’s new team among the pages of lists taped up across a whole wall of windows. Finally I found his name, and then we looked up and down the team sheet until we found the line for “Coach”. I read it out: “Coach – Michael Makin”. My son was horrified: “Daddy, I want a real coach”. I too was shocked, but guessed that, soccer being soccer, the program had far more players than willing coaches. I dutifully attended a coaches’ preparatory meeting, where I heard some coaches ask questions that really startled me. “Where is a free kick taken after a violation?” one asked. Isn’t this sport, not gang rape, I thought, and where else would a free kick be taken but the spot of the foul, anyway? There was worse to come. Sliding tackles were outlawed in our program. My son, already distressed at the low level of coaching on offer, refused to play if he couldn’t use his favorite defensive play (which was quite rightly banned among small children). Even my explanations of the tactical risks of the sliding tackle (unless you win the ball and put it out of play you are likely leave your team a man down until you can get up and back into the game) were to no avail. I had to beg, coax, bribe, and cajole him to get out of bed and get his kit on for the first match, one cold spring morning. I felt like the manager of some team of vastly overpaid stars, dealing with my sulkiest player. However, whatever my son thought of my coaching, the other parents all loved me. The accent helped, of course, but the main thing was that our team, which had a number of very athletic boys and girls (and no daisy pickers), won every game. Of course, it had very little to do with me.

I learned something very important about America in that two-month season. Children and parents came up to me on the streets of our little town and in the corridors of my son’s school, they even shouted greetings to me across streets, and they all called me “Coach”. This was a far more valuable title than the one I occasionally hear on Campus (“Professor”). It bore real respect and enthusiasm. I was an important part of the community. At games, parents deferred to me; they called me at home to apologize for absences, and asked my opinion about their son or daughter, as if I was Sir Alex Ferguson (of whom they’d probably never heard). Before matches, nervous mothers discretely warned me about opposing coaches they had seen in cafeterias at their place of work plotting strategy for their match against our team (of five- and six-year-olds) and then praised me as if we’d won the World Cup when we defeated the plotters.

America may not be quite the sportiest country in the world (surely that accolade belongs to Australia, with its astonishing record in Olympic sports, its magnificent Cricket, its superb Rugby Union and Rugby League teams, its great tennis players, and golfers, and even some very solid soccer players), but sport occupies a huge place in the national consciousness, the family agenda, and the young person’s self-esteem scale. Even the coach of the smallest children is a very important person (especially – and here’s that paradox again – if he or she wins).

Later that year the local club called me, and asked me to coach the youngest team in their competitive program, for which I had already signed up our elder son. This was to be my next step on the coaching ladder. I explained that I was a hopeless athlete, hadn’t played the game in an organized way since I was about twelve (my secondary school played Rugger, not Soccer), and I wasn’t at all sure that I was the right choice, but they had heard about my “enthusiasm”, and, I suspect, they liked my accent, too, so they wanted me, and I agreed to try it. I loved coaching the boys, and liked working with the parents, who were even more deferential than the rec. and ed. families, and very enthusiastic. But my assistants (I had two for a team of five-to-seven-year-olds) and I didn’t quite see eye to eye. One of them had coaching qualifications (quite unlike me), and she hated my use of terms like “pitch”, loathed my emphasis on playing rather than practicing (scrimmages, not drills), hated my game strategies, and, I suspect, just didn’t like me. I hadn’t expected it to be so serious (two practices a week, games every weekend – “It isn’t Barcelona vs. Real Madrid,” I used to joke when parents called to apologize for a son’s absence from the next game because of urgent family matters), and I didn’t agree with the way my assistants wanted to play anyway. When they had their way, our best players kept goal in matches and our fullbacks never crossed midfield (“What is this” I asked myself again, “Ice Hockey?”). I tried to suggest that we should rotate players through positions, and that defenders could take the ball upfield when the opening was there, but when I talked about “expressing yourself”, praised “attacking fullbacks” and mentioned “Roberto Carlos”, they looked blankly at me. We were playing in a league where most of our opponents were older, and we were regularly overwhelmed. We won two matches – one against a team even weaker than ours, the other against an opponent at about our level. I was very proud of that win. It came when the assistant who disliked me most was absent, and I was able to run the team as I wanted. Eventually, however, the assistants staged a palace coup and tried to take over the team. My wife pointed out that if I had asserted myself in the beginning, none of this would have happened, but I was too innocent to think that a team of small boys could become part of a massive play for power. I should have known – as I most certainly do now – that adult egos are a very large part of children’s sport. I resigned, and haven’t coached a regularly-playing team since.

By then, both our sons were playing. After the débâcle of my own coaching career, Gordon joined the developmental program run by the club in the town where we worked. Here we found some fellow spirits, although there was still plenty of friction. Neil, our younger son, posed other problems. Because he played all the time with his elder brother, he didn’t fit with children his age – he scored too much and hogged the ball; he argued about the rules of the game, while most children his age didn’t know the game had rules. The first time he went to summer soccer camp, he astonished and delighted his coaches when fouls were committed by telling older players, in his middle-of-the-Atlantic accent, that “actually, it’s a free kick”. When just five, he reported to my wife that he’d been the only player to form a wall at one such free kick, and added that he’d also been the only man to protect his genitalia in the traditional manner (hands in front of the groin, facing the ball – although “genitalia” wasn’t exactly the word he used, of course). We signed him up for the developmental program and the indoor teams run by a Brazilian former player. That program had coaches from Latin America, France, Portugal, and other centers of the game, and suited us fine, until its owner was unceremoniously deported by the INS. Soccer in the U.S. as a great employment opportunity for the foreign athlete is another interesting story – the developmental game here is full of men who played professionally at home, and now make a nice living working with American children and pleasing their demanding parents. In less than five years of children’s soccer, our sons have worked with coaches from America, Scotland, England, Portugal, France, Nigeria, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

