Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating study
Review: If you're not enamored of academic language, consider this fair warning: It's loaded with it. But this book is one of those rare cases in which wading through the jargon is worth it. The two scholars involved use the tools of the academy to great effect here, explaining the role of sports in creating an American identity. American football and baseball weren't blatant attempts at nation-building (unlike, say, Irish football and hurling), but they served that purpose quite well.

This is indeed a powerful read for non-soccer fans as well. Ivory tower-dwellers drawn by the "American Exceptionalism" part of the title will get an eye-opening look at sports and American life.

Oh -- and soccer fans will consider it a good read as well, especially if you're curious about the game's history in the U.S.

Rating:
Summary: For the couch potato with the active mind
Review: If you're puzzled about why the country that dominates every other aspect of popular culture -- from fast food through Hollywood movies to rock 'n' roll -- lags behind the rest of the globe when it comes to the world's most popular mass sport, this is the book to read.

Andy Markovits dispenses in short order with all the cliches you've heard the sports pundits offer up by way of "explanation" for why soccer has not (yet) caught on in the U.S.: It's NOT because Americans are impatient with low-scoring games, or because kicking a ball down a field lacks strategy or skill, or because there's something about soccer that's incompatible with the American "character."

The real explanation has to do with the history of mass sports -- how marketers in both Europe and America took games played by gentlemen on college campuses or in local amateur clubs and turned them into popular, professional competition for paying (and, since television, watching) fans. It's not the "soccer moms" and Little League dads who determine whether a sport takes off: it's the franchises who organize consumption for the couch potatoes.

Markovits shows how the market for mass sports was already carved up among baseball, American football, and basketball when soccer tried to take root here. He doesn't downplay the growth areas that do exist for soccer in the U.S. -- in women's competition (where the U.S. leads), in colleges, and among new immigrants. But he's realistic about what it would take (such as a US team making it to the finals in a World Cup match) for soccer to break into America's already crowded "sports space."

One of the great things about this book is the author's enthuasiasm for ALL manner of sports. Andy Markovits is a big-time soccer fan, but he also loves to watch NFL and Big Ten football, NBA and NCAA basketball, the Yankees and the World Series. Because he understands what's exciting and graceful about all these games, he's able to dismiss all the anti-American and anti-European prejudices that dominate discussions about comparing sports.

In this book, you'll not only learn about the history of soccer; you'll also learns some things that Ken Burns didn't get around to telling you about baseball, or about why we can "blame Harvard" for writing the rules that made American football differ from its English cousins (rugby and "Association football" or soccer).

Rating:
Summary: Excusing greed and commercialism
Review: Perhaps this book is simply the self-indulgence of the authors, but in reality it shouldn't take more than half a page to explain the two reasons why soccer is a failure in this country:-
1) Money. Soccer is a game, not a collection of commercials with some chest-beating in between - a pure sport, an actual contest.
2) Americans become fanatical during play-off season for all of the purely American "sports". After the finals, the victors are constantly referred to by public and media alike as "World Champions", well I guess a couple of sports may offer the outside chance of a Canadian team emerging victorious. If one were to follow soccer, there is the chance that the victor would not be an American team, and that is simply not acceptable.

So instead of reading a book searching for palatable excuses for the failure of Soccer to rise to its deserved popularity in the U.S., simply accept the truth - greed and flag waving are more important facets of democracy than peoples choice ever will be.

By the way - it's not soccer - it's FOOTBALL

Rating:
Summary: Why Is There No Soccer in the US
Review: Review of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism by Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman, Princeton University Press, 2001. This remarkable book asks the question "why is there no soccer in the United States." Immediately you respond, "OF COURSE THERE IS!!! My kids play it all the time!!" Markovits and Hellerman would respond, however, that, yes, soccer is played in the US but it is not felt, dreamt, and lived. Fathers and mothers are not drawing on their own wealth of experience in teaching their kids how to play soccer, as they do with other sports; "pick-up games" only infrequently involve soccer; it is simply not part of the texture of daily life, as is checking the box scores of your favorite baseball team. In this book, the authors explain why the US is so different in its "sports space," as the authors call it, from almost all other countries - where soccer, generally known as football, is dominant. More broadly, Offside also offers one of the most interesting attempts to understand the spread of sports internationally. Not only do the authors' question the argument about the globalization of everything but they assert that we need to understand a given country's history and even more so its sports history to grasp how its sports space is configured. Thus, in attempting to explain "why there is no soccer in the US," they discuss the role that powerful organizations have played in cementing baseball, basketball, and football (and to a lesser extent, hockey) into the US sports space during the key 1870-1930 industrialization period and how difficult it has been for other endeavors to gain a strong foothold. Markovits and Hellerman's integration of media, political, and economic factors into this analysis and their complex comparative design (comparisons of sports, countries, time periods) provide us with an excellent model to follow and engage in our further studies of the internationalization (or not!) of sports. In short, this is an excellent, comprehensive account of how and why the "world's game" has not become a part of the American way of life. Drawing on many sources of evidence, ranging historically and cross-nationally, the authors have masterfully told an innovative and original story about US sports.

Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking & relevant
Review: The authors have done a remarkable job exploring the reasons why soccer hasn't caught on in the US as anything more than a child's activity and a fledgling sport for women. Many of their arguments make sense when applied to other ways in which American culture has developed differently from that of other industrialized nations. That's especially important for Americans to understand now that we've been forced to recognize that there is a whole world out there we've been ignoring. The authors are careful to point out that even if we don't ever embrace soccer as a part of our culture, we need to deal with the fact that billions of other people do and that's not "wrong."

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable, but flawed
Review: This book's purpose is to explain why Americans haven't taken to the sport of soccer. The authors characterize this as one of many ways that America is exceptional, that is, different from other countries. Their explanation relies upon their premise that all American exceptionalisms -- all the ways in which America is different -- can be explained by appealing to the same factors.

I don't find this a bit convincing. The authors begin with an explanation of why socialism never took hold in this country, and it seems to me that the reasons they give have absolutely nothing to do with the reason why soccer hasn't taken hold. The most important reason they list, the bourgeoisification of America, just doesn't seem to have anything to do with soccer's absence or presence in America. It is true that when they explain this (on p. 9), they go on to add that bourgeois America prides itself on being of European origin at the same time that it believes it has surpassed Europe's culture. But I can imagine Americans thinking themselves superior to Europe (and the rest of the world) even if America hadn't become so bourgeois.

To put all this in other words, the authors seem to carry some excess intellectual baggage. They adhere to concepts of the old left, which talks about the bourgeoisie, and try to force soccer's absence in this country into a Marxist conceptual framework. Meanwhile, they utterly ignore the concepts of the new left, of the postmodernists, who talk about Otherness. The absence of soccer in this country seems due to nothing other than the belief of most Americans that our sports are superior, simply because they are OUR sports, and that the sports of foreigners are inferior, simply because they are THEIR sports. But the authors seem completely ignorant of postmodern writings.

I admit that this book is chock-full of important information about soccer. Some of it I hadn't seen before, even though I've tried to read everything about soccer. Still, there are some lapses here that are hard to comprehend. It is beyond understanding that one would talk about the old NASL without talking about the Minnesota Kicks. OK, I was a Kicks fan back then, and I am biased. But I always thought of teams like the Kicks and the teams in Seattle, Portland, and Tampa Bay (and before them, San Jose) as representing a more substantial part of the league than the Cosmos. The Cosmos drew huge crowds, but not until the middle of Pele's last season. Moreover, they had many other stars besides Pele as well as a potentially huge fan base. It is not surprising that they (eventually) drew huge crowds. In Minnesota and other places, there were no stars, and there was a much smaller population to draw on, and they still drew huge crowds. The Kicks had an AVERAGE attendance of over 30,000 fans in both 1977 and 1978. One can understand when people who hate soccer ignore these figures, but why should people who like soccer ignore them?

Finally, I do wish the authors had been a little more skeptical of the claim that Michael Jordan was well-known throughout the world. I've asked foreign students from Africa about this, and they deny it. The evidence the authors use (p. 323, n. 38) consists of headlines in various foreign newspapers. But they also provide evidence that the World Cup can grab headlines here in the U.S., even though just a small fraction of our population has any interest in it. Shouldn't we use the same criterion for judging these headlines? When a newspaper day in and day out ignores basketball and one day has a big headline about it, isn't it reasonable to assume that most of their readers don't really care?

I've come down somewhat hard on this book, but I'm still giving it four stars out of five. Anyone who takes soccer seriously ought to read it, although I think they should also be aware of its shortcomings.