July 2010
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A classic old-fashioned All-American anti-soccer...
It’s awfully hot out in Las Vegas, where Tim Dahlberg pines for the good old days when Americans rooted for sports that were, well, American:
“We’ve seen this all before, beginning in 1994 when the World Cup was played in the U.S. and a cute dog named Stryker was the mascot. Tens of thousands of kids around the country already were playing the game, so FIFA figured that giving...
June 2010
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Out of the 'burbs, and on to the streets!
Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post nabs what ails us on the Elysian pitches of America — it’s the Elysian pitches, natch:
“The suspicion in soccer circles is that the American game is played too much in comfortable suburban leagues, and not enough in the streets. A great American star is out there somewhere, in a neighborhood blackening with soot, playing from one crack in the...
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Those selfish groovy cat American soccer-lovers
ESPN.com’s Jeff McGregor assesses America’s experience at the World Cup, and wonders if soccer means anything to most of the huddled masses, and if it ever will:
“Weirdly, while the rest of us struggle, some of the original American fans, the deep believers and postwar pre-modern footie zealots don’t want to let the game go. They want to keep it for themselves, keep it...
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What the World Cup is all about
Luke O’Brien’s last U.S. dispatch from South Africa sums up the ecstasy and the agony of a very flawed team that nonetheless provided few dull moments:
“There’s been so much palaver in recent days about the ascendant American squad, so much of it fueled by the feel-good hype that stems from several miraculous near-losses against sardine-size teams. Some of it is accurate....
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You can have your Vanilla Yanks
Ken Silverstein isn’t letting up, USA footyheads. Are you going to lie down and take this?
“So I’ll admit, all you people now sending me gloating emails — that’s OK, I can take it as well as give it out — the U.S. deserved to advance, no matter how lousy the competition and how lamely it performed.
“Still, cheering for the U.S. team at soccer is like rooting for Killers to win...
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It's just the American in him
CNN’s Roland Martin is just too hip for you soccer/footy types to fall for the hype:
“Every year I hear fans say that ‘it’s just around the corner’ or ‘this is the year’ or ‘the moment has arrived’ when soccer is accepted along the lines of football, baseball and basketball. To be honest, even the National Hockey League has suffered...
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It's the World Cup, stupid
The navel-gazing is non-stop! What does all this euphoria over footy really truly mean?
David Whitley of FanHouse thinks you soccer nuts are getting carried away with yourselves, especially since it was Al-freaking-geria out there, and not Brazil:
“The last minute or so of Wednesday’s match was thrilling. The preceding 90 minutes were soccer.
“In their euphoria, the...
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Curb your soccer enthusiasm, America
In the most pompous link we here at IIMKI have unearthed, the historian and author Michael Mandelbaum wants you to know you shouldn’t get too excited over this World Cup thing. You see, he wrote about all this stuff in a book before.
Not only is soccer unnatural to the American psyche, but the way the World Cup settles matches in the knockout stage ought to be truly repulsive to our tastes...
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Leave your ideologies at the door, lads!
Bravo once again for Stefan Fatsis, who is to American soccer blogging what Landon Donovan has become at this World Cup:
“This is where soccer fearmongers on the right and worrywarts on the left are wrong. The apparent concern among certain conservatives is that soccer equals socialism and our personal bogeyman, immigration. Lock your doors, suburban U8 players of America! Over at The...
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You're going to have to keep watching
Go away soccer! Go away! Go away! Go away!
Why won’t you just go away?
“Unlike the bickering French and English, and petulant U.S. pro athletes in other sports, the U.S. soccer players have a tremendous team spirit, few egos, and their never-say-die attitude makes them a lovable bunch. From Tim Howard to Landon Donovan to Michael Bradley to Jozy Altidore to Jay DeMerit and Steve...
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WatchCan’t imagine why anyone would ever think soccer’s going to catch on in America. Yawn. Give me the Royals-Rangers already.
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A message to whingeing Yanks on the Summer...
Above the border, Canadian footy blogger Richard Whittall is just as fed up with the American Exceptionalists as your hostess here at IIMKI:
“What I want to tell you is that if you’re American and you don’t care about the World Cup, I really don’t give a fat steaming shit about it. The apoplexy of those not in the soccer know asking what it will take for America to really,...
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“I just don’t think Americans can get down with how subjective this sport...”
– Free Darko
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Shhhh! Just don't tell the doofus Luddites
Stefan Fatsis, writing for Slate from South Africa, gets invited to Sunil Gulati’s suite in Johannesburg and goes all sports biz on the prospects of the U.S. getting another World Cup, and is most fascinated by the palace intrigue:
“Does the combination of business and political firepower make the United States a lock? Not by a long shot. In international sports, it’s not always...
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But you must know how much they loathe it so
A sportswriting friend who’s a red-blooded ‘Murkhan sports fan and also written extensively on the UConn women’s hoops team and the WNBA notices the connection between raggin’ on the ladies and the footy:
“The negative reaction to the World Cup should prompt soccer fans and women’s basketball fans to stage a group hug. Women’s basketball fans endure the...