Meanwhile, Gordon took the next step up – to a travel team. This was the real thing. He ran back to us from the field where he’d passed his tryout to announce that his coach was Scottish (which he took to be unambiguously positive), and then ran back to the coach to ask the questions that were burning on his lips – would there be real red and yellow cards in his matches; would there be league tables and proper tournaments; would they play away matches? Would they ever. Even at the under-nine level we have covered the suburbs of Detroit quite efficiently, and are now moving beyond the State of Michigan. We did some sums the other day, and calculated that the last eight months of our sons’ footballing have cost us approximately $5,000 (including club and tournament fees, kit, season fees for indoor sessions, referee fees – Lord knows why some of them got paid at all, since they clearly didn’t know the rules of the game, but that is another story -- camps, clinics, and, of course, travel). The travel team (of seven- and eight-year-olds) began its year by traveling several hundred miles to Indiana for a weekend of intensive training. Elsewhere they call it the “people’s sport”. In America, it is definitely the “middle-class people’s sport”.

Of course, we’ve only just begun our journey in “travel soccer”. If it lasts, we’ll be crossing the Midwest every weekend in Spring and Fall, and perhaps even funding trips to Latin America and Europe for our sons to play against clubs with very different traditions. It has already become the MAIN THING in our leisure time. A typical winter week this year included: an evening clinic for Gordon, and an evening clinic for Neil (different evenings); a match for Neil on Friday; at least one match for Gordon at the weekend or in midweek, and an 8 a.m. practice on Saturday for Gordon. Only at the end of the winter did Gordon discover that he enjoyed going to the special clinics for goalkeeping, so that saved one night a week that could have been spent in the airless, sweaty confines of our local indoor arena. Spring will offer three evenings of practice, and at least two matches a week, plus occasional tournaments. And at least two hundred miles of driving every week.

Gordon’s travel team has a squad of ten players (they play six-a-side matches). The ten families provide an interesting profile of soccer, American style. Among the parents there are, I calculate, two professors, a university lecturer, three licensed psychologists or psychiatrists, two university researchers, a university administrator, an editor, a lawyer, three doctors, and at least two business owners, one of them specializing in new technology (some parents, I should add, occupy more than one professional role – there is a researcher who is also a psychiatrist and an M.D.). At least three mothers seem not to work outside the home; only one family is divorced. Members of three families have been overseas on business and/or vacation since the fall season began. My five-year-old Land Rover is probably the oldest car regularly used to transport players. Most families arrive at least twenty minutes early for outdoor practice; some come to matches forty minutes or more before game time. Two fathers keep meticulous statistics, regularly updated and posted to the team’s unofficial web site. When the league in which our team plays put an incorrect result on to its web site, the scorekeeper got three emails from different parents (myself among them, I must confess) within twelve hours of the error. I was consulted by one mother, who wanted to know what team our Scottish coach supported (Glasgow Rangers), so that her son, who adored the coach, would get the right soccer shirt for his birthday. That’s the same boy whose father remarked that he’d been displaced in filial affection by a series of soccer coaches. I might add that my own sons have regularly provoked their European coaches by wearing England replica kits to practice (while I, feeling that these objects should be treated with appropriate respect, have banned my wife from washing them, taking on that duty myself alone, and always washing them separately from other clothes). Parents on our team have formed ad hoc groups from our squad for at least five small-sided tournaments in the last five months, hiring our own team’s coach for the last of them (that, of course, is in addition to all the league and tournament matches our team officially plays). In eight months of regular practices and matches, there have probably been fewer than twenty absences in total among ten boys. The team fathers are regularly reminded that we are not supposed to “coach from the sidelines”. Such reminders do little to stop a whole array of “encouraging” remarks, from “mark up” and “play big”, to “don’t ever play the ball across your own goal” – that last shout drew its author a hard elbow in the ribs from his wife, who refused to stand next to him for the rest of the game. One father claims in all seriousness to have a system of secret hand signals for communicating with his sons during play. Early in the fall season a referee threatened me with a yellow card (simply for appealing for an obvious offside, I might add) – if I hadn’t shut up, I might have had to watch the rest of the match from my car. It’s not just the fathers – the team mothers can be vocal, too, although a gender divide is certainly evident: on the whole, the fathers shout and coax; the mothers try to comfort, while attempting to hide their frustrations and disappointments. It is quite common for the entire family to watch a practice, while grandparents and family friends often attend matches, including away matches.

Parents of children on other teams sometimes find us a little too intense. Maybe it wasn’t entirely sporting to remind our boys of the potential importance of goal difference in the final standings when we faced weaker opposition, or to object when a referee, contrary to league rules, demanded that we take a player off in one match, once we had a five goal lead, and then another when our team scored a further goal, despite playing a man short.

Our team won its division last fall.

The next team down the travel ladder in our club has families who are much less intense – players miss matches, parents don’t come to practices. They didn’t win their division last fall.

Sport and other aspects of middle class life – careers, ambitions, and the like – turn out to find a nice match in soccer.

Not to mention the role of vicarious pleasure. Parents (most of ours are in early middle age) fulfill their athletic fantasies through their children. Children are made to feel that they are the center of attention of the entire sports world. Although they may regret that when they hear a long analysis of their play after a mediocre performance.

