Neocons Bemoan USA Soccer Victory
Gary Schmitt, formerly of the Project for a New American Century, has a bizarre post up at an AEI blog in which he laments the fact that the United States upset Spain in the Confederation Cup, then further laments the fact that soccer exhibits a high degree of competitive balance, then explains that Americans don’t like soccer because its high degree of competitive balance cuts against American-style capitalism, then explains that soccer is popular in the US and Europe because it’s so socialistic. Fortunately, Alex Massie has already written the needed rebuttal so I’ll just recommend that to you.
It is worth saying that as best one can tell the degree of competitive balance involved in different sports seems related to the relative scarcity of high-level performers. Soccer and baseball are both sports in which relatively normal sized people can excel if they practice a lot and develop the skills. In other words, there are a lot of people who could be excellent soccer or baseball players. And since these are both popular sports, lots of kids learn them and attempt to excel at them. So pro clubs have a relatively high supply of good players from which to choose and the gaps in team quality get relatively small.
Basketball, the sport with the least competitive balance, is very different. There are instances of guys who are six feet tall (or even shorter) succeeding in the NBA, but they’re very rare. At the majority of the positions you need to be much taller than average, and you need multiple people who are outrageously tall. Ask yourself how many people taller than 6′9″ you’ve met in your life and then ask yourself how many people taller than 6′9″ are employed by a typical NBA team. The result is that you get a huge disparity in the quality of big men available to different teams and consequently huge disparities in team quality. Meanwhile, aside from the USA the other region of the world where basketball really caught on relatively early was Communist-dominated Eastern Europe.
127 Responses to “Neocons Bemoan USA Soccer Victory”
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June 25th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
And China. Chinese love basketball — as I understand it, that’s the reason it survived the Cultural Revolution.
B/t/w, thanks for reading right-wing junk so I don’t have to dirty my beautiful mind with such nonsense.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Actually, there’s a more structural reason for the high degree of competitive balance in major league baseball. In every game, the most important player by far, for good or bad, is the starting pitcher for each team. But they play every day and a starting pitcher needs several days rest between starts (or his arm would soon fall off). So each team has to have an entire rotation of (now universally) 5 starting pitchers; so even if you have the most dominant pitcher in the game, he’s only out there for 20% of your games. This tends to make it very difficult for any team to be dominant in a high percentage of its games.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
I coached my son’s soccer team (u10) despite knowing nothing of the sport other than the obvious — use your feet, don’t use your hands. I was able to finagle close games by simply coaching what I could explain: stay between the ball and the goal. It’s ridiculously possible in soccer to stay close by not playing to lose. If you can knot it up in regulation you’ve got an even chance of winning on a free kick.
The game’s got numnuts rules.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
“We like, as good small “d” democrats, our underdogs for sure but we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert. And, in sports, that means excellence should prevail.”
Wait, this is from someone in the party of George Bush? I guess that’s why he made sure to include that qualifying “in sports…”
June 25th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Don’t forget “Communist” China. They loves them their basketball. Although granted, they have a much bigger pool of players to choose from …
June 25th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Wow.
I think the appropriate sport metaphor here is “born on third base but thinks he hit a triple.”
June 25th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Soccer and baseball are both sports in which relatively normal sized people can excel if they practice a lot and develop the skills.
Well, sort of. You can usually tell the truly talented footballers — the ones who’ll end up in the top professional leagues — at around the age of seven.
They’re not physical freaks, and they do practice a lot, but they get more out of practice because they’re just plain good at it. As a result, they get signed on schoolboy forms in their early teens (Wayne Rooney was 10 when he signed) and have a much earlier apprenticeship than is typical with American sports, especially baseball.
So, while it’s true that the pool of potential top-class footballers is not limited to those in the top height or weight percentile, there’s still a huge difference in quality between top-flight teams and lower divisions and non-league part-timers and Sunday morning cloggers. But there are also enough players to mean that you can have a decent kickabout in the park and not feel as if you’re playing a parody of the game. And there’s always room for a North Korea-Italy upset.
Either Schmitt is trolling badly, or he’s just proving that neocons can be wrong about absolutely everything.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
jeffrey – perhaps the popularity of soccer is, in part, due to its simple rules.
Simple rules mean that its harder to win by pulling shady tricks and the best players with the best teamwork tend to win.
No winning with smoke and mirrors and goofy trick plays and special teams and field goal kicks at the last second like in football.
I’m not a soccer fan to speak of, but football (the american football) is a sport that’s just overloaded with really stupid rules.
Simplified, football would eliminate special teams and eliminate the fieldgoal. The running back might even go away. There would be 5 or 6 men down on the O-line, one QB, and then a bunch of receivers. The defense would have a few down linemen and/or linebackers and a bunch of DB’s.
And pretty much anything would go, provided it doesn’t pose significant unnecessary risk to life and limb. Trick plays would be illegal-mostly (the ball must always move forward when it changes hands, so no end-arounds). Receivers can’t catch a ball behind the LOS.
Think about how much more fun it would be if football looked like that.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
If you think about it in evolutionary terms, pro basketball is an environment that favors directional selection——players from one extreme end of the height spectrum, with a few exceptions. Jockeys and lightweight wrestlers and boxers emerge from directional selection going in the other direction. Other sports are akin to environments favoring stabilizing selection——better to be more average in size. Disruptive selection, where both ends of the phenotypic spectrum are favored over the intermediate forms, is seen in crew, where the big guys do the rowing while the puny coxswain sits in the back and does whatever the hell he does.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
And aside from the particulars of the game itself, how on Earth could you argue that the business side of baseball is some sort of love sonnet to capitalism? In terms of rewarding risk and raw entrepreneurial drive, soccer makes baseball look downright Bolshevik.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
That’s the neocon voice alright:
Reality is a Manichean battlefield
June 25th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Massie is wrong about baseball. The reason why the worst baseball teams win more than the worst soccer teeams is because a baseball games’s outcome is greatly more influenced by the performance of pitchers than by the other 16-18 players on the field, compared to how any single soccer position influences the outcome, and starting pitchers only can play every four or five games. Even a horrible baseball teams can have a one truly great starting pitcher which will ensure winning at least 1/8 of a team’s games. Hell, Steve Carlton won 27 games in a year where the Phillies only won 34 games when Carlton didn’t start. This is not a matter of randomness.
Baseball to me is similar to golf; it is hard for me to understand the appeal of watching the sport to those who have never played it. Like trying to use a three-iron to hit the ball to a small area a long ways away, trying to grasp how damnably difficult it is to hit a great pitch is hard to understand if one has never tried it, and if you aren’t drawn into the intricacies of the hitter/pitcher duel, there is no point to watching baseball. Lots of people have hit an open jump shot from 23 feet, a not infrequent occurence in an NBA game, but a tiny number of people have tried to hit a good slider, and almost all the sliders at the major league level are good.
Soccer’s biggest problem as a spectator sport, from my viewpoint, is slightly different from what Schmitts wrongly asserts. It is too easy for a greatly inferior team in soccer to play defense, and thus negate the superior team’s athleticism. Hockey can have a similar problem, depending on rule enforcement. Of course, soccer’s global popularity shows that the problem is one many are able to overlook, but that popularity is in part due to path dependence, just as baseball’s is in the U.S.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Part of the bigger competitive balance in soccer is due to its rules. Fewer goals scored means that underdogs have a better chance to pull an upset (one lucky kick is all that’s needed) and the capacity to play a defensive style (greatly outnumbering your opponent on your side of the field) neutralizes much of the opponent advantage.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
This analysis ignores the other large factor, which is that the number of scoring events is a strong driver in the ability to score an upset. Upsets in cricket or basketball basically never happen because there are a bazillion scoring chances. Upsets in baseball and soccer happen all the time because one or two lucky events and you can find yourself in the lead.
My main problem with soccer is that there’s no ebb and flow. In basketball or baseball you can be behind but feel like you’re “coming back” or ahead but the lead is “slipping away”. But in soccer it just feels like you’re waiting for lightning to strike, or not to strike.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Have you ever tried to hit a 95-mph fastball? Hardest thing to do in sports, and genetics plays a huge role in separating those who can play professionally.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
[...] Via Matt Y, Gary Schmitt As someone who didn’t play soccer growing up, but had a dad who did and whose own [...]
