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Introduction | The world’s game as America’s game

By John Turnbull ⋅ October 4, 2008
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Ice hockey is her sport, but Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin reached out to a broader audience early in the Oct 2 debate with Joe Biden. Immediately after thanking moderator Gwen Ifill and the debate commission, Palin in her opening statement said the method of deciding if it is “a good time or a bad time in America’s economy … is go to a kids’ soccer game on Saturday.”

If you are curious about the soccer bona fides of Gov. Palin’s state, the Alaska Youth Soccer Association offers an impressive range of programs. You betcha.

Bill Clinton was said, in pundit-speak, to have rumbled to victory in 1992 and 1996 atop a runaway caravan driven by soccer moms. They have become enough of a cultural referent that Thom Satterlee, Alon Raab and I felt compelled to include homage to the soccer mom in the anthology published by University of Nebraska Press, The Global Game: Writers on Soccer. We had multiple examples from which to choose, although American poet David Starkey, author of “The Soccer Moms—1996,” chapter 5 in the collection, hints that they are destined to fade from relevance, driving “their minivans off into the twilit / hinterlands of demography.”

The notion of the “soccer mom” presents, in fact, a complex idea. The term signifies more than the cliché of an orange-slice-dispensing, left-leaning suburbanite policing a legion of soccer tots in a vehicle with abundant cup holders. Casual use of the phrase masks how soccer, swiftly and with little comment, has transformed the landscape of American youth sport. Taking root in the mid-1970s during the heyday of the North American Soccer League, youth soccer brought a noncompetitive ethos that contrasted with less forgiving traditions of baseball and American football. The ethos also differs from soccer as experienced in much of the world. English novelist Tim Parks describes the sport as “an ambiguous middle ground between words and blows.”

The core philosophies listed on the Web site of the American Youth Soccer Organization include “everyone plays, balanced teams, open registration, positive coaching, good sportsmanship.” The most important impetus may have been opening, with the assistance of Title IX, the sport to girls and young women.

Such noble ideas were not yet in circulation in the early ’70s during my yearlong involvement in Little League baseball, when a tiny muscle-bound center fielder, with hair like steel wool, punched me in the stomach for mishandling a fly ball. Coaches did not intervene, so I assumed that this was the way of the baseball world. Researchers suggest that soccer slotted well into such middle- and upper-middle-class enclaves of anxiety-ridden kids and ample open space. The suburbs were predominantly white and were constructing a culture of privilege and isolation vastly different from what children knew in struggling cities and in other underserved communities. “Soccer,” reads a 1997 ethnography of the sport in suburban Memphis,

like the detached family home, the reliance on the automobile, the shopping mall, and a preoccupation with material consumption, has become a core constituent of suburban American reality. (Andrews et al., 262)

I took to the new game quickly when it was introduced in 1974 into the suburban pastureland outside Washington, DC. Yet all was not bliss. I once witnessed my coach drag the goalkeeper off the field for a series of poor decisions in net. It should also be said that the goalkeeper was his son. But, in the main, the game seemed more kid-friendly than baseball. “What are the rules?” I asked. No one seemed to know.

More than three million American children from ages 5 to 19 play organized soccer, according to U.S. Youth Soccer, the largest constituent member of the U.S. Soccer Federation. In 1974, the number was 100,000. The figures show that, contrary to perception, soccer is vastly popular in the United States. But despite ethnically based leagues and a growing grassroots effort in urban centers, American associations with soccer remain constrained by the suburban mind-set. The international game—even with the presence, over decades, of imports such as Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, George Best, David Beckham and Cuauhtémoc Blanco and of top coaches from abroad—has made limited inroads into mass consciousness.

Advances of late have resulted in part from the influence of global branding, with superclubs such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan and Bayern Munich marketing their wares in sporting-goods shops and superstar players via satellite television. As Simon Kuper—author of chapter 9, “Holland, a Country of Clubs”—writes recently in the Financial Times, some of these clubs—English teams in particular—flourish despite liabilities of several hundred million pounds sterling. Businessmen in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Thailand have willingly assumed these debts for the prestige of attaching themselves to the world’s most marketable game. The world may be able to survive without one of the banking giants, Kuper concludes, but not without Chelsea Football Club.

If we recognize the soccer field as America’s new Main Street, as Palin suggests, we must also consider the shortcomings in our stewardship of the sport. Popular expressions of soccer in North America often are deracinated from the significance the game has brought to the poor, especially in nations cut off from the wealth-creating mechanisms of Western capitalism. The few occasions to encounter the fierce inequities among neighboring countries in our part of the world—since even environmental devastation in Haiti merits little notice in mainstream media or from presidential aspirants—might be when American soccer teams venture to play World Cup qualifying matches in the Caribbean and Central America. For the first time since 1947, for example, a full U.S. national team, on Sept 6, traveled to Havana for a qualifying match that it won 1–0 in an antiquated stadium under failing floodlights. Only the incontestable logic of a match schedule devised by world soccer’s administrative lords could facilitate a momentary exception to U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba, in place since the 1960s.

Eduardo Galeano, from whom in chapter 2 we excerpt part of the masterful El futbol a sol y sombra (Soccer in Sun and Shadow), has addressed both economic injustice in Latin America and soccer as a cultural form worthy of study. “A style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community,” he writes, “and affirms its right to be different.” On the soccer field one can embrace the “forbidden adventure of freedom.”

But America, perhaps due to its affluence and superpower status, has yet to embrace this spirit that so enchants fantasists in other lands. In an interview in May 2006 with Democracy Now! the Uruguayan writer suggests that such forms of isolation put American citizens at a disadvantage:

Galeano

[I]t would help to understand that the world is much more than the U.S. I mean, this is a very important country, indeed. And I come from a small country. Most people don’t even know where it is. But we are all important. We are all able to say something that deserves to be heard. And when I was living here … teaching at some university, so on, I was surprised by the fact that the world didn’t exist for the media, for the big media. It didn’t exist. Almost no news about the world. And when the news came, most of the people didn’t know what it [was] about.

