Goal!!!

When American's don't excel at a sport on the international stage, we see this as a problem that needs to be fixed immediately.  While this isn't exactly true with fringe sports like curling and team handball, we seem to have a big problem when we are not kicking ass and taking names in every major international competition.  While there are exceptions, notably China in the last Olympics, it doesn't seem as though it's as big of an issue in other countries.  Kenyans don't say "you know, we're sitting on top of the world of distance running, but we need to break the United States' and Jamaican's hold on sprinting."  Their national identity is associated with being excellent distance runners.  The problem is that in America, our national identity is associated with winning things like the Space Race and world wars.  We're the biggest, fattest, most productive* nation on earth, yet we seem to be evenly matched with some greasy Eastern Europeans from the former Soviet Satellite of Slo-whatchemacallit, it's a bit hard for us to take.  We live and breathe sports in America, but in a lot of countries, they only live and breathe soccer (ok, football.)

*Excluding China, Japan, Singapore, India, Germany, Switzerland, most Norse countries, Malaysia, and every country where facebook and iPhones have yet to catch on

Right now though, we seem to be doing ok.  Or at least, we seem to be performing respectably, advancing out of group play into the elimination rounds.  And this has people asking "will this make soccer more popular in America?"

The answer is no.

Every kid in Suburban America grows up playing youth soccer, with the orange slices and the Capri-Sun juice pouches and that parent that cares way too much.  I was the kid picking his nose and daydreaming about having powers like Goku in Dragon Ball Z while the ball would go flying past me or flying into my face, then everyone would yell at me and it would be ostracize-fest 99 and I would feel bad and really wish I had powers like Goku so I could go kah-meh-ha-meh-haaaaaaa on their athletically gifted little asses.  This was a big deal, because, well, I'm not exactly sure why, but it's nice to win things.  Unfortunately, I never got to experience winning because I was always on awful teams.  One season we scored a grand total of 3 goals the entire season.  The one good to come out of this whole fiasco was that I discovered I could at least beat other kids down the field, which would lead to future feelings of athletic inadequacy.

The more athletically gifted kids get separated soon after when they join hegemonic club soccer teams that require your soul as the membership fee.  This is not hyperbole.  This is an even bigger deal because everybody cares a whole lot more, and your soul is at stake, because if you win the big tourney you may actually get it back!  Just kidding!  From what I have observed, club soccer is a life ruiner.  So if you have kids, ovaries, or testicles, remember, don't ever let your kids do club soccer.  It would be a better idea to have them work in a coal mine.

The paradox seems to be that everybody here plays it just nobody likes watching it or has the ambition to be really good at it.  We don't have the cultural incentive.  Soccer players aren't lionized like football/basketball/baseball stars are.  Between Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NFL, and collegiate Football and Basketball, Americans have enough to care about, unlike in Ghana, where the only thing your country has going for itself is a pretty good soccer team, or the UK, where it's culturally acceptable to get into massive drunken brawls to display your fanhood.

And everybody complains that "soccer is boring to watch."  We complain about how it's low-scoring and how there's too much midfield action and it's not exciting like REAL AMERICAN FOOTBALL!  But, let me say this.  In American football, at least half the time is taken up with commercials, and even more time is taken up with inane commentary.  A standard game takes up an hour of play, but a football game on television takes up three hours.  We love watching a game where two thirds of the game isn't actually the game, but soccer is boring because they're actually playing the whole time?  The reason isn't because soccer is boring.

It's because soccer doesn't have as much advertising value.

Even if you were some kind of time-warping wizard, you could not come close to packing as many commercials into a broadcast of a soccer game as you could into a broadcast of a football game.  And in America, where corporations have come to dominate our cultural landscape, that is the reason why soccer will never be popular.  The people who control the system know that they can turn a much larger profit if we care about American football instead of regular football.

And that is why most Americans will never really care about a soccer match.