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 When the Titans or the Jaguars and the Rams or the Buccaneers have toughed it out on the floor of the Super Bowl the arguable long term winners may not be the fans in Tennessee or Tampa Bay or Jacksonville or St. Louis or, even if an encounter worthy of the adjective has taken place, fans nationwide. The real winners, the smart money might say, are the sponsors and the ad-men. What a coast to coast shop window!
Well, yes, so far as that goes. But the head count shows that it doesn’t go so very far. Put alongside the TV audiences that soccer’s big games command, the Super Bowl is minor league. In 1994 the Finals stage of soccers World Cup — a genuine World Series, incidentally — was staged in the U.S.A. The host nation was involved. Even so, an eve of tournament Harris poll indicated that only 25% of Americans knew of the event and only 15% intended tuning in to any of the 52 matches. Worldwide, however, they were beamed to 188 countries. The Brazil-Italy Final was watched by an audience of 1.2 billion. The aggregate viewing figure for the month long tournament was 32.1 billion. That’s not small beer, Budweiser. Hardly surprisingly, there seems to have been an invisible codicil to The Declaration of Independence: whereof we hereby resolve to reject those pastimes most pleasant to such subjects maintaining allegiance to the Prince. But while (except where implanted in out and out colonies as the subtlest instrument of British colonial control) cricket has largely failed to "take", the soccer ball rolled on right around the un-American world. The reason isn’t hard to seek. Pele, soccer’s Muhammad Ali, called soccer “the beautiful game.” The ball at his own feet, it certainly was and the beauty that the Brazilian genius was saluting is the games magical blend of simplicity and complexity. On the one hand minimal (but logical) rules, an elemental appeal to the instincts of combatant and juggler, a minimum of paraphernalia. On the other an almost infinite range of tactical variations, of combinations between set plays and improvisation, of balances between technical finesse, speed, power and physical bravery. Soccer gives us encounters where size — truly — is not important. Players small enough to ride in the Kentucky Derby can mix it on a level playing field with those tall enough to cut it with the Celtics. All amid as extreme a swirl of tactics. One team will slick the ball across the grass with the one-touch precision of hockey players. Another will hoof it high and long into the open spaces its power runners are straining to reach first. Confident in the ball-winning bite of its tackling, yet another team is a counter-punching fighter suckering the opponent forward. But this one is an in-your-face boxing opposite, pressing forward non-stop to smother all technical guile out of the opposition.The stamina requirement is awesome. Of mind as well as body. Over the ninety minutes the game usually goes to the fleet of mind rather than foot. If football at its best is classic Duke Ellington — sublime soloists soaring aloft from the ground base of the tightest pre-arrangement — soccer is be-bop. Charlie Parker and Bud Powell on a day when they were talking to each other. A brilliant soloist ghosting past defenders may scintillate all day; a duo, a trio, a quartet may repeatedly wiseacre the ball the length and breadth of the field; ten outfielders may overlappingly give and go until they seem like twenty. Hidden under the fluid interchanges all teams play to the basic shape, the overall game plan in their heads. But the result will probably hang on the exploitation of an utterly unplanned split-second moment. Soccer is existentialism with muscles. Naturally, as the be-bop analogy inescapably suggests, it can all go horribly wrong. Watching bad soccer is as tediously painful as watching absolute beginners attempt tennis. But anyone who has taken part in a game, no matter how basic the level, knows that it possesses that characteristic of all sports worth playing. Your surge into space this time is consummately judged; your team-mates pass is this once exquisitely inch perfect; your timing with instep or forehead is as true. Thunk! Yes! That one perfect six iron to the flag — the classic back-hand stop volley — on the strength of such rarely vouchsafed moments of grace you can survive the countless foul-ups still to come. "Beautiful game." Decades before, in the land of its codification, to Pele's blue-collar predecessors, it was "the people's game." Because cheap. All you needed was a ball and a halfways horizontal playing surface. Saturday afternoons men from the pits, steel mills and shipyards (soccer is an urban game) could express the self-respect their brutal toil had planted in them.The men without work could seek to claim the self-respect their skill and bravery might now earn. Over the past two decades "the people's game" has increasingly become "the huckster's." Across Europe, much of South America and in Japan soccer has taken the big bucks baseball route. The logic is shamelessly simplistic. Buy superstars and a top coach and you will have a winning team. Winning teams dominate the competitions TV wants to screen. Now the door is open upon TV rights, sponsorship deals, pay-to-view. The world is your mall especially if, as with Berlusconi in Italy, Murdoch everywhere, you set about owning not only the station and channel but (a piece of) the team as well and sit down on both sides of the negotiating table. Today agented players stalk the world demanding kings' ransoms for short-term contracts. And getting them. Chelsea, a major London club, feel comfortable fielding a team minus a single Britisher. Other sides buy inferior players from far away places chiefly to open up new markets. Crystal Palace, a minor London club, now sell replica shirts in China and their Certainly, synthetic though the process is, some wonderful sides have been assembled. But meanwhile the hometown talent is ignored. To develop that youngster will take several years. And no guarantees. Better to buy the latest Colombian international fresh on the market and hope his knee holds up a couple of gravy train years… Sadly, its service industry culture eroding self-respect, the developed worlds vast couch potato public like their soccer homogenized up there on the screen next to the pizza and the sixpack. Ignoring their local team they obtain their vicarious kicks obsessively identifying with the elite club the other end of the country and the remote. Ironically — at 76 rpm the Founding Fathers may be spinning in their graves — the best preservation of soccer's grass roots could lie within the US. High school soccer, women’s teams — the Soccer Industry Council of America has calculated that close to 20 million Americans play the game. When the Dodgers next buy a Japanese pitcher, it may be soccer, free from Vegas and Wall Street and Madison Avenue hype, that reminds the hometown kid that a game, any game, is finally beautiful not as a hyped product but because of the challenges its inherent logic and technical demands ask. Rollerball in the Goldfish Bowl will be less than beautiful. |
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sponsors have a line into the greatest customer base on earth.