The United States, too, struggles to connect itself to world literature, as the permanent secretary of the Nobel jury, Horace Engdahl, remarked on Sept 30. Given the limited support available for works in translation—despite efforts by University of Nebraska Press and other advocates—Engdahl speaks of an American mass culture restrained by ignorance. As a physicist living in Kiev said to journalist Anna Reid in her history of Ukraine, Borderland (1997), “The Americans, they’re robots, they never read, all they do is barbecue!” These may be overgeneralizations, but they do reflect common perception.

In the end, whatever The Global Game: Writers on Soccer can do to help bridge the cultural gulf comes largely from the network of translators that worked on the book. The book, to my mind, is less about soccer than about the miracle of conversion from one language to another and the illumination the process gives to unfamiliar beliefs and lifeways. Thirty-four of the 56 entries were written in languages other than English. We deliberately sought works from lesser-known literary traditions and included selections translated from Icelandic, Danish, Slovenian, Hungarian, Czech, Hebrew and Farsi.

Soccer, the evidence suggests, always leaves a literary deposit, contrary to the assumptions of earlier anthologizers of sport literature who supposed that soccer could not inspire lofty expression, especially when judged against the quality of prose devoted to baseball in the United States or cricket in the UK. (For a contrasting perspective, see a survey, in Spanish, of soccer anthologies published in Latin America in the past 40 years.) The late George Plimpton, former editor of the Paris Review, was especially strident in his introduction to The Norton Book of Sports (1992). “Soccer has no important literature at all that I can find,” he says, although he emphasizes that the problem may have been in finding it. His quick dismissal of the existence of unknown art attests to the danger, even for a worldly reader, of assuming that any composition of value has its genesis in the United States and that it must have been written in English.

Certainly, as editors, we were greatly helped by access to Internet-assisted search and by electronic mail, with which we could zip messages to potential authors or to experts on a particular world literature. Now that the book has been published, connection via the Internet breaks down the accustomed barriers between anthology editors and contributors. In securing rights to translate or to reprint their works, interaction often takes place with intermediaries, either agents or previous publishers. But for this companion Web site I will be posting interviews over coming weeks with many of our book’s authors and having them read, when appropriate, selections in their native languages.

The hope is that these supplementary materials will offer educational resources for teachers hoping to incorporate the texts into classrooms. Further, in the voices of writers from Iceland, Slovenia, Canada, the United States and so on, it should become clear that they speak from a well of passion for the sport; in some cases, soccer can be said to give life, or new meaning or mystery to everyday routine.

The importance of soccer to Ukrainian writer Yury Olesha early in the 20th century was its association with the scent of grass and the yellow of dandelion crowns. Olesha in No Day without a Line (1965) claims to have seen the “dawn of soccer” in his country. His parents expressed amazement at a game played with the feet and worried whether letting their son go to soccer matches would be a mistake. On weekends Olesha yelled to his father that he was off to the fields.

“What’s that? I don’t understand,” my father would say. “What field?”

“The Sporting Club field!” I answered with all the assurance of a new culture.

Further reading

For detailed analysis of the soccer mom phenomenon, see the 2003 doctoral dissertation by Lisa Swanson, “Soccer Fields of Cultural Re-production? An Ethnographic Explication of the ‘Soccer Mom’ ” (University of Maryland). On suburban soccer, see an ethnography of the sport in Memphis by David L. Andrews et al., “Soccer’s Racial Frontier: Sport and the Suburbanization of Contemporary America,” in Entering the Field: New Perspectives on World Football, ed. Gary Armstrong and Richard Giulianotti (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 261–81.

Marcela Mora y Araujo, the excellent writer for the Guardian Unlimited sports blog, reflects on recent football books in “What We Write about When We Write about Sports Writing” (Oct 8). In spotlighting publications from Italy and Brazil—“Tacalabala”: Esercizi di magia di Helenio Herrera (“Tacalabala”: Magical Exercises of Helenio Herrera) and Veneno remédio: O futebol e o Brasil (Poison Pill: Football and Brazil) by José Miguel Wisnik—she notes the stubborn barrier that exists to ushering quality writing from abroad to English-speaking audiences:

Despite the Mac-globalisation of the world village we continue to function as if in parallel universes. It should now be easier and cheaper than ever to bring contributions from different cultures together—to shift the boundaries of what defines markets and appeals to poetry lovers around the world, or fans of biographies or business books.

The Tacalabala volume compiles drawings, tactical sayings and ephemera from native Argentine Helenio Herrera, who managed in Spain and famously at Internazionale in Milan. At Inter he is credited with having perfected the catenaccio defense, a system with sweeper and man-to-man marking. “Style is in limitation,” Herrera said.

Of Wisnik’s text, Idelber Avelar, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane and a periodic football blogger at O biscoito fino e a massa (The Tasty Biscuit and the Mass), calls it the “best and most sophisticated book ever written on football in the land of football.” Avelar continues, in Araujo’s translation: “It is a rigorous poem about what football says about us, about who we are, about the fatality and deliciousness of being Brazilian.”

Tags: American Youth Soccer Organization, Bill Clinton, Brazil, David Starkey, Eduardo Galeano, George Plimpton, Helenio Herrera, Horace Engdahl, Idelber Avelar, José Miguel Wisnik, Marcela Mora y Araujo, Sarah Palin, Simon Kuper, soccer moms, Tim Parks, Title IX, translation, U.S. Soccer Federation, U.S. Youth Soccer, Ukraine, United States, Yury Olesha