June 25th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
I just wanted to point out that you’re missing the much more influential factor: team size. In basketball one player is 20% of your total team in the field. If you account for average minutes per game, maybe more like 10-15% for most starters.
Even among the small class of elite professional athletes, there are distinct differences in skill. Kaka or Fabregas are way better than the average player, just as Kobe or Lebron are. But in soccer the best players will only ever be 9% of your team. In the NBA, any team with LeBron James is going to make the playoffs because you have the best player in the game making up 15.7% of your team!
If you played soccer on a smaller pitch with 4 per side plus a goal tender, you’d probably see similar disparities.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
OK, I am only a casual soccer fan so I will likely embarass myself, but is there really that much competitive balance in word footbal compared to other sports? On the international level, play has been dominated for decades by Brazil, Argentina, and a handful of Western European countries (England, Italy, Germany, France, Spain). On the club level, I gather play is dominated by a handful of dynastic, and very rich European teams (not unlike the Yankess) that even a casual fan like me recognizes such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, A.C. Milan and Juventus.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Why does this guy from PNAC hate America so much?
June 25th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Nicholas – that’s the way the sabermetrics crowd sees it, too. The more scoring, the more often the better team wins.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
the premise is of this article is simply absurd. soccer is the sport with the highest degree of competitive imbalance, far and away, no question. on the international level only 7 teams have ever won a world cup, at the professional level, most leagues can eliminate 80% of teams for the championship before the first game. international soccer looks to the US for lessons in parity.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
then further laments the fact that soccer exhibits a high degree of competitive balance
WTF? Did Matthew actually read the Schmitt piece, or is this just Matthew’s typical disingenuous strawman?
I mean, Matthew thinks that “competitive balance” is an accurate description for a sport in which luck plays a huge part such that a bad team beats a good team often? That’s not competitive balance to my mind.
(As it happens, I think that Schmitt is wrong, and international soccer is not a sport in which luck plays a larger role than other sports. But that’s neither here nor there.)
(Oh, and also, that win by the US was huge. Landon and Timmy were beasts.)
June 25th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
The funny thing is that for all the talk about how inferior teams have more of a chance in soccer, when was the last time a team that wasn’t clearly one of the best 2-3 in the world won the World Cup. Going backwards through recent years — Italy, Brazil, France, Brazil, Germany, Argentina, Italy…
Same thing can’t be said about football (2007-08 Giants), baseball (2006 Cardinals), even bastketball (2003-04 Pistons).
June 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
I stand in awe of anyone who can be a successful major league hitter, but I am starting to conclude that the hardest thing to do in sports is to play quarterback in the NFL at a high level. It can be akin to trying to play chess and golf while competing in a heavyweight boxing match. Very fast, very large men are trying to inflict grievous bodily injury upon the quarterback, time and again, while the quarterback has to quickly process a significant amount of information in a tiny amount of time, and then perform fine motor skills with great precision. There is nothing quite like it.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
I agree, this is a ridiculous discussion. Why are we granting the premise that there is competitive balance in soccer? And I dispute the notion that anyone of “average” physical attributes can “work” their way to elite level professional sports. This just doesn’t happen. The talent required to succeed is largely genetically determined and is a necessary but insufficient requirement. What is more common is freakish physical specimens with no talent getting paid big bucks. See Olowokandi, Michael among many NBA examples…
June 25th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
@15
“Have you ever tried to hit a 95-mph fastball? Hardest thing to do in sports, and genetics plays a huge role in separating those who can play professionally.”
True enough. But baseball is dumb.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Upsets in … basketball basically never happen because there are a bazillion scoring chances.
Really? There are no upsets in basketball?
June 25th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I agree with others that the issue with baseball has more to do with starting pitchers than with randomness. But beyond that…
I’m confused at the idea that there is massive competitive balance in soccer, or, really, any kind of competitive balance in soccer. A grand total of four teams (out of 20 or so) have won in the Premier League since its foundation in 1992 – one of those, Blackburn Rovers, won only once. In the last twelve years, the other three teams (Manchester United, Chelsea, and Arsenal), along with Liverpool, have nearly monopolized the top three slots in the premiership – except for two third place finished by Leeds and Newcastle.
Barcelona and Real Madrid hold similarly commanding positions in the Spanish league. In Scotland, Celtic and Rangers have basically alternated between first and second place for the last fifteen years. Five teams (Inter, Milan, Juventus, Roma, and Lazio) seem to be utterly dominant in Italian football. Lyon is ridiculously dominant in France.
In the European championships, seven teams have won 35 of the 54 championships have been won by only seven teams, with twelve teams accounting for 45 of the 54 championships.
The reason international soccer tends to see upsets is because, after the group rounds, it’s a single elimination tournament with only one game to decide each match-up, surely? Basketball is, as Matt argues, a game where natural abilities are going to result in massive competitive disparities. And yet we see worse teams beat better ones in the NCAA tournament all the time. This has nothing to do with the game itself, but with the structure of the individual event, doesn’t it?
June 25th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
@Al
“(Oh, and also, that win by the US was huge. Landon and Timmy were beasts.)”
Didn’t realize you liked stuff.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
It depends on what is called “competitive balance”. Most soccer tournaments are dominated by a few teams, but that is often drived by the free market nature of player acquisition and tournaments rules (especially national leagues, where often there are no playoffs, only regular season records).
Soccer is one of the few team sports where a team ranked 20 could face the top ranked team and reasonably think that they have a real chance.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
It sounds ridiculous, much like when Marxists analyzed art.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Being a spectator of any sport is “dumb”, but engaging in “dumb” activities (like for instance, debating stuff in the intertubes) is one of the pleasures of being human.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Well, sort of. You can usually tell the truly talented footballers — the ones who’ll end up in the top professional leagues — at around the age of seven.
Harry is better than Rooney at same age
7:41pm Thursday 14th June 2007
By Chris Flanagan » Discuss this…
A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD footballer from Great Sankey has been told by Everton coaching staff that he is better than Wayne Rooney was at the same age.
Harry Simmons, who plays for Birchwood and attends Barrow Hall Community Primary School, was snapped up by Everton’s Academy before he had reached the age of five and has just won the club’s player of the year award in his age group for the second year in a row.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
how about college basketball? I can think of a few 5+ seeds upsetting #1’s, a team ranked 14 out of 100+ that had to be the best team in its region to be in the tournament in the first place isn’t that bad we’re not talking about bermuda here.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Two different arguments here. One is that the major soccer leagues/tournaments have a lot of parity. The other is that soccer itself is inherently more likely than other sports to give inferior teams a chance at victory. The latter is definitely true. And it’s all about the size of the field, using feet instead of hands, lots of players on the field making it hard to actually accomplish the simple act of getting a ball down the length of the field, offsides rules, and so on. It is a major accomplishment in soccer if the team manages to get the ball from their goal down toward the other without losing possession. In basketball, this happens every minute! Basketball would be just like soccer if you raised the hoops, lengthened the court, enforced offsides rules, disallowed use of hands, etc.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Seth hit it on the head. The best soccer players are about as genetically exceptional as pro Basketball players. Rather than being extremely tall, they’ve got great lungs, superior stamina, strong legs, sharp reflexes, and excellent coordination and aiming skills. Of course part of this is due to practice, but I’d say genetics is just a big factor in soccer as in most other sports. Nicholas Beuadraut, I’d have to disagree with the “lightning strikes” view of soccer. To the average American that doesn’t watch the sport, there may not be much of an ebb and flow, but to anyone that has seriously watched the sport and understands the tactics involved and flow of the game, there’s a great deal of strategy and buildup involved. Although the build up to a goal isn’t as clear as in American Football, it’s certainly present and plays just as big a role as in most other sports.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
If the relative scarcity of potential quality players were the explanation, baseball would have much less competitive balance. People that can become high-quality pitchers are rare. As others have said, pitching is the most important position. It is the fact that starting pitchers can’t pitch every day that gives baseball its competitive balance. Also, I think a more compelling explanation for relative competitive balance across sports is how many goals/points are scored in a game. Basketball has frequent scoring, while baseball and soccer do not. Would be interesting to test some of these claims (probably even publishable!). At any rate, the right-wing’s claims that soccer is somehow antithetical to American values is truly pathological. How on Earth can ANY sport be antithetical to values? Unless it involves human sacrifice or eating live kittens, I can’t see it. Conservative “intellectuals” just trying to come up with seemingly sophisticated ways of saying “I don’t like the fer’ners.” That’s all it is.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
European football is undeniably favorable to the traditional powers: the EPL is dominated by the predictable top teams; the Old Firm (Rangers and Celtic) have won every SPL title since the league’s creation in 1998, and only one other team has ever even finished 2nd; in the last 45 years, the top Dutch league has been won by Ajax, Feyenoord, or PSV Eindhoven 43 times.