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I got your anecdotal evidence right here
Ethan Epstein of True/Slant is in a huff about claims that soccer is the most popular sport in the world:
“A cursory glance at an an atlas will call to mind numerous nations where soccer is not the most popular sport: in Canada, hockey reigns supreme. In Australia, its Australian Rules Football – a game decidedly different than soccer. In Finland, it’s pesäpallo, a form of Finnish baseball....
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'The World Cup is pain, princess'
The princess being Sports Illustrated helmetball writer Peter King, who on off-season dispatch to South Africa, is shocked — shocked! — that a bad referee’s call not only stands, but isn’t adequately explained to satisfy his American outrage.
An African blogger now living in California takes delicious note of it all:
“What makes me really happy, however, is all you...
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NYT's pointy heads on that soccerball thing
David Brooks understands it, while not really revealing whether he approves:
“Soccer is a sport that rewards neurotic creativity. Many of the greatest players have been marginally insane. They see a situation unfold before them and they respond in unpredictable ways, not straightforward ones. Their neurons are just a bit off. I guess you could say that about some of their fans, too. But it’s...
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The joy (and agony) of 1-1
Brian Phillips tries to explain to his countrymen what a draw in the World Cup is all about:
“The existential conflict of soccer in America, at least once you’re invested to a certain degree, is that we want to be good but we also want something to celebrate. So we put the team in a weird bubble that lets us be sentimentally happy about them (we went up 2-0 on Brazil!), but that also means...
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I mean it, I really don't care . . . OK?
Real Clear Sports’ Tim Joyce wants you to know how proud he is that he isn’t interested in the World Cup, so he wrote a column about it:
“If I had to attach a season to America, summer would immediately come to mind. And summer means baseball in all its aspects - lazy, occasionally thrilling, often slow, long, tedious and full of magical epiphanies. I enjoy the soothing...
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We just really don't care, we really don't
Slate’s Daniel Gross psychoanalyzes his fellow Americans, those poor lonely old souls, who puzzlingly pay attention to the World Cup while he and the other enlightened elites who write for hip national publications happily don’t:
“Because of the nation’s historical incompetence at international soccer, Americans generally look at the World Cup the same way they look at...
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A hopeful legacy for the 2010 World Cup
That it will have such a breakthrough in America that no longer will publications like The Atlantic, which are geared toward liberal cosmopolitans, make the quadrennial point about soccer being the sport of liberal cosmopolitans:
“When you consider the timing of this trend, perhaps the adoption of soccer was a rejection of Bush/Cheney 2000s provincialism. If Karl Rove kept the I-4 corridor...
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No soccer scandals, please, we're Yanks
Shouldn’t soccer’s flip side — the corrupt, grubby truth about the World Cup, global money and fan violence — be shown to hip American fans in all their unvarnished glory?
On the eve of the U.S. vs. England match, David Rothkopf argues in favor of just all that:
“Soccer has all the chaos, violence, scandal, corruption and controversy that have made other popular...
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WatchIn vintage Bill O’Reilly Ugly American style, Stephen Colbert takes issue with soccer in general and the World Cup in particular.
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Forget about college soccer already
I’m all in favor of overhauling Title IX and think it has had an adverse affect on male athletes in some sports, including soccer.
But the leading group devoted to Title IX reform deserves a yellow card for cynically issuing this study on the eve of the World Cup while trying to make a fledgling case for college soccer’s role in American player development.
The limited nature of...
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ESPN's World Cup experiment
Not only is the score crawl disappearing from the bottom of ESPN screens during the World Cup, but the Worldwide Leader is attempting to show the sport to an American audience on the world’s terms … to some degree:
“Starting with the opening match between host South Africa and Mexico, the World Cup happens to be the biggest sporting event on Earth. ESPN, which for the first time...
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'Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong...
That’s what Heather O’Reilly of the U.S. women’s national team and the Philadelphia Independence of the Women’s Professional Soccer league says at the end of a Q & A about the future of women’s soccer.
It’s been a tough spring for WPS, which lost 2009 regular season champion Los Angeles Sol and St. Louis Athletica. Both teams abruptly folded due to...
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How to teach the children well, the Ajax way
The New York Times magazine commissioned author Michael Sokolove to visit the Ajax youth academy to see “How a Soccer Star is Made,” and the writer couldn’t help making repeated, inevitable comparisons to the fragmented youth soccer system in America:
“Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations...
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'They've got soccer pubs in America!'
The AP visits soccer-friendly bars in Milwaukee and Chicago and discovers actual fansgearing up for the World Cup who aren’t rioting or anything:
“In here, you can say the weirdest, nastiest things to each other, and after the ref blows the whistle, we’re done. I can put my arm around the guy, ‘Hey, way to go, good game’ and buy him a beer and we’re done. It’s a weird dynamic that you don’t...
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'If America learns to let talent grow'
British soccer journalist extraordinaire Rob Hughes visits New York and examines America’s cultural soccer divide. He locates the line between the rigid northern European athletic style exported from his homeland and the creative flair permitted on the Hispanic sandlots but not embraced in the U.S. national team structure:
“That freedom starts in infancy, and has to be indulged. One...