Our own team is not entirely representative in one way, however -- nearly all the players are first children. This may help to explain the particular commitment and intensity most families bring to games. The only family with extensive travel sport experience is the most relaxed – they’ve been through it all before, and, perhaps, they know better the dangers of “burn-out” that seem to haunt youth sports in America nowadays, largely because of the demands competitive sports place on very young children, and the expectations overachieving career-oriented parents often bring to teams. However, touchline fights, violent arguments, abuse of referees and other extreme manifestations of the will to win, inappropriately transferred to the arena of children’s games, have yet to be even hinted at in our games, although stories of them abound across the country.

Of course, I haven’t entirely given up my own coaching ambitions. In fact, I’m still waiting for that call from Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, or any other major European city where we could live a comfortable life on a couple of million euros a year. But so far the high point of my second career came when I coached our younger son and three team mates to victory in an indoor tournament this February. Our older son’s team (coached by other fathers) got knocked out of its bracket before the semi-finals, so family relations were difficult for a time, but every one of Gordon’s team mates and every team family came to watch Neil and his team mates sweep to glory in their final match. The clash between the family values seen embedded in the sport and the powerful athletic urges of the average American (and certain Russian and English parents) was evident again. The tournament was hosted by the Varsity soccer programs of the university which employs my wife and me. The Athletic Department’s first-class indoor Astroturf facility was given over to “micro-soccer” for two days – hundreds and hundreds of boys and girls, some as young as five-year-old Neil, playing three-on-three on thirty-yard micro pitches, watched, and coached, by loving and indulgent parents. When Neil, who had the last shift as goalkeeper in our championship match, had blocked the last shot of the game, every parent and sibling rushed out to embrace a winning player, and then headed off to the scorers’ table to record the victory and await the medal ceremony. But at that table it was explained that there were no medals for winning teams in the junior brackets, because “taking part was the main thing” (which made it hard to explain why there had been a championship match). Every boy and girl got a sticker instead. Aggrieved parents immediately conspired to go out and buy trophies for our victorious offspring. An hour later I was engaged in a more mundane activity to which every parent of a sport-playing child regularly resigns himself or herself – I was looking for lost equipment. In this case I was looking for my elder son’s goalkeeping gloves (he doesn’t actually keep goal all that often, but, of course, he has first-class gloves). As I made my way round another micro-pitch where an under-ten game was in progress, I heard the following instruction from a parent-coach, shouting to a player from the touchline: “If he leans on you like that again, you just elbow him in the head!” An instruction which would almost certainly have ensured a long suspension for a coach in the most physical of all top professional leagues – the English Premiership – had just been issued to a ten-year-old, in a country where the game is generally (and erroneously) regarded by parents of very young players as being better than others because it has no physical contact. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard, but, to my eternal shame, I did nothing.

As I picked up the gloves – miraculously located – and walked back to the Gordon’s pitch, I recalled the conclusion of Neil’s championship match. After the embraces, the players and I had lined up to shake hands with the losing team, following the universal convention. Their coach had not joined his players in congratulating the winners. He sat, silent, with his back to me, behind the goal. What would be a staggering snub at the very highest level, with millions of dollars at stake, must have seemed acceptable to him in an under-seven tournament.

On the other hand, a parent of a teammate of our older son expressed astonishment at a recent match when I called out to my son, after he had been knocked over in a foul challenge, to “stand up and get on with it”. I then muttered under my breath, “Just don’t cry, little man”. “Isn’t he allowed to cry?” the father asked. “Not when he’s knocked over – it’s a man’s game, he’s got to learn that.” “It’s hard for Americans to think of it as a physical game”, the other father said, with a nervous smile. He clearly hadn’t ever heard any members of our university’s women’s team discuss the “cool” effects of massive leg bruising. Perhaps he hadn’t even read the notices at our local indoor facility which – rather charmingly, I have always thought – announce that “Soccer is a contact sport”.

I could provide yet more anecdotal evidence of the hold the sport has taken on middle class America, of the enthusiasm of children and the vicarious passion of parents, and of the paradoxes inherent in that enthusiasm and passion. But in all of this, something is missing. It can be put fairly simply. Half the children playing the game seem to have expensive replica shirts from round the world (remember the boy in the Rangers shirt). But they don’t know what they mean. When I picked up my sons from school the other day, I saw a boy in a Bayern Munich shirt. “Do you think they’ll beat Chelsea next week in the Champions League?” I asked. “Don’t embarrass me”, my son hissed, while the boy in the shirt of the German champions looked blankly at me. An undergraduate turned up in my own class the other day wearing a Barcelona shirt. “So, you think Barça have got over their Champions’ League elimination, and have La Liga sewn up?” I asked, adding, “They certainly played well last weekend”. He looked blankly at me. Those football shirts, rich with the power and danger of tribal insignia elsewhere – things you might die for or because of – are little more than fashion accessories here. I didn’t have the heart to tell the mother of Gordon’s teammate that, in acquiring the Rangers shirt, she was buying into the sectarian divisions of Glasgow, which are measured in blood and football equally: Rangers for the Protestants; Celtic for the Catholics (“F*** the Pope”, sing the Rangers fans at derbies; “F*** the Queen”, reply the Celtic fans).