I think this is partly due to league champions being crowned according to who has the best record after a round-robin regular season. When you look at league cup winners, things open up a bit — it’s a lot more likely that some bottom-of-the-EPL club will win the FA Cup next year than that they’ll finish with the best EPL record. It’s similar to college basketball conferences setting up “championship tournaments” partly to make money, but partly to try to finagle automatic bids to March Madness for middling teams that get hot and win 3 or 4 games in a row. Everyone knows that Duke or UNC will win the ACC next year, but NC State might get hot and win the ACC Tournament.
But as far as I’m aware (and I’m hardly an expert, so I could be wrong and please tell me if I am), no major international football leagues have a regular season/playoff format like American sports. They have round-robin regular seasons, and concurrent, randomly-paired single-elimination Cup tournaments. I wonder if our impressions of which sports allow upsets would change if the leagues exchanged formats.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Just as a mark of respect to Steven Wells, the former NME writer who just died, here’s a Guardian piece from two years ago that touches on this divide:
June 25th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
The fact that lower scoring favors underdogs has been explored a lot by sabermetrics and apbrmetrics people, and it’s the basis for Mike Fratello ultra-slow coaching style. There is a nice article by Dean Oliver explaining this (with formulas and everything!!) but I can’t find the link right now.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Also, Matthew is lying when he says that Schmitt “laments the fact that the United States upset Spain in the Confederation Cup”.
In fact, Schmitt calls it a “great moment” for the US.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Will Allen’s last paragraph makes a good point about an inferior soccer team succeeding via defense. That’s what I saw happening in the game yesterday. During the roughly half of the game that I was able to watch, Spain was pressuring USA’s goal practically all the time. USA brought nearly everybody back on defense, and furthermore made several amazing saves.
I am also afraid that there is a little grain of truth in what Schmitt says, namely that there is a growing fraction of American sports fans who enjoy and identify with dominant juggernaut teams. This trend, at least my awareness of it, dates back to Dream Team I in the ‘92 Olympics. Some people around me loved watching Jordan & Co. blow Greece or whoever out. I much more agreed with one sports journalist’s comment that the best basketball ever played was Dream Team I’s scrimmages.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
the gaps in team quality get relatively small.
The five stars of Brazil would like a word with you.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
In American football, the coach of the clearly athletically inferior team will almost always try to “shorten the game”, that is, try to play in a manner which lowers the number of possessions, because the more possessions the greater the chance for athletic superiority to prevail. It’s hard to do though; if the other guys can put your guys on their backs, you simply can’t get the ball away from them, unless you get lucky or the other guys do something really dumb.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Wrong, Al. Schmidt says:
He never says, as you claim, that the game was a great moment for the US, or even for the US soccer team, it’s a great moment “for the sport”. If Schmidt’s attitude doesn’t rise to the level of a “lament” it certainly qualifies as damning with faint praise.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
But as far as I’m aware (and I’m hardly an expert, so I could be wrong and please tell me if I am), no major international football leagues have a regular season/playoff format like American sports.
Yes, there are playoffs in some European soccer leagues. In particular, leagues often use playoffs for promotion/relegation battles – for example, the English League Championship (the second tier of English soccer) uses playoffs to determine the last of the three teams to be promoted to the EPL. In addition, some leagues, such as the US’s MLS (and I think the Belgian league and Australia’s A-League), have regular season/playoff format.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
There are two contradictory arguments being made here: First, that there is too much luck in soccer and two, it’s dominated by a few good teams. Both claims can’t be true. If luck was such an important factor, you would not see the dominance you’re seeing.
Also, the fact that a few teams tend to win doesn’t mean that there’s no competition. Competition just means that the best teams win. Which they do. You American commies are confusing the result of vibrant competition where the the fittest survive with the egalitarian hippie paradise that is American sports, where weak teams are favored and there is therefore greater equality between the teams. Competition and equality are not the same concepts.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Soccer is one of the few team sports where a team ranked 20 could face the top ranked team and reasonably think that they have a real chance.
Actually I can think of very few American team sports where the the 20th team does not have at least a decent shot at beating the 1 team. It happens all the time in American football, baseball, hockey and basketball. If upsets weren’t fairly common then we couldn’t bet on the games, and then where would we be?
June 25th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
As long as by “Communist-dominated Eastern Europe” you mean Lithuania.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
As long as by “Communist-dominated Eastern Europe” you mean Lithuania.
And Spain.
Oh Matt, Matt..
June 25th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
it’s a great moment “for the sport”. If Schmidt’s attitude doesn’t rise to the level of a “lament” it certainly qualifies as damning with faint praise.
Don’t see how calling it a “great moment” (for the US or for the sport – and I think he clearly means for the sport *in the US*, but whatever, it is irrelevant to the point) is either a lament or damning with faint praise.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I smell a neocon wonk who doesn’t actually know anything about sports, let alone the bizarre European game he’s discussing. Upsets can always happen, unless you happen to be the Lions last season.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
“Actually I can think of very few American team sports where the the 20th team does not have at least a decent shot at beating the 1 team. It happens all the time in American football, baseball, hockey and basketball. If upsets weren’t fairly common then we couldn’t bet on the games, and then where would we be?”
It does not “happen all the time” in American football, I can tell you that much. That’s why they have a point spread, so that one can “bet on” the Lions without actually predicting that they’ll win.
It does happen frequently in baseball, but baseball is a much different sport from the others, as others have explained.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
My main problem with soccer is that there’s no ebb and flow.
That’s surprising, as Alex says, because it’s something I absolutely see in matches — and hockey is the only American sport that comes close.
Perhaps you don’t have the points on the board (in both sports) to indicate those shifts in momentum, but there are certainly build-ups of pressure and possession where a goal seems inevitable — or the exact opposite, where a team withstands that pressure and scores from a textbook counter-attack.
On Al’s link: signing a kid at four is part publicity stunt, part long bet by the club. The academies at that age are basically just a couple of hours after school each week with a bit of coaching supervision to encourage good habits — the kids would be out playing on the park anyway. But at seven, you actually see them developing tactical abilities, and that’s when the scouts get serious.
The US is getting to the point where that kind of infrastructure is falling in place for the men’s game. For all of the whining about competitiveness (which is frankly ungrounded) it’ll be interesting to see what happens when — not if — the US wins the World Cup.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
*Sigh*
I’m an American who has gotten into watching soccer quite a bit over the past 5-10 years. I never played soccer at any level while I did play other sports growing up. It’s easily one of my favorite spectators sports now.
People who say things like it soccer has the most competitive balance, it’s easy to play defense soccer, or make any other silly claim clearly have no idea what they’re talking about and haven’t watched very much of the sport played at the highest level. I can’t help buy roll my eyes in the same way some other might roll their eyes when they say baseball players are fat and not athletes, or only the last 2 minutes of a basketball game matter, etc.
Also, I don’t know if it’s been pointed out above in the earlier comments, but soccer as a professional sport is FAR more capitalistic than any US sport. No salary caps, no luxury tax, no draft to help out the crappy teams. The big teams buy and sell the best players b/c they have the most cash. Individual teams occasionally go bankrupt. Teams that are poor get punished and sent to a lower league.
