Playing and Following: A Short History of Soccer in Europe and the US
By Andrei Markovits
Austria and Switzerland will be the center of the sports universe during the month of June this year. The quadrennial European Championship of national soccer teams will be played to the intense delight of billions of soccer fans well beyond the continent's proper confines. Though far less than during this tournament's much more important global patron, the quadrennial World Cup, Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans will be glued to their television sets, providing prima facie evidence that in the world of soccer Europe is unquestionably the leading place on this planet.
In the United States, however, "soccer," the abbreviated British slang word for "association football," has never constituted what I have called "hegemonic sports culture" - meaning a world of watching, following, worrying, debating, and living a sport rather than merely playing it. To be sure, the "following" and the "doing" are related, but only to an extent.
In all countries in Europe and most of Latin America, soccer or what much of the world calls football emerged as virtually the sole occupant of these countries' sports cultures whereas the Big Four of baseball, American football, basketball, and ice hockey furnished its equivalent in the United States.
Soccer surely is the globe's most widely played and also most widely followed game and sport. But it does not mean that it has succeeded in covering the entire globe in an equal manner. It has remained from the beginning of the 20th century predominantly the prerogative of Europe and Latin America, with the rest of the world always playing the game but never following and experiencing it as culture.
While Britain developed its generic football starting in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s mainly at its elite secondary schools, America, too, was busy creating its own sports culture. Beginning in the 1840s and fully developed by the late 1850s, baseball had become a totally modern sport with teams, written rules, and uniforms that was played all over the United States. Baseball became even more entrenched in America's sports culture by beating out cricket as its major competitor.
But baseball was not to be America's only team sport that would comprise its hegemonic sports culture by the late 1800s. An American version of football emanating from rugby was created at Harvard between 1870 and 1874 and then perfected at Yale in the course of the 1880s. This game already became so predominant by the early 1880s, particularly at America's all-important colleges, that it appropriated the terminology and signifier "football" for itself. This marginalization in the nomenclature already bespeaks soccer's peripheral position in America's sports space, at whose core rules this other football, appropriately called American football since it is not played anywhere else in the world in that fashion.
Football and baseball complemented each other superbly in this definitive founding era when the seeds for most contemporary sports cultures in most industrial societies were actually planted. Whereas baseball flourished in America's working-class culture and was played during the summer, American football became the cultural domain of its growing middle class and was played during the fall on college campuses. Enter basketball, the only modern team sport that had absolutely no predecessors in ancient Egypt, Renaissance Italy, the Inca empires, or rural Britain but was literally created de novo by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891.
Certainly by the onset of World War I, this game emerged as the third team sport in America's sports pantheon, occupying the winter season because it was played indoors. So it was that precisely during the time when soccer experienced its phenomenally successful export from England to the rest of the world, where it became entrenched as hegemonic sport culture par excellence, America filled its very own sports space with three games (plus the Canadian import of ice hockey in key northern states such as Michigan, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, and Wisconsin), thus "crowding out" soccer's chances of becoming part of America's sports culture.
Soccer feminized and Latinized in the US
This is not to say that soccer did not exist in America from the get-go. Indeed, the first official college "football" game played in the United States occurred on November 6, 1869, when Rutgers and Princeton played a game that resembled the association version much more than it did the rugby variant. This game was much closer to contemporary soccer than it was to American football. But then Harvard intervened and soccer disappeared from the authoritative world of American colleges. Still, soccer continued to exist in America. Thus, the oldest soccer federation in the world outside the four of the British Isles was the American Football Association of 1884. The first professional soccer league following the English Football League was the American League of Professional Football Clubs, formed in 1894.
Thousands of soccer leagues have existed in America throughout the 20th century, and there are more today than ever. Indeed, America has 18 million soccer players. But playing and following are two different things. Millions of people bowl, fish, jog, bicycle, or play billiards, yet this does not mean they follow the sport.
Nowhere have reforms in gender relations over the past 40 years been taken as seriously as by American higher education in which legislation has decreed that women have to participate in sports to the same degree as men. Soccer became a perfect venue for women to occupy a niche in large numbers that unlike in the rest of the world remained relatively unoccupied by men, who had concentrated all their energies on the hegemonic sports cultures of the Big Four.
Centered on the world of college soccer, American women joined the ranks of the most successful female soccer players in the world, with two-time Olympic gold medalists, two-time world champions, and many other impressive international victories. But beyond these immense successes on the field, soccer has become feminized in America to an extent totally unimaginable anywhere else in the world, where it remains a proudly guarded and strutted male preserve and masculine domain.
Where else in the world of soccer are women players much better known nationally than their male counterparts? Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Brandi Chastain are known to all Americans well beyond the world of women's soccer or any soccer, for that matter. Only America's small soccer niche knows names like Kasey Keller, Landon Donovan, or even Freddy Adu. And where else could a woman be the color commentator on television, interpreting the nuances of soccer to an overwhelmingly male audience? This is what has happened in the United States and will surely be the case once again in the telecasts of the EURO 2008 from Austria and Switzerland.
In addition to its feminized profile in the United States - in complete contrast to its identity in Europe - soccer has also become Latinized, in that its most passionate and knowledgeable followers hail from the ever-growing Latin American immigrant populations in the United States. To be sure, there are key Latin immigrants who hail from "beisbol" countries such as the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. But immigrants from virtually all other Latin American countries are passionate "futbol" fans whose identity and culture is congruent with the male-dominated, working-class-anchored soccer culture of Europe and incongruous with America's upper middle class soccer moms of the suburbs.
While the EURO 2008 will not even come close to rivaling the popularity of the NBA finals in the United States and the Stanley Cup finals in Canada, the last decade has still witnessed a serious increase in the EURO tournament's popularity among North American sports fans. The Disney channels ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 will televise live every single one of the tournament's games. Needless to say, the Spanish-speaking channel UNIVISION will do the same, most likely to a larger audience than its English-language counterparts.
Andrei Markovits is currently the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