It’s not just that football has gone upmarket and respectable in the States. Something else has happened. The game which is played with such enthusiasm and passion by America’s youth still has relatively little impact as a spectator sport. It’s very odd. It’s as if all of America had suddenly started writing plays, without ever going to the theater. Even many of the best young players here have no sense of how the game is played at the highest professional level, and their parents have little notion that it actually is played at that level at all. Almost no one understands the passionate fan culture elsewhere. Parents have even looked at me with genuine astonishment when I started talking about the millions of dollars earned by top players in England, Spain, and Italy.

For many ambitious families, the goal of their vicarious passion is simpler, more local, and, of course, more middle class: an athletic scholarship at a good college. When I first realized this, I was astonished. Football is about glory; you dream of your son pulling on the shirt of the hometown team you’ve supported all your life; you fantasize that he’ll lead out his country at the national stadium, while a hundred thousand fans in the stands cheer and sing, and tens of millions sit glued to their TVs. You don’t dream of saving a hundred thousand dollars. Of course, my reaction was uncharitable. An athletic scholarship is glory in a sport that has little professional profile here – and, again, it’s glory that’s shared equally between boys and girls. While there is a professional league in the States -- the MLS, and it’s really doing quite well, all things considered -- far more American sports fans have heard of Indiana University or the University of Michigan than have heard of the Kansas City Wizards. And a four-year scholarship at Michigan is probably worth more than many contracts with MLS teams anyway… All the same, there are further paradoxes. If my wife and I can spend $5,000 over eight months on a bit of football for two small boys, it must follow that the top youth players see huge family investments in their adolescent playing. A friend of ours, and parent of a teammate of Gordon, has two children playing travel sports, too. He told us of opening a credit card bill the other day and concluding, in horror, that his card must have been stolen, only to realize that the month’s astronomical charges were actually from tournaments which at least one child had attended every weekend. By the time you’ve driven to Chicago and back, fed yourself and your offspring, and stayed in a half-decent motel, you’ve run up a solid middle-class bill. And he and his wife had been doing that every weekend for a month, sometimes separately with different children. I have taught the star goalkeeper on the University’s women’s team – a super athlete and an excellent student, too, like most of the men and women on the Varsity soccer teams. She joked to me that her parents could easily have paid her university tuition with the money they spent on her junior playing career. And they’re still paying, of course – they drive from Atlanta to the Midwest for every match she plays in. I sat with other Varsity parents at a recent match: one had flown in from California that morning to watch her daughter play, and confided that the daughter was worried that she’d weakened her chances of admission to a top law school after graduation by choosing an athletic scholarship.

It really is a long way from the stories of boys who couldn’t afford their own boots, but went on to rule the sports world and be adored by millions.

Coaches in America have told me that they’d like their players to watch the professional game more, but most boys and girls don’t want to. Some coaches don’t want to, either. Two years ago, the Coaching Director at the club in the little town where we live astonished me. He was telling me how much he’d enjoyed a trip to Europe with a team the year before – that wasn’t the astonishing part, since many older travel teams go to Europe once a year; but after their games, they’d all gone to a friendly between Manchester United and one of the Dutch clubs. “Who is that big, bald central defender United have?” he asked me. After a minute or two, I worked out that he meant Jap Staam, the Dutch international, who’d been playing for Milan for over a season by the time of our conversation, having left United after a fight with the United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson. In those years Staam was thought by many to be the best Center Half in Europe. I couldn’t believe that a highly successful professional coach hadn’t heard of one of the game’s top defenders, let alone didn’t know where he played now (imagine a top high school baseball coach who hadn’t heard of “A-Rod”). Of course, American soccer has thousands of coaches originally from footballing countries, who could name their own national teams for every year in the last century, and will do so as soon as they hear a non-American accent, but the vast, glamorous, passionate world of the professional game is still a largely unexplored continent for most Americans, including the majority of coaches and players.

This is all the more surprising when you remember that the Americans have actually done very well at our game recently. The last three World Cups are very instructive. 1994’s was hosted – very well indeed, incidentally – by the United States. And, as one of the British papers put it, one reason why it was a great success was that “every team was at home”. The wonderful mosaic of America’s ethnic communities guaranteed support for virtually every team, despite the huge expense of travel to and around the United States. But just before that World Cup started, I was in Chicago and remember that the local AM sports radio station filled the airwaves with complaints about forcing this alien event on the U.S.. I remember, too, watching Russia play Sweden at Detroit’s Silverdome: thirty thousand Swedes singing and waving flags; about a thousand Russians (Russia now has large traveling support, but things were different ten years ago); and about fifty thousand polite, quiet Americans. The Americans around us moved edgily away when I rose to chastise the referee, who clearly had it in for Russia; at least those soccer moms and dads had heard of the reputation of English fans. In the end, the World Cup of 1994 was almost a success despite the indifference of most Americans. Yet their team did very creditably.

I have to admit that, like many other foreigners living here, I took a certain glee from the performance of the American side the next time, in 1998 (France was the host). FIFA effectively guarantees the U.S. a spot in every World Cup, by giving three qualifying places to a Federation that only has two countries that regularly produce respectable teams (Mexico and the U.S.), so there is always a feeling that the Americans don’t have to try too hard to qualify, and may not be as good as many of the teams that have actually had to beat someone worthwhile to get in. Don’t forget that there have been recent World Cups without such countries as my own, or Holland, or Denmark, or Portugal – all countries with very strong footballing pedigrees. Even the great Brazilians have encountered the odd obstacle to qualification (which, however, they have always overcome, unlike the English). The dangers of facing only weak opposition in qualifying were revealed clearly in 1998, when the Americans did very poorly in the finals, and suffered a particularly humiliating defeat to Iran in their last match.