The NFL, NBA, MLB, etc. look like a communist nation in comparison.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
When I think about competitive balance of a sport, I don’t think about individual games. I think about overall success over the course of a season. And really, that has nothing to do with the individual sport if we’re talking baseball, basketball and football (American football. I don’t know soccer). The difference between the best players and the worst players in each of these sports is pretty comparable. Rather, it has more to do with the financial structure of the league.
The NFL – the sport with by far the greatest parody – has a hard salary cap. All the teams have a lot of money, so they all spend pretty much the same amount on players. With the way contracts are set up, it’s impossible to keep more than a handful of good players for more than a few years. This leads to lots of turnover and not as many chances to build dynasties around a core group. Baseball, on the other hand, is consistently dominated by the teams that can spend money. Sure the Yanks and the Sox don’t win the series every year, but they consistently finish at the top of the standings while the Pirates and Royals finish at the bottom. Baseball does not have a hard cap, but rather a soft tax that’s set at a level few teams can spend to anyway. And the NBA is run by a bunch of morons so it’s a little less predictable.
Basically, you need to look at the money to look at competitive balance.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
“The NFL – the sport with by far the greatest parody – has a hard salary cap.”
Heh heh.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
For all of the whining about competitiveness (which is frankly ungrounded) it’ll be interesting to see what happens when — not if — the US wins the World Cup.
It’s not bound to happen. The US already have at least three sports attracting the most athletically gifted people with multi-million contracts. If a kid is incredibly talented in many sports, he will tend to choose the one of his idols, the ones on the cover of the magazines.
By contrast, all the kids in Brazil dream of playing for the national soccer team.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Nothing resembles the old Soviet Union planned economy so much as the modern NFL. How about a little competition in your closed franchise system with revenue sharing, you ‘capitalist’ bastards? Soccer leagues around the world (sadly, not the US) have promotion and relegation which allow teams to rise and fall on the merits of their product, which is how I thought a market economy was supposed to work. Ask Indianapolis or Las Vegas why they can’t be in MLB no matter how well they do in the minor leagues but Pittsburgh can stay forever even though they’ve sucked for a generation and then get back to me about the whole ‘Soccer is Un-American’ bullshit.
Finally, America’s oldest soccer tournament the US Open Cup began play in 1914 which predates the founding of the NFL by 8 years. The tournament was dominated in it’s early years by worker teams from Bethlehem Steel, who spent their pansy socialist ass days building armor plate for the US military during WWI.
Fucking Neocons ARE wrong about everything. Even sports.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
What’s up with neo-cons and soccerphobia? Here’s Commentary moron Jonathan Tobin with a similarly ridiculous piece in the spring:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/61202
June 25th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I roll my eyes at people who can’t admit that sports do have differences, like it being easier for athletically inferior teams to play defense in some sports, compared to others. Compare the number of 1-0 World Cup games to 3-0 NFL playoff games.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Both claims can’t be true. If luck was such an important factor, you would not see the dominance you’re seeing.
Dominance and trophies don’t overlap perfectly in the international game, where major competitions are sufficiently spaced out to remove the sense of an ongoing dynasty, and retain the element of luck at the knockout stage. The World Cup has been won by a small number of teams, but no-one doubts the talent and influence of the Hungarians in the early 1950s or the Dutch in the 1970s.
The European Championships have had a couple of ‘upset’ winners — Denmark and Greece — who played well enough to make it to the final but weren’t ever considered dominant sides.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
@24 Will Allen: “the hardest thing to do in sports is to play quarterback in the NFL”
Totally agree. The only position that is harder to play than NFL quarterback is President of the United States in the year 2009.
As for soccer, what a beautiful sport. Right now I’m watching a replay of a Man U/Chelsea game from September. Everybody on the pitch is working their ass off -working together as a team- and presently they are getting nowhere.
But I expect a couple of passes to link up at some point, followed by a thru ball or a searching cross, and lightening may strike.
Hey, maybe the US can beat Brasilia and win a tournament. How cool would that be? Serendipity looms large in soccer. No doubt. And we are going to need some if we are to defeat those dirty samba-dancing geniuses.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Soccer, more than any other sport, lends itself great to poverty. All you really need is an open space and a single ball. The basic rules are incredibly simple, and very few people are left sitting in dugouts or on sidelines waiting for their turn. This gives it a world-wide advantage.
If courts are publicly provided (as they often are in US cities), basketball enjoys many of these same advantages.
Games like baseball, lacrosse, cricket, football, hockey, etc. can be played on the cheap via “street” versions, like stickball, but are ultimately, games for the children of the wealthy.
Also, we tend to overemphasize the differences in sports, but these are really just minor variations of the same simple game that dates back centuries. Two groups each try to get a ball from one edge of an area to another.
If you study the history of ball games, you’ll soon realize how closely related soccer, football, rugby league, rugby union, etc. are (and just how historically recently these branches separated from each other). The original game was very violent (as “get the ball to the other side” was really the only rule), and led to many injuries and some deaths, and inciting riots, leading it to be banned in many areas.
All the variations are pretty much a reaction to the bans placed on the original violent sport, each with various rules (or equipment) introduced to minimize the injuries. Such variations were locally contrived and eventually diverged into the sports of soccer, rugby (union and league), American football, etc. But, they’re all just local varieties of the same original sport.
Out of those variations, soccer is probably the cheapest to play, easiest to understand, and least likely to cause a major injury. Its not really much of a surprise that it was the most adopted version (and American football was quite geographically isolated). There were numerous other versions (including versions where small balls were thrown overhand across the field), but they’ve since gone extinct.
The continuous nature of play in soccer does not lend itself well to the advertising break revenue system of American TV, so we see little of it on television, and since we’re rich enough to play the games we see on TV that do lend themselves to commercial breaks, we play them instead.
Worth a read is the wikipedia entry on “Medieval Football” (or Mob football as its sometimes called). Cross reference that with the “early years” section of American Football.
Sports evolve much like animals with a lot of branches, regional adaptation, mutations, and extinctions. Personally, I think it might be interesting for an evolutionary biologist to take a look at the whole thing. I think the answer to why we play what we do probably parallels why some areas have turkeys and others have owls.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
By contrast, all the kids in Brazil dream of playing for the national soccer team.
Apart from the rich kids, who dream of being racing drivers. Point taken, but I’m taking the long view here: perhaps not ten years, but probably no more than twenty.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Soccer is one of the few team sports where a team ranked 20 could face the top ranked team and reasonably think that they have a real chance.
Seriously? I’d say in any of the major American sports leagues there’d be a decent chance that the 20th best team could beat the best team in one game.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Baseball is anomalous among team ball sports because the performance of the offense has no direct bearing on the performance of the defense. In basketball, soccer, hockey, and football, all the interceptions, steals, blocks, stops, saves, holds, clock violations, and so on allow the offense to play more often and/or with fewer obstacles in their way. Likewise, a successful offense and plenty of goal-scoring lets the defense get in position more often because the ball must be cleared or the clock is stopped or the opponent has more ground to cover. There’s no such dynamic in baseball. A baseball team, on any given day, is actually a pair of teams that are working independently toward the same goal. When they are both performing well, you get your 10-2 victories. But most of the time, one will perform well and the other will not, thus the many 6-4 games that go either way—and the resulting difficulty of winning more than 100 games, even with an all-star roster. A great sliding catch by the centerfielder in the top of the seventh does not mean that the bottom half of the inning begins with two men on base before the first pitch is thrown. In those other sports, an interception or turnover can lead directly to offensive success. Roll snake eyes on the first roll of the dice, and it actually makes it more likely to roll snake eyes on the second roll. Not so in baseball. And that’s why it’s interesting, and why a team like the 2006 Cardinals can get hot at the right time and win a title despite being barely over .500 during the regular season.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I wonder if the Dinaric Alps having the highest average human height in the world has anything to do with the Easter Bloc prowess in basketball???
