B03: Soccer in a Football World
Author: David Wangerin
There’s a quote in this book, p. 117 in the edition I have, that sums up so much of what I find so interesting and so endearing about American Soccer — After a 6-0 loss by the United States Men’s National Team to the Scottish National Team in Scotland’s Hampden Park in 1952, officials from the US Soccer Federation who had attended the match telegrammed to their headquarters in New York: “107,765 in attendance; score secondary.”
Isn’t that just it? Hasn’t it always been ‘score secondary’ for American soccer? That is what’s defined my appreciation for the way that this sport has played out in the country in which I grew up. American Soccer has survived in spite of itself, and in spite of its spectators and media and surrounding culture, and though its history is fraught, inconsistent, often weird, rarely triumphant and never without caveat when it is triumphant, I remain enamored with it. I see a game that stumbles to achieve cultural and social footholds and survives more than anything else and I admire that more (and find it more interesting) than the self-sustaining machines that otherwise define major American sports. It’s paradoxical — we go years without a top division league and our men’s team inexplicably reaches its greatest height during that period. For years (it was a record still standing when this book was published in 2006, and I think it was only during the late 2010s emergence of Atlanta United that the record was broken), the highest attended club match in US Soccer history featured no American players. The team that drew so many people, the New York Cosmos, were so successful that they’re treated as the scapegoat for their league’s death. Major League Soccer never initially appealed to the fans they tried to court, and still struggles with that even now.
I’m not a ‘do or do not, there is no try,’ guy. Effort and intent matter. Trying hard matters, and so many people have tried so hard to make American soccer function and so many of them have failed in such fascinating ways. The section on the NASL has this unending whiplash between the Cosmos drawing 70,000+ to the Meadowlands, the Rowdies developing a professional sports culture in Tampa, and the Whitecaps getting parades in Vancouver, all the while there’s a team in Hawai’i that started and failed, and a team in San Diego named the JAWS, after the movie, the Minnesota Kicks more or less being an outfit to fund wild drunken and stoned tailgate parties in their stadium parking lot during the mild Minnesota summers, teams are springing up and folding constantly, it’s just so different from everything else, both in American (and Canadian) professional sports and in soccer on a global scale. It’s always like this with this sport, it’s constantly shifting, perennially (and I suppose ironically) relegated beneath the rest of the American sports landscape, treated as a fad or a novelty or a social movement but only every now and then as a sport.
We have few of those unquestionable moments of triumph, they’re all wrinkled and misunderstood and flukey — but they still seem to echo — The section on Belo Horizonte, the 1950 upset of England which was so monumental that its unbelievability was mostly understood in the denotative sense, moreso the point of ridicule thrown at England from its European rivals… Then in 1998, DC United beats Vasco Da Gama to win the intercontinental cup, a huge upset that regardless is seen by few in-person, not covered in the US Press, and is primarily celebrated by fans of Flamengo and other Brazilian rivals. Paul Caligiuri scores with an arcing, off-speed shot from long distance in 1989 in Port of Spain to send the US to the 1990 World Cup, one of the best moments in US Soccer history, and 28 years later and a few miles south in Couva, Omar Gonzalez puts another arcing, off-speed shot from long distance into the back of the net to knock us out of the World Cup — The success in making it to Italy was not as cementing as fans might have believed immediately following just as the failure in missing out on Russia was not so disintegrative as many of us thought, both matches met with confusion by most mainstream outlets, Bob Ley having to explain on ESPN that this mean’s we’re in next year’s world cup begets Max Bretos and Taylor Twellman having to explain on ESPNews that we won’t be in next year’s world cup. Even the USWNT’s World Cup wins get treated like novelties, 1991 in virtual anonymity and 1999 like a fad. 2019 had so much political drama wrapped around it that it felt like more of a rod for discourse to much of the mainstream media (2015 (and 2014) I’ll say felt like one of the few times that American soccer got to just be American soccer, for what it’s worth. Might’ve been that ESPN had the tournament rights and had to sell them on their merits.)
And there’s just the absurdity of it all — Why do two leagues always inevitably spring up to fight for the same spot? It happened in the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s with the indoor game, even the 1990s initially with the failed APSL merger, even after this book released in the early 2010s with the NASL/USL split in Outdoor Men’s Division II. It just keeps happening! This was still pre-NISA, MagicJack, Couva, the 2012 Olympic Semifinals, the Western New York Flash in the baseball outfield, the Galaxy losing by ten goals to Manchester United, Rafael Marquez, the NJ Teamsterz owner suiting up in goal, the San Francisco Deltas, nearly the entire existence of Chivas USA, Salt Lake City and Kansas City’s trading back and forth of an NWSL franchise, even the match I’m watching on the TV behind this laptop screen right now between Seattle and Al-Ahly, the first time an American team has ever appeared in the Club World Cup. Freddy Adu was still a prospect when this book was published.
In American soccer I see the weirdness and perseverance I like to believe I reflect myself, I see the wrinkles, eccentricities, quirks and features that I find enamoring about other people, and I see something more reflective of my experience as an American than I do in other sports. It would be wonderful to attend a UEFA Champions League Final at some point in my life, I suppose, or one of the historic European or South American derbies, but I found life in our 20,000 seater in Western Kansas City, and I’ve found it in little college stadiums on a cliffside in San Diego, in downtown Omaha, in Northwestern Lawrence, even on a practice field in KCMO. GOD I love American soccer.