Next came the World Cup in Korea and Japan in 2002. I was glued to my TV set at all hours of the night for a month, but I remember thinking, on the eve of the Americans’ first match – against the mighty, magnificent “Golden Generation” of Portugal, that I’d simply tape that particular match, and enjoy watching the Americans get a footballing lesson the next morning. But when I woke up at seven and switched on my TV, the sports anchors seemed to be talking about three goals and a great moment for American soccer. Surely I was still half asleep and I’d misunderstood something? I quickly rewound the VCR. Portugal 2 – USA 3. And the third American goal was one of the best in the whole tournament. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. I took my sons out for breakfast that morning, and sat talking about the match. But something was wrong. This was the greatest result in American team sport since Lake Placid in 1980 (my wife doesn’t let me mention by name in our house that particular Russian national disaster). So where were the street parties, the happy faces, the breakfast conversations all about one thing? Why hadn’t the country stopped to celebrate? Of course, I knew the answers – no one much cared; it was a “niche sport”; and how could Americans possibly understand that their victory against the poorest country in Western Europe was a magnificent achievement for them (if we’d beaten Brazil in the quarter finals that year, instead of rolling over pathetically in the second half, not a single English person would have worried about the economic and cultural profile of the country we’d defeated, I assure you)? The American success didn’t stop at that, either. The U.S. team qualified for the knockout rounds, and overwhelmed their great local rival, Mexico – a defeat that is burned on the national sports psyche south of the border. In the quarter-finals, they were unlucky to lose to those ever-lucky Europeans, Germany.

The American success at the last World Cup was a magnificent achievement for that sports pyramid and the middle-class appropriation of the game that I’ve described, because the player development was done with relatively little reference to the professional game as it is understood and followed everywhere else. And it wasn’t the only sign of the huge progress of the game in America. In 2002 the Americans did better than the holders, France, or than two-time winners Argentina, who both went home in the first round. Football-mad Spain did no better than the U.S. A potentially great England team could only match the Americans’ performance. I now think that it is highly likely that the U.S. will win its first World Cup before we win our second, and probably before that much-awaited event – the emergence of an African World Cup winner (African nations have so many wonderful footballers, but they certainly don’t have huge, middle-class sports pyramids).

In fact, however, the U.S. national team, to use a term from the politics of the president supposedly elected by soccer moms, looks a lot more like America than does the sort of youth soccer I’ve been describing. The current American team has a strong Hispanic element in it; a number of the players were born abroad, many players were born here of immigrants; the range of ethnic backgrounds is large; by no means every player comes from a middle-class family. In sporting terms, too, the team looks a bit more the way you might expect, given that the U.S. is still, to a certain degree, in the footballing third world – they play a pretty physical game, and can rattle opponents who want to play an elegant one (that was the Mexicans’ complaint at the last World Cup). So not only is there an intriguing disconnect between the world of soccer moms and the world of international, big-time soccer, but there is also a disconnect between the profile of youth soccer in many parts of America – even high-level youth soccer – and the country’s national team (although, of course, both the middle-class, suburban profile of much youth soccer and the diverse backgrounds of the national team’s players are, in their different ways, expressive of the new America of the twenty-first century). And it’s not just a disconnect of style and class background. Many youth players would be hard pressed to name more than a couple of players on the U.S. team, most of whom could walk through any mall in the country unnoticed (imagine the likes of David Beckham, Ronaldo, or Francesco Totti stepping out for a bit of quiet shopping in any town in their homelands – or most towns anywhere else, for that matter). Indeed, the most feted American player may well be Ghanaian-born Freddy Adu, the fifteen-year-old who already plays professionally in the MLS (he’d be too young to play in Europe). But he has not even played for the U.S. national team yet, and his fame is partly the result of a promotional frenzy by the MLS that might yet stunt his development. Meanwhile, those who do represent the United States in international matches either ply their trades in the modest, but thriving MLS, or play without starring in Europe.

There, too, lies a paradox for the sport. If American professional players are to get better, they have to play for the best clubs in the best leagues. That means Europe for future stars. But if they’re good enough to do that, shouldn’t they stay at home and help the national league? Yet how can they raise their own game in a league that’s weaker than the top European leagues (and how could that league pay them European salaries)? Moreover, Americans are used to other nations sending their best to play here (NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball); could the general sports fan ever swallow enough pride to admire Americans – however good -- playing in Italy, Spain, and England?

In fact, American soccer has one huge plus over national counterparts elsewhere. Because it expresses only the paradoxes of contemporary America, it is almost entirely free of the complex historical baggage carried elsewhere. I well remember the English football stadiums of thirty and forty years ago, where newly visible black players were often booed by opposition fans simply because of their race and the fact that they represented the new immigrants from Commonwealth countries, objects then – as now – of considerable hostility from some parts of British society. The football pitch turned out to be a difficult place for a meeting of working class Britain with the legacy of empire. Those attitudes are mostly gone from British football (although certainly not from British society), and the England team seems always to be united across race lines – black footballers have captained England, have anchored the defence, kept goal brilliantly, and led the line, too, and they’ve all been cheered equally by our rabid fans. But they are certainly not gone from European football in general. Three years ago, Ashley Cole and Emile Heskey, representing their country against Slovakia, were booed constantly by Slovak fans during a match in Bratislava. The other nine men were left alone. Cole and Heskey were England’s only black players on that day. This very year, a friendly in Madrid was the scene of astonishing racial abuse for England’s black players, tacitly endorsed by the Spanish coach, and observed without commentary by the commentators for Spanish TV (at least, as far as my limited Spanish allowed me to judge).