June 25th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I see that dumbass didn’t make it past the first paragraph.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hey, in the name of Brazilian readers, congratulations for a very impressive win! We will be waiting for you guys in the final on Sunday. Respectfully.
To be honest, anyone following the game knows that the US has not been such an underdog for some years. In the 2002 World Cup you guys fielded a very impressive team that crushed favourites Portugal and went on to lose to Germany in the third round in a game in which the US was at the very least an equal to the Germans, and could have won.If you did, you would have played the semis against South Korea, an even match in anyone´s book.
All in all, this Sunday´s final could have happened seven years ago.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Al @ 51:
Since Schmidt is so dismissive of soccer as an enterprise, I took his statement that the US victory was a “great moment for the sport” as damning with faint praise. That is, nothing “great” for soccer is really all that great since soccer is the decadent sport of non-meritocratic socialists, or something.
As to relegation/promotion playoffs, that’s similar but not quite the same as the World Series or NFL playoffs/Super Bowl, in that actual League Champions don’t participate in them — it’s reserved for the bottom or near-bottom teams of one division, and the near-top of the lower division, with the actual lower-division champion automatically promoted.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
That would be in the third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs.
Rest your lips and then plough on when you’re ready.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Have you ever tried to hit a 95-mph fastball? Hardest thing to do in sports
Says who? Ted Williams, who just happened to be better at it than almost everyone else ever? Just a smidge self-serving, I think.
(My vote goes to the Vendée Globe, in which you race a sailboat around the world 25,000 miles non-stop … by yourself.)
As long as by “Communist-dominated Eastern Europe” you mean Lithuania.
And the former Yugoslavia and its component parts. See: Kukoc, T.; Divac, V.; etc.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
He specifically says that those who win more often than not don’t deserve to win, which shows you what he thinks of the American effort yesterday, and claims that this is not only corrosive to American values but that Americans are rejecting it.
There, that was easy.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Soccer certainly has a lot of competitive imbalance, but I think Cricket is worse. There have been nine World Cups and Australia has won four of them, including the last three. They’ve been runner up twice, meaning Australia has played in two thirds of the World Cup finals. Of the nineteen teams, only six have ever reached the finals. What’s kind of amazing though, is that the dominant team has one of the smallest populations and therefor one of the smallest pools of potential players. India only has one championship with more than fifty times Australia’s population.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Apples and oranges. The National Team for the US beat the National Team for Spain. These are all-star teams. Each of these players plays on some club team throughout the world. The “competitiveness” of the club system is what is addressed in the report referenced by our host. Once again, AEI doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
One thing that I’ve always felt does actually separate the most “American” of sports from other sports is the divide between games that distinctly separate offense from defense, and those that don’t.
In both baseball and football, you have one team who is trying to score points, and another trying to prevent that (Cricket, definitely not “American” shares this feature). I’m talking about the “we attack, you defend, then we switch” structure. In most other games (Rugby, soccer, basketball, hockey, etc.) the same group is both an offense and a defense simultaneously and never discretely separates the two roles into distinct periods of game play.
I do think there must be something “American” about this specialization and separation of roles, although I haven’t thought of a good thesis to explain it. The dedicated offense vs. dedicated defense always struck me as a bit more war-like in the sense that it reminded me of attackers storming the defended castle.
You have one side that has little (football) or no (baseball) chance of scoring any points. They simply do their best to stop the other team from scoring. They merely just try to minimize the damage of these dedicated aggressors.
It would be like in boxing, if in each alternating round, one boxer was not allowed to punch back. With such an analogy, it’s not surprising that certain cultures would find this a weird concept in a game. It seems “unfair” even if they do indeed alternate the roles fairly over time. (wait? I just stand here while you get to punch me and I can’t punch back?!” “Yeah, but next round, you get to punch and I don’t so its fair.” “Umm…I’m not sure I want to play this game.”)
The offense gets to kick ass without fear of retaliation, and/or the defense gets to claim they fended off these aggressors despite not being able to truly fight back.
You get to alternate between being the ass-kicking viking berserker, pillaging another without fear of your home being attacked and also the helpless, morally superior group defending the homeland (with no chance of gaining ground) warding off the attacks of the more powerful aggressor trying to crush you and steal your land. (In wingnut speak, you’re either the Iraq invasion force or the Red Dawn “wolverines” defending against the Ruskie invasion, but never are you asked to play both roles at the same time.)
June 25th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
There have been nine World Cups and Australia has won four of them, including the last three.
The World Cups are one-day tournaments, so they’re not really the crown jewels of international cricket. They’re at best an interesting spectacle, and at worst a sideshow.
Sure, the Aussies have dominated the game over the last 15 years or so — in Tests as well as one-day matches — just as the West Indies (with an equally tiny population) were huge in the 1980s, and the other big competitive nations have had their shorter runs of success. But you can’t extrapolate overall competitiveness from the World Cup.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Nothing resembles the old Soviet Union planned economy so much as the modern NFL. How about a little competition in your closed franchise system with revenue sharing, you ‘capitalist’ bastards?
That’s silly. The games in the NFL are as competitive as in any other sport, and that’s what’s important: people want to watch the teams’ athletes compete, not their accountants. In most European leagues, however, the same teams dominate year after year after year (this is the 4th year in a row that the exact same teams won the first four places in the Premier League, and it competition was hardly much more open before that).
The structure of American vs. European sports shows a depressing truth about egalitarianism: You can achieve it only by having a closed club. Once the system is open (in Soccer, by promotion / relegation), you will pay by having greater class divisions. Of course, when we’re talking about Sports, the stakes are pretty low.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Becoming a major league baseball player is a much more unpredictable and mysterious phenomenon than becoming an NBA or NFL player. Many of the greatest college (and high school) prospects never made it. Hitting MLB pitching is enormously difficult and it takes years for even the best of the best to do so. Lebron was Lebron from the git. Michael Jordan couldn’t hit to save his life. It’s not sheer athleticism that makes the difference. You could have the greatest physique in the world, be faster than a speeding bullet, great eye-hand co-ordination, etc., etc. and still never be able to hit a major league slider.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
You could have the greatest physique in the world, be faster than a speeding bullet, great eye-hand co-ordination, etc., etc. and still never be able to hit a major league slider.
That’s also true for bowling or Rubik’s cube championships. Jordan would never have made it to the top there.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
The idea that world soccer is anti-capitalist compared with US sports is ridiculous. US sports leagues have all sorts of socialistic rules: drafts, salary caps, restrictions on opening franchises, scheduling that favors bad teams. World soccer leagues are wide open: they bid without limit for players, bad teams get relegated, etc.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I’m sorry, which universe are we talking about where there is a competitive balance in baseball?
June 25th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
“But you can’t extrapolate overall competitiveness from the World Cup.”
That’s obviously true, but when you look at the regular test matches, it’s still the same six teams that win most of the time. These days, Australia almost always wins, even if they are playing a good team like India or Pakistan. That’s not to say there aren’t some great matches. India vs Pakistan is always a good game because they are both good teams and hate each other. And you can almost always count on Bermuda losing. But it’s basically one awesome team, five teams competing for second, and thirteen teams that don’t stand a chance.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
We are all stupider for having read Schmitt’s piece. He’s arguing, ultimately, that Americans hate upsets in sports because we don’t ultimately believe it’s fair when the little guy takes down the big guy. That’s why no one watches the first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament, everyone regrets the Miracle on Ice, and all of us wish that Michigan had beaten Appalachian State.
There are two soccer-specific points here:
1. Just like every other sport, soccer’s big teams almost always win, both in the one-offs and over the long run.
2. Winning defensively is still winning, no matter the sport. Saying Spain held the ball the whole game and still couldn’t score isn’t much of an argument for it deserving to have won that game.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Mexican soccer decides its champions through playoffs. After the regular season, the top 8 teams make the playoffs. In the case of a tie (for a two-legged, um, tie), the higher-ranked team wins.
They also have a repechage, which confuses the bejeebers out of me.
They also play two seasons per year, one in the “winter” and one in the spring.
A fair number of South American leagues follow this format as well.
