World Cup in exile
International Viewpoint #257 June 1994
EVEN International Viewpoint has been gripped by World Cup fever, but as American socialist David Finkel reports, fans may be in for a rude shock. DAVID FINKEL* - Detroit, USA
A S a commercial enterpri-
Use, the success of World Cup 1994 appears assured. Stands will be packed to capacity or very nearly so. Even more important is the extraction of maximum revenues from World Cup corporate sponsorships, stadium luxury boxes, broadcast fees, clothing and assorted paraphernalia, a science first developed by Peter Ueberroth for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and brought to new heights of refinement in subsequent international sporting extravaganzas.
### FIFA
Beyond the tournament's immediate profitability, of course, lies the question of a far bigger payoff: whether FIFA's gamble in bringing the 1994 World Cup to the shores of soccer Babylon will finally crack open the fantastically lucrative U.S. spectator sports market to the world's most popular game. In a country where some large cities have not one, but two radio stations dedicated to 24-hour sports talk programming, and where some basic cable televison services offer up to three all-sports channels, the stakes are obviously significant.
It is undoubtedly true that preparation for this World Cup has produced the highest level of soccer interest in U.S. history. It's somewhat difficult to convey, however, just how low this level of "interest" actually has been.' Media coverage of the upcoming cup is minimal. Results of the U.S. team's preparatory matches are reported in the margins of newspaper sports sections. Greater interest has been stimulated by the experiment of implanting real grass into Pontiac's domed stadium for the matches to be played there. How far can a World Cup go toward transforming mass apathy to rabid fanaticism?
The speculative answer I will offer here is (1) that while World Cup 1994 will have a modest long-term impact on the American spectator sports consumer culture, it will not make soccer more than a secondary presence here; and (2) that this fact should come as a relief to the game's billions of international fans. To explain both points leads to some considerations on spectator sports in the mass U.S. culture.
It must be stressed here that we are discussing the spectator/consumer dimension of the sport, not the participatory one. Soccer has been growing for at least two decades as a participation sport, breaking out of its historic European and Latino immigrant community base into the schools of mainstream suburbia.2 (This participation base is already reflected in the fact, although few sports fans here realize it, that the United States is already a dominant power in the game - in international women's soccer.)
The game's growth among African Americans is much slower, the reasons for which are readily clear from a survey of the wreckage of untended inner city parks. Indeed the decline of urban facilities for youth is probably responsible for even stalling the growth of Black participation in the professional baseball leagues. Having few places to play soccer and fewer coaches available to teach it, African American athletes are unlikely to attain the dominant position they have long occupied in basketball. This fact is probably comforting to some of the promoters looking to market the sport in burgeoning suburban yuppievilles.
Only to a limited extent does participation translate to spectator consumerism. So far as World Cup 1994 is concerned, the combined spending power of suburban consumer affluence, a flood of soccer tourists and the popularity of the Latin American and European sides among U.S. ethnic communities will fill enough seats. FIFA's perspective - and one of its conditions for granting the World Cup to the United States
- is the formation of an ongoing professional league to make this enthusiasm a permanent institution.
### Niche
Actually, professional soccer should by now have carved a successful niche as America's second spring-summer outdoor game. Soccer has no chance of displacing baseball in the United States — or in those countries and colonies where the U.S. imperial culture implanted its "national pastime", including Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan and the Philippines — where baseball has the kind of historic and mythic roots that simply can't be replicated. Nonetheless the sheer size of the market allows for cohabitation.
* The author is a member of the revolutionary socialist organisation Solidarity, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Against the Current.
1. A small anecdote may be illustrative here. During the final game of the 1990 World Cup, when the U.S. socialist group Solidarity was holding a national leadership meeting - a fact which readers in most countries may find incredible - this writer was the only participant who watched part of the game during a break. In any case, the only noncable television broadcast was on a Spanish language network available in only a few cities.
2. Among newer immigrants, of course, the game's popularity remains fanatical. During qualifying for the 1990 World Cup, when a USA-El Salvador game had to be moved from El Salvador to a neutral site due to the civil war, Salvadoran officials unsuccessfully requested that the match be played in Los Angeles, calculating that the stadium there would be filled by 100,000 or so Salvadorans creating a home-crowd advantage.
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International Viewpoint #257 June 1994
Organised in 1968, by the middle 1970s the North American Soccer League was a going concern in a dozen U.S. and Canadian cities. The league's base grafted the growing participatory interest in youth soccer, as a safer and less costly alternative to American football, with the sport's traditional immigrant community base. The Chicago Sting, for example, drew upon that city's Mexican and German communities (Karl-Heinz Granitza serving as a major attraction for the latter), while the league championship one year was won by a team called Toronto Metro-Croatia. The New York Cosmos coaxed Pele out of retirement, imported Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia and other internationals and for a few years regularly attracted crowds of over 50,000.
