The Football Fatwa

Since the World Cup kicked off last week, I've noticed a strange uptick in right-wing railing against the world's sport.

The Weekly Standard has a piece about soccer as nihilist and amoral by its very nature. Cannon and Lessner write, "DESPITE HEROIC EFFORTS of soccer moms, suburban liberals, and World Cup hype, soccer will never catch on as a big time sport in America. No game in which actually scoring goals is of such little importance could possibly occupy the attention of average Americans. Our country has yet to succumb to the nihilism, existentialism, and anomie that have overtaken Europe."

John Tierney of the New York Times writes, "Maybe the rest of the world loves soccer because they haven't been given better alternatives". I don't pay for Times Select, so that's as far as I can go with that.

But this goes back at least 20 years. In 1986, former (NFL) football player, US representative and Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp famously declared, "I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport."

What gives? In 1986, I played soccer in the Stoddert Soccer League of Washington, DC, along with every other eight-year-old I knew, and many I didn't. We didn't really care what we were playing. I doubt that the sport informed our epistemological outlook on anything. I'd wager that few, if any, ever became socialists, nihilists, jihadists or some other as-yet uncategorized threat. A great many of us became capitalists. Today, we're doctors, lawyers, drug dealers, lobbyists, wage slaves, and any number of money-driven professions.

I'm sure that if tetherball took off in the 80s, these same guys would have said that it's too much like the commie maypole; its one-on-one nature too similar to descriptions of Marxist class struggle. Tennis and ping-pong would surely follow. We should never have let Forest Gump go to China. That's where all the trouble began.

It's OK not to like soccer. In red-blooded capitalist language, it's a consumer preference. It's OK to be mystified by why the rest of the world is so in to the game, and why America's temperment ranges from lukewarm interest of "elitist coastal liberals" to the outright hostility allegedly found elsewhere.

Why can't we just let the world have their game? At the risk of reification, this is part of a larger mindset. But then, I'm using their logic, succumbing to the same fearful way of thinking.

I say, score one for American exceptionalism and call it a game.

That's all it is.