Regarding randomness of results (the ability of an inferior team to beat a far superior one), Arsenal recently had an undefeated season, and I think Chelsea and Man U have come close as well. I think inferior teams can tie the superior ones, but they have a harder time winning outright.
Baseball is so random because hitting is really, really hard, but there is still a relatively narrow range between the best hitters and the worst. The best batters reach base forty percent of the time, or maybe a little more, but the worst batters still make it thirty percent of the time. So in the course of the game, it is more likely that the random base-reachings will favor the inferior team over the superior one.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
“That’s also true for bowling or Rubik’s cube championships. Jordan would never have made it to the top there.” (WOW)
Yes, but when it came to baseball – he thought he could. And, alas, baseball is a tad more MAJOR LEAGUE than bowling or cubing.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Depends on what you mean by “succeed.” If you look at most high school football programs, even really good ones, you see a lot of lineman who weight 220 pounds. In my little town in norhtwestern PA, it’s not uncommon to see guys who weigh 160 playing center. Even at the smaller college level, not everyone weighs 340 pounds and runs a 4.0 40. And at the pro level, guys like cornerbacks and receivers are certainly in shape. But quite a few of them weigh in at under 200 pounds.
And of course, in basketball, you only see a whole slew of guys who are 6′ 9″ in the NBA and elite colleges. You can have a perfectly serviceable high school basketball career even if you are short. And score plenty of girls I suppose, which is how most kids define “success.”
Now, of course, if you are defining success as a contract at the highest professional levels, sure, you have to be freakish. But I am not convinced that you don’t have to be freakish in some sense to be Pele. I mean, I could practice from now until forever, and I could not play like David Beckham. To suggest otherwise would be to play into that idea that it’s an “easy” sport. So in that sense, I don’t think that soccer is in any way more “democratic” than other sports.
I do think the neo-con’s hatred of soccer is weird. To be clear, I SHARE that sentiment. As a red-blooded American guy raised on Jack Lambert, I am genetically programmed to think soccer is for sissies, and in some sense un-American. I groan when I see really athletic kids ignore their spiritual and religious duty to perform in front of me on the gridiron in favor of SOCCER. But I hope I am sophisticated enough to realize how ridiculous this sentiment is, and not say so in public. Other than in bars.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Since Schmidt is so dismissive of soccer as an enterprise, I took his statement that the US victory was a “great moment for the sport” as damning with faint praise. That is, nothing “great” for soccer is really all that great since soccer is the decadent sport of non-meritocratic socialists, or something.
You explanation makes sense. It just has nothing to do with Matthew’s statement that Schmitt “laments the fact that the United States upset Spain in the Confederation Cup”, which was what my comment was about, and which is clearly untrue.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Says who? Ted Williams, who just happened to be better at it than almost everyone else ever? Just a smidge self-serving, I think.
Exactly. Not to mention, the justification for saying hitting a baseball is the hardest thing in sports is always explained by the fact that even the best players hit “only” .333. Of course this is the average of balls *successfully* hit in play. Most players put the ball in play, so that most at bats *refute* the notion that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. If we were to use Williams’ logic, we could argue that scoring a goal in hockey is the hardest thing to do in sports, because even the best players only score on one out of every 5 or so shots (on net, no less) (a worse batting average than baseball!).
~
I would say this about baseball, however. People always talk dubiously about young players, along the lines of “wait till he has to hit a major league curveball”. Well, no. The hardest pitch to hit is a major league fastball. Fastballs are what separate the men from the boys, and make or break major league pitchers (and thus hitters).
June 25th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
[...] Schmitt’s riff on America’s victory over Spain is rightfully getting ripped. What I want to add though is how weird it is that the neocons – the people who are [...]
June 25th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Mike from Detroit has a great comment there. Hey, remember when Myles came on to assure us that salary caps, reverse-order drafts, and other examples of forced competitiveness interfere with the purpose of sport, which is to watch the richest teams beat the poorer ones again and again? Where is that guy now, I wonder?
June 25th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
“The game’s got numnuts rules.” WTF! Soccer has basically 2 rules: 1) Don’t use your hands to touch the ball; 2) If you’re on offense, don’t get behind the defense unless you have the ball or the ball has already been passed to you. That’s about it. Have you read an NFL or NBA rulebook recently?
“I coached my son’s soccer team (u10) despite knowing nothing of the sport other than the obvious — use your feet, don’t use your hands. I was able to finagle close games by simply coaching what I could explain: stay between the ball and the goal.” I coached my sons’ soccer teams for 10 years, and was able to crush teams coached this way by understanding the subtleties of the game. If you could finagle close games by playing not to lose, you must have had some pretty sorry competition.
June 25th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Jeffrey Davis also seems to have coached in a league where a draw is settled with penalty kicks, which is not the case in pro soccer. And he calls penalty kicks “free kicks”! Guess he’s not kidding about not knowing about the game.
June 25th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Somebody probably already made this point, but:
I’d speculate that the rarity of really tall people precisely means that among such people innate athletic talent is less necessary for a high-level basketball career than it is among normal-sized baseball/soccer players. Putting it the other way round, aptitude/talent is more important for normal-sized people in sports where being really tall isn’t near-essential than it is in basketball. Which, I think, sort of disagrees with a point Matt made.
June 25th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
I thought when I was young that by the time I was an adult soccer would be big in the US. But I was naive–clearly not everyone who played it enjoys watching it. I’m quite sure if I hadn’t played it through high school that I wouldn’t appreciate it as I do (it’s unlike football or basketball or baseball in that way, I suspect). But having played it, I find it the most enjoyable sport in the world to watch. And I’m a huge college football fan, so it’s not that I don’t appreciate American sports. I find it enthralling, and though goals are great, a 0-0 game still can be utterly fantastic.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
“In most European leagues, however, the same teams dominate year after year after year (this is the 4th year in a row that the exact same teams won the first four places in the Premier League, and it competition was hardly much more open before that).”
Man City is buying itself a team. Arsenal might finish 5th next year.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
As far as I can tell the author is speaking as an individual, not as a spokesman for all conservatives – neo,paleo or otherwise. I am a conservative and I was cheering for team usa louder than anyone I was watching the game with. How a neocon becomes neocons I have no clue. Another false title in a long string of misleading articles here on tp.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Wow, what an interesting thread.
The “competitive balance” described by Yglesias really seems to me a noble attempt to explain soccer’s global appeal—ii just ‘sounds’ like unified field theory of the game which in that context, has been properly challenged by some very obvious statistics about which clubs have won the most competitions.
As to the claim that there’s extraordinary physique needed to play reasonably competitively, that fits the “competitive balance” term very well. Unless one has asthma or one leg shorter than the other or brittle bones, every kid has the physical potential to be a good player just through practice and practical exercises (for stamina and flexibility). But great players play a great mental game and that’s where genetic luck really comes in.
There’s a few interesting comments I’d like to respond to:
#14 My main problem with soccer is that there’s no ebb and flow. In basketball or baseball you can be behind but feel like you’re “coming back” or ahead but the lead is “slipping away”. But in soccer it just feels like you’re waiting for lightning to strike, or not to strike.
Is that said as an observer of both, or as a player of basketball and an observer of soccer? Because that last sentence doesn’t sound like something a player of soccer would say—unless they really sucked at the game and shouldn’t have been playing at all. Sorry.
Someone wrote: “I coached my son’s soccer team (u10) despite knowing nothing of the sport other than the obvious — use your feet, don’t use your hands. I was able to finagle close games by simply coaching what I could explain: stay between the ball and the goal.”
To which greguva responded (with authority) “If you could finagle close games by playing not to lose, you must have had some pretty sorry competition”.
Quite so. When I played competitive youth soccer from 8 to 13 our coach didn’t actually ‘coach’ he just told us how long we’d have to run around the pitch, or do jumping jacks or how many minutes we’d spend practicing passes or heading—the end.
It was up to us kids to figure out how to actually play, and we all had a pretty good idea of that anyway because we’d all been soccer-mad since we were four or five.
I’d suggest the kids on the team finagled the close games by their own efforts, not by the coach’s admitted obvious advice.
