SOCCER--NOT AMERICAN AND NOT CONSERVATIVE :

The Soccer Gap : What conservatives are missing. (Robert Ziegler, May 31, 2002, National Review)

The most-watched sporting event in the world has begun, and most of my fellow conservatives in America are going to miss it.

While some of you no doubt are thinking that the Super Bowl and World Series are both months away, the event I'm referring to is the World Cup of Soccer, watched by an estimated 3.5 billion people around the world, including millions in the United States, almost all of whom are apparently liberals.

As a movement conservative and rabid fan of the beautiful game (that's soccer, by the way), I find myself as something of a de facto missionary for the sport to the political and cultural right. What is it about soccer that makes it (in America) the nearly exclusive domain of liberal sports fans? [...]

The main drawback to soccer for "traditional Americans" is that it is a game requiring some patience to appreciate. Baseball, the thinking man's game, has been affected by this national attention-span deficit to some degree... [...]

Americans have typically come up with their own games to dominate. We invented football (even taking "soccer's" proper name and redefining it to an almost Orwellian degree), basketball, and baseball and made those our major sports. To the degree that these are played and/or followed elsewhere, they are American exports. While baseball is popular in Japan and parts of Latin America, and basketball in Europe and Australia, they are still "American" games first and foremost. Soccer will never be that. In fact, American football in part began, as legend has it, when a game of "soccer" became too boring, prompting a player to pick up the ball and begin running with it, and the rest is gridiron "pointyball" history.

Golf and tennis are also "foreign" in their origins, but they are not linked as closely to their international roots as soccer, and at any rate already had made deep inroads in the American cultural establishment by the early 20th century.

Mr. Zeigler seems to have made a significant mistake here by not analyzing the politics of the game itself. The real reasons conservatives hate soccer appear to be unsurprisingly related to the fact that it simply isn't conservative.

Here, for instance, is the great Russell Kirk's list of the qualities that characterize the Conservative Mind :

(1) Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. [...]

(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. [...]

(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at leveling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation. [...]

(4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not economic progress. Separate property from private possession and liberty is erased.

(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters and calculators.' Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite, for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

(6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces.

If we put soccer through this mill we find that :

(1) Divine Intent : when He made us in His image, he obviously intended that we use our hands.

(2) Variety and Mystery : In soccer you chase the ball--kick the ball--chase it again--score once in awhile--start over. So where's the variety and mystery? every game is identical.

(3) Equality : soccer is popular in schools precisely because it requires no skill. Every doofus on the school yard can run around and kick a ball. It's no surprise all the socialist countries love the game.

(4) Property : you can't even pick the stinkin' ball up so there's no such thing as possession. Even the fans don't get to keep the foul balls. All you really need to know about soccer is that little kids don't bring their mitts to the games.

(5) Tradition : American soccer tradition, is an oxymoron.

(6) Change and innovation : give it another two or three hundred years and maybe we'll accept the game. Meanwhile, the Red Sox are in first and all's right with the world.

In the words of Albert Jay Nock :

As a man of reason and logic, I am all for reform; but as the unworthy inheritor of a great tradition, I am unalterably against it. I am forever with Falkland, the true martyr of the Civil War,--one of the very greatest among the great spirits of whom England has ever been so notoriously noteworthy,--as he stood facing Hampden and Pym. 'Mr. Speaker,' he said, 'when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.'

Mr. Zeigler proposes a change that is not necessary.

UPDATE :
Kevin James has posted an excellent response in defense of soccer from a Kirkian perspective.

UPDATE II :
WHO WANTS IT? :
We're Stealing Their Game (Robert J. Samuelson, June 4, 2002, The Washington Post)

I have bad news for everyone else: The United States will win the World Cup. Maybe not this year, but the triumph is closer than the rest of the world thinks. We are becoming a soccer-playing and, to a lesser extent, soccer-loving country. We may not convert others to our vocabulary -- our soccer is their "football" -- but we're going to beat them at their own game.

This will be shocking. It is one thing for us to flaunt our military and economic power, to spread McDonald's and Madonna around the world. It's quite another to trespass on everyone else's special preserve. After religion--or before it--soccer is the world's passion and obsession.

If you took the the whole second round of the NBA draft, the guys who either won't make teams or won't play, and made them the U.S. World Cup team, wouldn't we win it every year? It's not like we waste our best athletes on soccer--these are the guys from High School who didn't have enough hand-eye coordination to play a real sport. When we do win it--and I don't see why that shouldn't be this year--it will be as a distant afterthought to all the games we actually follow. It'll get the TV ratings of a WNBA game. That really will be embarassing for the rest of the World.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 3, 2002 6:23 PM