Posts tagged as:

US soccer culture

Stop Defending Tony Meola’s Haircut

On the one hand, Americans are still faced with the “Soccer is Gay and Foreign and Makes My Shriveling Mind Hurt” genre of xenophobic sports journalism — which hasn’t evolved in two decades. But the counter-genre — “Will Soccer Now Make It in America?” as exemplified by Hendrik Hertzberg’s recent piece in The New Yorker — has grown equally tiresome and obsolete. The argument is over, and the TV ratings for the World Cup prove it. “It’s not 1990 any more; we don’t have to defend Tony Meola’s haircut.” (Zach Dundas/True/Slant)

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‘An American Story, Not a Soccer One’

The debate about whether the World Cup turned Americans on to soccer completely misses how U.S. culture transmogrifies everything into something it can easily digest — “Team USA…was appropriated and fed back to us not as soccer, but as Americans kicking ass.” It was a simplification, a mistranslation, the difference between “an adolescent crush…and the rhythms of foreplay…Maybe we didn’t learn a damn thing about soccer. We did learn, though, that under the right circumstances, we could pretend that didn’t matter in the least.” (Bethlehem Shoals/The Atlantic)

Read of the Day: Soccer Will Never Arrive in the United States…and That’s OK

Here come the inevitable attacks on soccer from U.S. know-nothings — your Becks, your Liddies, your Mike Florios (whose prose provides a reading experience akin to wearing a week-old jock strap around your face). And…so what? Soccer is already the most widely played sport in the United States — but its marginality to U.S. culture is “part of what makes it fun to be a fan, for…our soccer fan culture actually depends on a certain fact of being slightly ill-at-ease…The sport is always going to be arriving, and it’s never fully going to arrive, which to my mind is actually a recipe for perpetual renewal and enjoyment of the sport and its peculiar fan culture in the U.S.” (Laurent Dubois/Soccer Politics)

Bad Beats: Developing a U.S. Soccer Culture

Yes, skills and access are important, U.S. soccer fans – but where’s your appreciation, asks Jason Davis at Match Fit USA, for “the most important factor in the country’s ability to produce world class talent — time”? Meanwhile, there’s “awkwardness to spare in U.S. soccer culture,” says Clive Longbottom-Fellow from Nutmeg Radio, and we need to move beyond this second-hand situation — starting with our supporters’ music.