While other American sports are shot through with the racial issues specific to the United States, soccer seems almost entirely free of them, confident in its representation of a country which wishes to step beyond the older paradigms of nation states (as it is uniquely qualified to do). So the sport certainly has a chance to make powerful statements about modern America that would certainly appeal to a very wide, even non-traditional sports audience.

But beyond that lies another question – could American sports fans, with their unique and separate team-sport culture, ever come to terms with a sport where even the greatest nations lose more than they win? The sport’s giant, Brazil, has five World Cups (out of seventeen played); football-mad Italy has three, only one of them won after 1938); even the resolute Germans have only three. The “homeland of football” has only one, and that was won in London in 1966 (the English have only made it one other time even to the semi-finals). The nation that produced the most exciting teams of my life time – Holland with its superb “total football” of a generation ago – got as far as two successive finals (1974 and 1978) and lost both times. Fans in nearly 200 nations dream of glory, but most teams don’t even qualify for the finals; every four years fans in at least ten nations have a justifiable sense of real possibility, but only one nation celebrates at the end of each World Cup. Except, of course, when Brazil wins but their fans feel that they’ve been let down by a lack of flair from the national team – a luxury of complaint no other nation could even dream of.

Less than twenty years ago, no one much in America even had the chance to watch the World Cup. I followed the 1986 World Cup on Canadian TV. The World Cup of 1990 was shown occasionally on the Discovery Channel, if I recall correctly – a rather unlikely home for it, of course. I’m sure I even tried to call the Discovery commentary team at one point, because they hadn’t been able to explain why an apparent goal had not counted (in fact, an obviously indirect free kick had gone into the goal without touching another player – the commentators just didn’t know the rules of the game, and must have thought, when the kick was taken and then went in untouched, that the referee was holding up his arm just to test the breeze). In fact, Discovery Channel showed only a few matches that year; I watched most of the ‘90 World Cup (including England’s gut-wrenching Semi-Final exit to the Germans on penalties, after extra time) in a stifling University auditorium, packed with men and women from round the world, watching live Spanish-language broadcasts. I don’t recall seeing a single American in the audience.

Nowadays, Americans have every chance to follow the game internationally, without making their way to obscure auditoria and working on their Spanish. As an expatriate fan, I can testify to that. Electronic media – first and foremost, the Internet and Satellite TV – have changed everything. Let me give an example. A couple of weeks ago, I engaged in a new sporting activity for myself – involuntary ballet on ice. As I later learned, I cracked a rib during this activity. I didn’t find out for several days – like most men, I try not to go to see doctors, and didn’t go this time until my wife forced me (and wouldn’t have had an X-Ray if she hadn’t insisted). But, like most men, I also made the most of my injury from the very beginning. In particular, I relished the chance to lie on the couch, doing nothing all weekend, and watching sport (how unlike most husbands on most weekends, I imagine, or myself when I get the chance, for that matter). In fact, I could have claimed that I was doing research for this paper, because, on Saturday, I watched three matches from England, two live, and also listened to the live webcast of radio commentary on a fourth match; on Sunday I watched a live match from England, a match from Spain and a match from Italy. The best football in the world, without leaving my house in Dexter, Michigan (my wife is thrilled by this, of course). The same week I called a close friend in St Petersburg and wrote to a colleague in Tomsk. Since both are football fans, I made sure that I had read the day’s issue of Russia’s main sports daily before I called or wrote. Every morning I make sure to read the British sports pages when I get up; I watch the British sports news every night before I go to bed; and I listen to the webcast of the radio commentary on my team’s matches nearly every week (because of the time difference, work can occasionally get in the way of midweek matches, but I do my best to make sure it doesn’t). On our sports package from the satellite TV provider, we now have two “soccer channels” (Fox Soccer Channel and GolTV) – that is one more dedicated soccer channel than golf channel; two more than we have dedicated to tennis. And our package is similar to sports packages available from major cable TV providers around the country. We also have the opportunity to shell out from $15 to $25 an “event” for pay-per-view matches (usually two every weekend). Perhaps I’ll use this paper as a reason to deduct some of those bills from my taxes (my usual justification to my wife for these expenses is that they “help the boys develop as footballers”…).

For the expatriate fan, it is wonderful. Many have been the early-morning gatherings at my house, where Englishmen and invited guests have arrived at 7 or 8 on a Saturday or Sunday, bleary-eyed and ready for more tea or coffee, to watch important (and often not-so-important) matches from back home among expatriate friends. England matches at five in the morning have also gathered very solid crowds, rather to the distress of those in the house attempting to sleep (that cry of joy accompanying the opening goal – or despair, of course, depending on who scores first – can wake the deepest sleeping spouse). Before I had satellite TV, I used to trek into the town where I work for early-morning matches. There was a bar with a satellite subscription, so I would be seen heading towards it at nine and ten on weekend mornings, often with small children in tow, proclaiming within hearing of passers-by, “Daddy, go bar”. Over eggs and bacon (and tea, I assure you) we would watch Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, and other luminaries of the English game, while supporters of those particular clubs sported their replica shirts and middle-aged spreads, sometimes discussing University politics at half time. Early downtown strollers, in town for the college (American) football game later in the day, hearing a roar from the bar, would sometimes stick a curious head in the door, only to withdraw rapidly, startled and puzzled by the alien spectacle. When England played Turkey in Istanbul, in a crucial European Championship qualifier that wasn’t available on domestic satellite TV, that bar showed the match. Three hundred Turks and two hundred Englishmen and Englishwomen packed the place for hours (and, by the way, left peacefully at the end). I got there two hours early, and just about found a table. I understand that it costs bars and restaurants several thousand dollars to acquire the right to show such a match. Money well spent that day.

