The Pain And Purpose Of Soccer

In the wake of the most sickening end to a match I've ever experienced I've just spent what should've been a pleasant summer evening and restful night agonizing over whether the infrequent highs of soccer are worth the incessant gut-punching lows, whether there might be better uses for the back nine of my life than supporting a professional club that can't compete because its owner is only the 215th-richest man on earth and a fledgling national team making next-to-indiscernible progress in a nation that largely doesn't care. US media such as Slate and NBC are putting their best optimistic lipstick on the pig the US men set loose on us with weekend-warrior-level mistakes at critical moments Sunday. But if you're enough of a soccer fan to read a blog as specialized as this, you know the truth: The US is sitting with three unjustified points from being pushed around by Ghana and a point from a shadow Portugal whom a half-decent World Cup squad would've put away long before Michael Bradley's fatigued final flub. We might well go on to the next stage, but we don't deserve to.

“They deserved to win, but in soccer ‘deserve’ doesn’t get you anything," commented Landon Donovan after the match, illustrating a reason Americans have been slow to warm to the sport. It's a statistical fact that soccer is more random and prone to luck than other sports played by large numbers of humans, due to the rarity of goals relative to the high number of other events in a match. This clashes with the American narrative of skill and work making all things possible, of getting what you earn. Our native sports go to great lengths to neutralize the winds of fortune and generate decisive judgments, notably our national sport of baseball, in which teams play an absurd 162 games to measure a season, playoff series of multiple games to further winnow the best at the end, and limitless extra time in each game so that draws are impossible. Soccer fans are mocked routinely in America for calling a draw a "good result." As an early-departed soccer-hating friend of mine was fond of saying, "There is only one good result! Why play if no one wins?" Many American fans would rather go home with a loss than a draw, which may be why Americans can't feel Sunday's draw as anything but a loss.

Yet the rarity of scoring and the cruelty of fortune are what make soccer more dramatic, tragic, operatic than other sports. I've supported the NFL's most historic and decorated team for as long as I can remember, half a century. I've never seen a Green Bay Packers touchdown produce the outpouring that either US goal did yesterday where I was watching. The Highbury Pub on a main thoroughfare in Milwaukee was so insanely raucous that TV cameras showed up to film it, with the Newcastle regulars as always near the epicenter, all over our nightly news. Would that soccer fandom weren't still so much a novelty where we live. But that novelty, among other things, seems to set US soccer fans on a different plane than fans of purely American sport. Which, for me at least, is the point.

The future remains bright for US soccer. Among younger people the survey numbers are reversed from the population as a whole; traditional American sports show signs of wear and soccer is seen as hip. On the field, I believe that we will win...eventually. Let's face it: We're two or three World Cups from legitimacy. We're still patching with paper citizens. I'm going to be an old man before the US is a soccer country, if I'm lucky enough to see it at all. And I'm not counting on ever seeing Newcastle United turn into a contender, soccer economics and Mike Ashley being what they are.

But if I were in it for the highs alone this blog would be called I'm Glad I'm A Plastic Red Devil. Results are fleeting. What's permanent is below. This is what I would miss if I were to swear off soccer, much as I'm tempted at the moment. May our shared sufferings and joys bind us ever closer.

  

Comments

[OutOfTOONer]

We have that U.S. optimism that those across the Atlantic culturally don't seem to share. We are not mature enough to be jaded. Go USMNT and always the Toon. One day Ashley will sell!! There's that U.S, optimism anyway.

[Yeager]

Surprisingly pessimistic - if you had told me after the groups were drawn that the USMNT was going to play a MEANINGFUL third game in their group, I would have been excited.

[Bob]

Obviously the way it went down is the problem. Quote from Fabian Johnson: “We’re kind of sad, I think. If somebody had told us that we were going to have 4 points after those two games, I think we would take it. But at this point, we are a little bit disappointed. We’ve got to look forward.” And Portugal will have to raise its game to stay within a couple of goals of Ghana. So no, I'm not optimistic. But I'm not the soccer smarty on this blog so let's hope I'm wrong.