Although aesthetically marred by rather small playing surfaces, by that uniquely North American barbarism, artificial turf, and by an absurd "shootout" to resolve tied games, the NASL at its best was able to present a product that wouldn't have disgraced a lower second-division English League side. (An overaged and overweight George Best played prominently for a while; when Trevor Francis in his prime played a couple of seasons for the Detroit Express, it was considered a somewhat disappointing match if he didn't personally score twice.)
"Dizzy"
This intriguing hybrid was ruined when the league's owners, over the vehement objections of a few who knew better, became "dizzy with success" and convinced themselves that they were on the verge of surpassing the National Football League in the arena of corporate sports gigantism. From 1976-77 on, a forced-march expansion of the league and gross overspending on promotion and player imports produced a shambles of franchise shifts followed by a general implosion. By 1985 the North American Soccer League was dead.
What's remained is a variation called "indoor soccer", which has been a reasonably successful promotion on a minor-league level. This is a six-a-side game played at sprint pace with free substitution on a surface the size of an ice hockey rink (roughly 65 yards long and 30 wide). Goals count for either two points or three (if scored from further out), with typical match scores looking like 23-16. This, it is felt, appeals to the American fan's penchant for high scoring; goalless draws and 1-0 scores have 36 been considered the kiss of death for traditional soccer here. "Indoor soccer" is fun to play, and entertaining to watch a time or two, but lacks the texture and complexity that makes soccer itself a world game. The reestablishment of a proper professional soccer league, it's been promised, will avoid the greed-driven disasters that wrecked the old NASL. Certainly a recent U.S. sports owners' innovation, the "salary cap" that rigidly limits budgeting for player salaries, will be employed. Franchises will not be independent entities but in essent l ce branch offices of a single corporate enterprise. With play to begin in 1995, the league's central purported purpose is the development and promotion of US players, the best of whom now compete in scattered foreign leagues instead of at home. From a demographic and econemic point of view there's no reason why this venture shouldn't be at least mode rately successful. Nor should/it depend on some unexpected and highly unlikely spectacular success by the U.S, team in the 1994 World Cup. Provided that it avoids the delusion of surpassing base ball, American football or basketball in the manic economy of professional spectator sports, a soccer league can find a profitable place in the growing and highly elastic market.
There are, in any case, good reasons for soccer fans of the world to be grateful that their game will not become the 500-pound gorilla of the American sports market. Spectator sports in this country are undergoing a profound and unhealthy transformation. An unexpected mass success of soccer in the United States would quite likely feed back into the game's European and Latin heartlands, quite possibly damaging the game in the countries where it is central to popular culture.
It suffices to summarize a few of the features of this transformation:
1) Detachment from community. This process can be dated to the Brooklyn (baseball) Dodgers' desertion to Los Angeles in 1957. It has accelerated massively in the past decade, with whole cities held to ransom by multi-millionaire franchise owners demanding publiclybuilt new stadia as their price for staying in town.
2) Going upscale. Ticket prices have escalated beyond the capacities of working class families. New facilities are constructed solely for the purpose of generating revenue from luxury boxes for the super-wealthy or for corporate purchasers who write off the expenses against taxes.
3) Cable and pay television. Many major sports events are going off free home television, onto cable or "pay per view" services. This trend would probably be accelerating more rapidly in football and baseball except for the fear of Congressional political intervention, e.g. the threatened removal of major league baseball's anachronistic immunity from anti-monopoly laws.
The marketing of the new U.S. professional league will be heavily tilted toward the prosperous and suburban, not toward traditional, immigrant communihes that gave the game its base for half a century. Sensitive international World Cup Watchers may want to be sensitive • to certain early warning signs of creeping Americanization of your sport:
Do your television commentators marvel at the modernistic wonders of some of the newer U.S. stadia? Beware: Many of these are sterile monstrosities built for the convenience of broadcaster and luxury box owners rather than fans.
Dolthey speculate with awe on the possibilities of construeting domed facilities like the Pontiac Silverdome? Don't bite: This may be a ploy to get you to accept artificial turf, which is ruinous to the game's quality and to the players' physical health.
Do they rave about the security and the absence of "hooligans? Remember: This may imply the elimination of seating that anyone without a corporate manager's income can purchase.
Do they comment frequently on the supposed desire of Americans for a higher-scoring game? Careful: There may be trial balloons for widening the goals, for free substitutions or for eliminating the offsides rule. Never underestimate what evil visions dollar hunger can generate. (Would you like typical scores of, say, 10-8?)
Welcome to the World Cup in exile. May it survive the experience. Enjoy the goals. And keep in mind, if you're a fan, that you may need to defend your game from impurities the way the Germans have defended their beer. *