Back in 1997 my wife had the misfortune to agree to attend a wedding in New York on the weekend that England played Italy in Rome, with a place in the World Cup at stake (the very match that, a couple of years later, my young son would hear described after his clash of heads). Although I should have known, I did not at that time guess that yet another World Cup campaign would end in early tears for England, and could only think about finding a venue where live broadcast of this crucial match would be guaranteed. I did what any expatriate fan should do -- I wrote an open letter to the mailing list I belonged to, asking who could recommend a suitable establishment, and also searched the web myself. Several locations were identified, and I chose the one on Fifth Avenue nearest to our hotel in mid-Manhattan. My wife and son were dispatched to Central Park (fortunately, it was a Hasidic wedding, so our Saturday afternoon was free), and I walked to the bar in question an hour before kick off. It was a long, narrow bar, typical of a downtown area in a big-city -- a few yards of street frontage, with a narrow doorway and a darkened window. In front of the door sat a large employee of the bar, cheerfully taxing the entrants $20 for the privilege of standing in what turned out to be an extremely packed, very smoky bar room, dominated by several pull-down screens, gently rippling in what little air circulated above the heads of several hundred beer drinking men (and a very few women). Most of the spectators were in their late twenties, their thirties, and early forties. They looked and sounded as if they worked on Wall Street (which had not stopped a good number from donning replica shirts, mostly of clubs from London and the English North West). Even with an hour to go, the bar was packed, and getting a drink required a good five minutes of pushing and shoving in order to reach the bar, followed by another five minutes of the same to recover a comfortable standing place from which one of the TV screens was visible. The inevitable trip to the lavatory which followed the expedition to the bar was equally complicated. That day England played a magnificent defensive game, and the Italians – those masters at defense and counterattack – could simply not break our guard down. At the very end, though, they almost scored, and three hundred people nearly expired in that bar. When the final whistle sounded, everyone in the bar leapt in the air, danced, embraced, and sang – a glorious nil-nil victory. And everyone was holding pint glasses. Three hundred people were doused in beer. I strolled back to my hotel and almost embraced the doorman. My wife was less than enthusiastic – “Have you started smoking again?” she asked in horror when she smelled me approaching, and, even when assured that I had not, she demanded that I take an immediate shower. I didn’t care. But I did make sure to buy all the Italian papers in New York the next day, to leave in the mail box at work of an Italian friend. And I insisted on having lunch at an Italian restaurant, so I could ask for “Azzurri fritti”, which I thought at the time must be very funny (sullen Italian waiters barely spoke as they served us).

In fact, it’s easy now to be an expatriate fan here, especially if you have a decent TV subscription and access to the Internet. You’ll know as much as the people back home, and you’ll even see matches that are blacked out back there. Clearly the TV companies see a useful niche market, and bars in every big city do a healthy business in expatriate football supporters, whatever time of day or night the matches are shown.

But when I took my family to see that wonderful and very engaging film Bend it like Beckham, I was the only person in the audience who laughed at the football jokes. The audience, by the way, consisted mostly of middle-class parents and their daughters – another irony: the film is about English girls who want to play football, and they look in wonder at the state of the women’s game in America. On the way out, though, another father, hearing me discussing the England captain with my sons, actually asked me, “So, this Beckham – is he a well-known athlete?” In America a film that presumably gained much elsewhere from having the then Manchester United no 7 in its title actually worked the other way round: it introduced David Beckham to a football-mad audience. Even now he probably means more to America as a “metrosexual” trendsetter than as a star (if rather overrated) footballer.

The blood and guts of the international game, the overpowering tension of a tight match in a knockout tournament, the drama of clinging on for a point in a nil-nil away draw, the sheer beauty of an attacking team in full flow, the deadly natural injustice of the counterattacking victory – these are not the stuff of dreams and nightmares for the American sports fan. The world my sports enthusiasm takes me to is almost unmapped for most American fans, although nowadays it actually lurks alongside theirs in secret parallel.

Partly for that reason, the transition of U.S. players to major professional leagues abroad has sometimes been a challenge, despite the evident and rapidly increasing talent and proficiency of the top players in the U.S. The Americans are all very fit, and they are well coached. But if they’ve played the college game, they hit the hard world of major professional football much later than their competitors abroad. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the U.S. national team seems to overachieve compared to individual American players abroad – in one-off international matches (where, moreover, everyone on the team shares some of the same formative athletic experiences) fitness and good developmental coaching can have more impact than in the season-long grind of a major European league, where, on top of the other demands, you have to fit in with men from all around the world.

Among the Americans who have succeeded in Europe, goalkeepers seem to predominate, and I think I know why. The general sporting development of a good all-round athlete (strength, agility, reflexes, etc) is more important for that position than what you learn playing spontaneous games in the street. And good coaching can make an especially big difference. The club that Gordon belongs to offers special goalkeeper clinics even to its youngest travel players – and to all of them (there are no specialist goalkeepers on the younger teams – everyone plays every position, a very wise developmental strategy). Eight-year-old Gordon went to one of those clinics, and got about twenty minutes of the undivided attention of a coach who’d kept goal at the top of the amateur game (US college soccer). The training was meticulous, well-planned, first-class in every respect. And Gordon had access to it, even though he doesn’t keep goal all that often. No wonder the U.S. is turning into a goalkeeper factory.