It’s just the nature of the game that when a better team plays a lesser team, 9 x out of 10 simply defending presents a greater risk of losing the match than trying to take the game to the better opponents. Even if one ekes out a goalless-draw, the inevitable return match will be a loss, and likely a pretty big one.
It’s very tough trying to compare these team ball-sports in terms of what it takes to play and what it’s like to watch, because of the rules that define the respective games.
The best comparison I can come up with is between basketball and soccer: the common ground I see is that possession, coordinated passing agility and maintaining pace make for successful team play. And in case you had noticed, the margin of victory in basketball is actually often as small as that of soccer—one basket or one goal.
For all the talk of money and team domination in professional national and international competition, soccer does have a considerable degree of “competitive balance” in that it is so accessible because of its nature:
As a six year old I’d go out on our street and pass the ball to myself by deflecting it off the curb, like a bank-shot in snooker. There was a lamppost that I would treat as a single goal post and I’d practice curving the ball “inside” it—and I could do that in the dark of course.
My school was a collection of buildings arranged in a rather ad-hoc fashion. We’d play “knock-out” which was basically like playing safety-shots in 8-Ball, but the ‘table’ was an urban landscape.
A section of the wall the school shared with the pub was the ‘home’ target. The first player would kick the ball at the target in such a way as to deflect it somewhere that would make it difficult for the next player to also hit the target area from wherever the ball came to rest—which might for instance end up being behind a low wall in the cramped dumpster corral with no direct line of sight to the target wall.
That might require a scoop lob with a backspin it up and out of the corall, bounce it off the roof of building 6 whilst also giving it the side spin needed for the angle to the target wall.
I’d play against my brother (who would actually coach me—teaching me techniques and talking about the game in general) and I’d play with and against his friends (who, like my brother were all seven years older than me.). Those sessions raised my game considerably—though it was still just recreation.
Now here’s where the “competitive balance” comes in. Some idiot in our village (population 1,800) decided to create a soccer team that would play in the FA sanctioned Boy’s League and seeing the notice for players at the local grocers, I went along to try out. A total of fifteen 7-8 year old kids showed up and we instantly had a team!
Our very first league match we lost 7-1, and that one goal was scored by our goal keeper who was so pissed-off by our lousy performance he abandoned his goal, took the ball the length of the pitch and scored!
By the end of our first season of about 36 games we were third from bottom of the league.
The second season we landed in the middle. The third season we’d acquired one more team member but he was unreliable. We finished fourth.
The fourth season we finished third and unreliable Eddie quit. Our fifth season, now 12-13 years old, we played the league championship final in front of 12,000 spectators and we won 3-2, with the same 15 players we’d started out with, beating teams that had many more players to choose from.
On that level, I think my experience serves as an example of “competitive balance” .
June 25th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
The fact that Schmitt went through the trouble of spelling out the FIFA acronym shows what a dipshit he is. “Eww, it’s French.”
June 25th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Like some other commenters, I disagree with the Schmitt piece that luck plays a larger role in soccer vs many other sports.
However, Matt’s piece is like someone writing an article entitled Progressives Bemoan Long Distance Backpacking because Matt wrote that hiking the Appalachian Trail is an idiosyncratic behavior and that normal people only want to hike to a specific location on the trail.
By the way, I’m impressed that Matt climbed Kathadin. That is an awesome experience. My wife and I made the trip a few years ago via the Abol Trail.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Soccer and baseball are both sports in which relatively normal sized people can excel if they practice a lot and develop the skills.
OK, this is tricksy. Yes, “relatively normal sized people” can excel, but “relatively normal sized” does NOT mean relatively normal overall. Professional baseball and soccer players are genetic freaks. I doubt there’s a major league hitter who ranks worse than the top fraction of 1% of the population for hand-eye coordination. Most have either exceptional strength, speed or glove skills as well.
Matt, you can rest easy knowing you didn’t miss your chance of playing in the majors – I’m pretty sure that if you or I had spent 10 hours a day practicing baseball we still wouldn’t have made it.
June 26th, 2009 at 12:18 am
The 2006 Cardinals did not “get hot at the right time”, rather, they did well enough from April to August (the vast majority of the season) to survive an absolutely disasterous September, and then started playing closer to their regular game again during Oct. The team itself was high quality, as these guys had one of the best records in each of the previous 3 years (or maybe 2 out of the previous 3, I forget).
I know, I’m off the general topic. Sorry, Cardinal fanaticism got the best of me.
June 26th, 2009 at 12:25 am
I’d just like to add to the voices pointing out that the tactical requirements of under-10 soccer might not have much relevance when discussing a game played by professional athletes.
Also, the Ted Williams quote has always bugged me. Any sport played at a high level is going to have athletes doing things that push physical limits. Volleying a shot from a cross on goal, swerving a free kick around a wall from 30 yards out, hell, even the relatively mundane skill of trapping a pass with a defender pushing you in the back while running full speed–these actions are all pretty damned difficult, as anyone who’s attempted them can attest.
As for the tired scoring complaint–what people don’t realize is that the dearth of scoring is part of the appeal. The joy of a goal scored is heightened by the rarity of its occurrence. It’s something that people who enjoy pitcher’s duels in baseball might wrap their head around, but those who enjoy those orgies of scoring in basketball games might not.
My last argument for soccer is that it’s a players game. Coaches can broadly define tactics, give you a motivational speech at half-time, and make a few substitutions, but other than a little yelling from the sideline, are powerless during the game. Players thus have a lot more leeway for improvisation and creativity during matches. Which, for me, is more interesting than a team of players slavishly following a coach’s instructions. Though unlike the xenophobic “soccer sucks” crowd, I realize, on this issue, de gustibus non est disputandum.
June 26th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Oh, I can’t let that Cardinal post go. The 2006 cardinals were barely over .500 in a really weak division. This is actually a perfect illustration of an American sporting difference–in which championships are rewarded to a team for their performance in a short time-frame (granted they have to qualify for play-offs, which is, for baseball at least more difficult than it is in other sports–early basketball post-season series are just embarrassing.)
It’s something that should be remembered when people compare franchise dominance between soccer leagues and American sports–Europeans generally acclaim the team that has the best record over a season, over the winner of tournaments, where one bad game or series can see a demonstrably superior team exit early. (People don’t say the team that won the FA cup or the Carling cup are the “league champs.” If baseball did the same thing, I’m pretty sure you’d see a similar dominance of a few franchises, like the Yankees, the Red Sox, etc.
But I don’t think I would rank a team who played a majority of its games against teams with losing records and still barely broke .500 among those dominant franchises. But that’s probably because I’m an embittered Mets fan (the Mets won 14 more games that season in a tougher division) who still can’t get over Carlos Beltran leaving the bat on his shoulder during the last pitch of game 7.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:03 am
The reality is that neocons don’t like soccer is that less offensively talented nations can still win against more offensively talented nations with the right tactics, mindset, defence and perserverence, something neocons and their love for pre-emptive war cannot stand.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:24 am
“competitive balance” is exactly what you want in a market economy, while the apearance of monpoys/oligopol is exactly the thing that demands regulation or public sector production.
So what this guy wants is not capitalism but a new form of aristocracy.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:55 am
Soccer is boring.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:19 am
Man City is buying itself a team. Arsenal might finish 5th next year.
They’re going to have to buy harder. Gareth Barry and Roque Santa Cruz are not turning a 10th-place team into a 4th-place team.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Soccer’s curse in this country is that it has been experienced mainly as a children’s game. People with views like commenter #2 are common – “Soccer sucks because I can get my under-10 team to employ ridiculous tactics, and it works!” The quality differences between top-flight teams are subtle, and you need some exposure to the professional leagues to truly understand the game.
