It’s obvious that us Europeans like soccer and the World Cup more than Americans do, but which sports have culturally settled where is partly a matter of simple historical circumstance. As Milton Friedman said, in a crisis the solutions are found among the ideas already lying around. “Association football” – shortening the term to “soccer” was actually a British invention – was codified in England at just the time that the average working man, as a result of the increased wealth of the industrial revolution, started to have the free time to play or follow games. Even today, the standard starting time of a professional match is 3 p.m. on a Saturday, reflecting the half-day off that the newly wealthy 19th century allowed laborers.
The quintessential American game is baseball, also codified at about the same time, partly just because of historical happenstance.
There are some other issues though. Soccer has spread through the world in a manner in which the major American games – football, hockey, baseball, and basketball – simply haven’t. My personal guess as to why, a rather odd one I admit, is physique.
You don’t have to be any particular size or shape to play soccer, while specific physiques are very important in at least two of those American games. This also speaks, to me at least, to that wealth from the industrial revolution. The U.S. became much richer, much earlier, than almost all of Europe. Where I am now in Portugal it’s really only this generation which is now reaching their genetically possible height. Their grandparents, those in their 70s now, are often 5-feet tall. That’s no exaggeration, it’s entirely common to see women under that height around here. The same was true a generation earlier during my childhood in southern Italy.
People are going to prefer a game which it is physically possible for them to play.
There is one more part to this, though. I doubt that soccer really speaks to an important part of the American psyche. It isn’t true that all Americans are obsessed with winning, nor that Europeans don’t care. But the one great finding in all of the social sciences is that there’s a nub of truth at the heart of every stereotype. It wouldn’t have arisen unless there were. And it’s true that Americans regard victory with more admiration than perhaps we Europeans do.
This is something of a problem with soccer given how often likely it is that after 90 minutes of play the result is a scoreless draw. This isn’t as bad as cricket, another sport that doesn’t really work in the U.S., where a Test series (two major nations playing the full version of the game) takes 25 days of play and the most likely result is a draw.
There is, among soccer aficionados, an appreciation of how the game is played rather than a pure concentration upon results. Again, obviously, this is not total on either side of the Atlantic, the concentration upon style, or result. But having lived on both sides, I would say that there’s a different emphasis. Ironically, it was an American, talking about football, who put this into poetry, Grantland Rice:
For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes – not that you won or lost –
But how you played the Game.
With soccer, the outcome is often more boring, so we thus concentrate a bit more upon the how rather than the result.
It would be entirely possible to conclude that us Europeans are all just boring wimps using the same facts above. Which, if we used only soccer as our example might be fair.
But now allow me to introduce you to the other winter game we play, rugby: that’s full contact football without pads or helmets. It’s not as dangerous as it seems actually. In 20 years of playing as a bad amateur, I only dislocated a shoulder twice. Unfortunately, it was the same shoulder twice in one week. We can still be boring, fools even. But wimps, not so much.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
