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

Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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,

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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).

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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).

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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,

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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

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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

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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

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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.

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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.

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Soccer Moms, Football Father: Association Football and the American Middle Class

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

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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

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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

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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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