Pretty much the same set of arguments can be made about baseball – if you had only ever seen your 6-year-old’s tee-ball game, you’d think it was a terrible sport. But most American sports fans grew up fans of some major league team or another, and having seen what the sport looks like at the top level, they manage to not think too hard about whether the tactical simplicity of tee-ball renders the entire sport pointless. Hopefully, the next generation (post-satellite TV, MLS, and wider cable coverage of international tournaments) will have the same perspective on soccer.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Yes, there are playoffs in some European soccer leagues. In particular, leagues often use playoffs for promotion/relegation battles – for example, the English League Championship (the second tier of English soccer) uses playoffs to determine the last of the three teams to be promoted to the EPL. In addition, some leagues, such as the US’s MLS (and I think the Belgian league and Australia’s A-League), have regular season/playoff format.
The attempted counter example proves the original argument that top leagues don’t use playoffs. The English League Championship (now the Coca-Cola Championship?) is, as noted, a second tier league. The Belgian league is no better than second tier internationally, and the MLS (of which I’m an occasional season ticket holder) and the A-League are probably more accurately described as third tier. Soccer people universally consider the regular season-playoff arrangement a gimmick unworthy of a first-rate league. When MLS fans discuss how to increase the credibility of our league, eliminating the playoff system is generally one of the first suggestions.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am
The notion that somehow basketball and football are unique because they have a restricted player pool due to height and weight requirements is absurd. It’s just that some elements of what it takes to perform at elite levels are highly visible in those particular sports.
If you tested the reaction times of major league hitters, for example, I’m confident that they would come out as many standard deviations above average as basketball players do for height.
Players who reach the most elite levels of any sport tend to put in an ungodly number of practice hours, but in addition, in one way or another, they are almost all freaks of nature. Go read some of the literature on the physical characteristics of Lance Armstrong or Michael Phelps, as just a couple of examples. Baseball and soccer are no different.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Jeffrey Davis also seems to have coached in a league where a draw is settled with penalty kicks, which is not the case in pro soccer. And he calls penalty kicks “free kicks”! Guess he’s not kidding about not knowing about the game.
Damn right, I wasn’t kidding.
But at the same time, my kids were losing 2-1, 1-0 when other teams were losing 6-0 and such. Playing to not lose badly has a name I’ve discovered. It’s called “South American Football. ” (Excluding Brazil.) Apparently South American soccer fans really hate to get shown up and will kill a coach or player in retribution for it. If a numnut coach like me could keep it close (and boring) then there’s something structurally wrong with the game.
Favorite story from my inglorious tenure. We’d fouled in the box and the other team was lining up for a penalty kick. I instructed our goalie to lean forward a bit and just stand there with his hands extended to protect his face. The kid who was to take the kick was a genetic freak — a head and a half taller than any other player, and I’d considered just leaving the goal open. Sure enough, the kid just whales into the kick, a laser-straight bullet right at our goalie. Fortunately, it was lower than his hands and face. Fortunately it was even lower than his groin. The ball absolutely buried itself in his thighs. As the crowd of adults yiked in sympathy the ball just stuck there in his thighs like some kind of remora. Then, quietly, it just popped out at our goalies feet. His thighs looked like a Japanese flag.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:08 am
A couple comments here:
(1) The notion that an inferior team can “just win with defense” makes no sense to me. Defense is half the game. If you bunker down, you’re going to be subject to immense offensive pressure. If you can withstand that pressure, then you are a good team.
(2) Matt, a major factor that you’re ignoring is that in basketball, there are only five players on the court, and the best player can touch the ball every time down the floor on the offensive end. So uber-talented players exert a greater influence in basketball than they can in other sports. This is the converse of what people have rightly pointed out as leading to competitive balance in baseball – the fact that a great pitcher takes the mound only once every five games. In soccer, you have 11 players, and one player can only do so much to dominate a game by himself. And in football, you’ve got 22 guys out there.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Some of you are missing the point of youth soccer.
#1 Have fun.
#2 Learn the rules of the game.
#3 Learn skills to enhance ones individual performance and to play as a team.
I’ve seen people coach to win way too much in youth soccer (U-10 and below). Sure, by playing the fast kid most of the game and giving him carte blanche to run over the whole field might make your team win, but it will not develop the rest of the kids on your team. There might be a future MLS or EPL player on your field who gets turned off by watching the coaches son hog the ball all game. Teach the kids to play in position and to work on skills. Havinging 10 kids in a scrum chasing the ball around the pitch is not helping.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
[...] Matt Yglesias is working for the enemy. [...]
June 26th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
I have done a fair amount of internet betting on trading sites in the last five years and I can tell you nothing is harder than betting on soccer. My bank account is everlasting proof of the game’s competitiveness.
Congratulations to the US soccer team. Spain and its best club have been awesome over the last twelve months. This is no small acheivement.
Finally I have never understood America’s socialist/communist sports system.However I find it more incredulous that right wingers who take such a free market line never talk about it.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
And all this time, I thought the problem with soccer was the Offsides rules. Now, I know it’s a plot to destroy capitalism, … like the evil, collectivist metric system.
— G.K.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
The neocon has an interesting theory but I find the simplest explanations are usually the best: Americans are all “meh” to soccer because football’s better.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Actually, there was a discussion that because soccer knows no salary caps, superstars play in the richest clubs, largest media markets and/or toys of billionaire owners.
But in cup gains there are always some upsets. Very good players do amazing stuff that succeeds in placing the ball where they want quite a bit more often than the “normal players”. Once a team reaches certain level, it can keep the score very low, and then the role of “sheer lack”.
What makes soccer VERY BROADLY competitive is the rule that two teams are eliminated every year from the top league. And two top teams from lesser leagues replace them. This is an extremely big deal for their fans, so you get a lot of “important games” with teams that are quite even, and fans are going absolute bonkers.
Matt would appreciate a view of a train load (yes, train!) of fans, clad in the colors of their team, singing together (and swilling some beer too).
Last thought: the idea that a municipality should have a large civic building for watching sports, and fans going absolutely nut is at the roots of our civilization, and these are not
“Judeo-Christian” roots.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Americans are all “meh” to soccer because football’s better.
Football is fucking boring. Way too low action-to-elapsed-time ratio, for one thing.
It’s popular with Americans because it involves artificially pumped-up behemoths waging metaphorical battle, so it appeals to Americans’ insecurity about their own strength.
June 26th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Edit: with low score, the role of “sheer luck” increases, and with high score, “the law of large numbers” is decreasing the role of luck.
If someone has a die that always rolls 5, you have 1/3 chance of scoring better, or getting even if you roll your honest die. But if both of you roll, say, 20 times, and you add the score, your chances of getting better or even are very slim.
June 26th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Excuse me but did anyone here actually go and read Gary Schmitt’s article. The only thing, and he does use the word “hooey”, that could be construed as a negative is that he argues that in spite of almost thirty years of beating the drum for the popularity of the world’s sport participation at all levels has remained the same. And major league soccer has the live spectators and the viewership of those bass fishing programs on Versus.
And for all those who immediately point out that any green area being filled by soccer players of many levels of skill it might be wise to note that most are immigrants and their sons and daughter are more likely to be practicing some of those exceptional sports that marked the difference between first and second generation immigrants since Plimouth Plantation.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:08 am
Man this is tripe.
Football LEAGUES are always won by the best teams. Its knockout tournaments where upsets are significant. Just like the NFL playoffs.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
How do you play a game with your hand for 95% of the time and call it Football?
Next, if you want to see ebb and flow…watch any of the Derbys or the real flight football. Arsenal vs Man U., AC vs Inter; Barcelona vs Madrid; Liverpool Chelsea.
I live in the US and I only wath international football – not the game played with the hand…I watch Rugby instead.
June 27th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Pro-soccer hasn’t caught on in America because Americans aren’t interested in any sport where non-Americans might win (Canadian baseball and hockey players excepted).
Witness car racing, America has it’s own ridiculous car racing rules because they don’t even want their engineers (supposedly the best) to compete with European or Japanese engineers. The Olympics aren’t a big deal in the US for the same reason.
July 2nd, 2009 at 11:53 am
Car racing is ridiculous, I agree. Here is an interesting article about how soccer could be improved in the United States: http://www.mindreign.com/en/mindshare/Sports/The-Problem-with-Soccer/sl40763392bp300cpp10pn1.html