On the other hand, I noted two negative things about U.S. footballers during recent rounds of European club competitions. For the second leg of a UEFA Champions League knockout tie this year, Liverpool took a 3-1 lead to Bayer Leverkusen of Germany. The young American star Landon Donovan plays for the Germans. Bayer had to play backs-to-the-wall football to have any chance of overcoming the first leg deficit, and they had to play at the top of their game. In fact, they lost horribly (3-1 again, but at home – a disgrace), and Barry Glendenning for the website of London’s Guardian newspaper gleefully remarked that Donovan put in “the most inept performance of any professional footballer I've ever seen”. Of course, it might just have been an off day for a young player, but the suspicion remains that the middle-class game that produced Donovan (who’s already complained about living in the dull, industrial heartland of Germany) simply doesn’t prepare an athlete for that sort of intense competition. After all, how many stars of the NFL, NBA, and Major League baseball come from the sort of families I’ve described on our little travel team?

The week after the Leverkusen-Liverpool match, I rearranged my work schedule (how nice it is to be an academic) to watch live the second leg of Newcastle United’s tie with Oliampakos of Greece in the UEFA Cup. Another pleasant surprise for the English – Newcastle won easily. Newcastle’s first goal was scored by the England international Kieron Dyer, with what is conventionally termed, in the sports speak of the U.K., a “cheeky back heel”. The commentators on GolTV were thrilled, and the color man (who has coached in the MLS) remarked that here was precisely the sort of goal that you couldn’t coach. It came from backyard and back street games, from the sort of spontaneous game played by boys who don’t have the money for Play Stations.

When I heard that remark from the commentator, I remembered something I’d seen in our local park a few years ago. I’d taken my sons there for a kick-about with “real goals” (why two tiny boys really wanted to run 100 yards between enormous goals to poke the ball in from a few yards out was a mystery to me, but that’s another story). When we got there, the best pitch was occupied by a Girls Under-Sixteen match, and we started to watch. Within a few minutes the team representing our little town scored, to the delight of a handful of family and friends on the touchlines. After the team that had conceded kicked off, I asked someone the score. “We’re losing 2-1”, I was told. “How long to go?” I asked; “About three or four minutes”, I was told. I looked up. Our girls, in possession of the ball, were in a perfect 4-4-2 formation. “You mean in the first half?” I asked to clarify. “Oh no, in the game”, came the reply. I couldn’t believe my ears and eyes. They’d just scored, and, with a couple of minutes remaining, even with the ball at their own feet, they were leaving four players back and pushing no one up – their two forwards led the line in splendid isolation from supporting midfielders. Players who’d grown up playing the game casually, without coaches, or who had ever watched a top professional team desperately strive for a last-minute equalizer (when they often bring the goalkeeper up for set-piece attacks), would never has stuck rigidly to their formation. Everyone should know that going down by two while trying to get the equalizer is better than not trying at all. But these fine players, on the verge of adulthood, didn’t react like that. They had been “overcoached” – remember my assistants who wouldn’t let their young defenders cross the half way line (a common interdiction among amateur youth coaches in our area)? And, of course, nice middle class girls always do what their coaches tell them. It was a depressing spectacle for a sport that is about self-expression, spontaneity, and reacting to the situation.

It doesn’t mean that the Americans won’t win the World Cup (indeed, they’ve won the Women’s World Cup with real style already, and their women are so far ahead of the Europeans that it will take a generation at least for most to catch up). But, for me, it illustrates perfectly the paradoxes of the world’s game as understood by the citizens of the world’s superpower. America is so strong, so good at sports, so determined, so adaptable and also so good at adapting what others create, that Americans might yet transform the game on a global level. But, to do that, American sports fans and soccer moms will have to understand not only what it means to tackle, but also how much it means to beat Portugal; and they’ll have to reinforce their wonderfully effective developmental pyramid by getting players to step beyond it and beyond the suburbs where its foundations lie.

It is said that, to understand a people, you must look at the games that they play. You can learn a lot about the uniqueness of America by looking at its sports – baseball, American football, basketball. You can learn a lot from the way American professional sports are built around moveable franchises in closed leagues (no system of promotion and relegation to punish badly run big clubs and reward ambitious, well-run small clubs; instead, a draft which guarantees that the worst teams of the season get the best young players); you can learn a lot from sporting structures where a season’s league play does no more than get you into a knockout competition. You can learn a lot from the unchanging stories that are told of players and teams, and also from the speed with which the rules of sports are changed; from the strange mix of sport and the academy represented by major American universities and their athletic programs. You can learn a lot from the passion for fitness and competition that drives so many amateur athletes on to the golf course, the tennis court, the baseball and softball diamonds. But you can learn some very special things from the situation of Association Football in America today. A sport that never really belonged here has taken off with amazing speed and energy (in a truly American way), and is cultivated not by the working class culture that has cherished it elsewhere, but by the American suburban class who see in it not as something first codified 150 years ago, but as a genuinely new form of team sport, different because, among other things, it makes little distinction between boys and girls. A sport that, for many middle-class Americans, is not “physical”, but is athletically democratic. A sport, nonetheless, that reveals very clearly the clash of two deeply held American values: equality of opportunity and the importance of winning. A sport which can illustrate not one, but two new Americas: that ubiquitous suburban middle class of Soccer Moms and SUVS; that vibrant new society of Hispanics and immigrants from beyond America’s traditional sources of new citizens. In other words, if the United States wins a World Cup in the next twenty years, this paper will have explained why, and if the United States does not win a World Cup in the next twenty years, this paper will also have explained why.

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