Why Americans Call Futbol Soccer, and Does Soccer Have a Future in the U.S.?

When the U.S. played Portugal on Sunday, a painful 2-2 draw when Portugal scored in the 95th minute (stoppage time), it was the most viewed soccer game in U.S. history. Tomorrow morning (Thursday), the U.S. plays Germany and must win to secure a spot in the knock-out round of 16.

Unfortunately for many American soccer fans, the game airs at noon EDT and 9 am PDT, making it difficult to watch unless we play hooky from work. Even so, if the Americans can pull out a miraculous win (Germany came into the World Cup as one of the two or three favorites, along with Brazil and Argentina), will soccer be guaranteed a bright future in the U.S.? Tom Ashbrook's On Point (NPR) looks at the future of soccer in the U.S.

And, while we're discussing it, why the hell do Americans call it soccer instead of futbol (football), as it is in most of the rest of the world? Turns out that it's a story, like all good stories, that begins in a pub (The Atlantic).

First up, a collection of links on soccer and the World Cup, then the future of U.S. soccer from On Point.

Theory of soccer

Jun 24 2014
9:00AM

• Alda Carvalho (ISEL), Carlos Pereira dos Santos (ISEC), and Jorge Nuno Silva (FCUL): Mathematics of Soccer. 
• Ozgur Dirim Ozkan (METU): Perception of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Qualification to FIFA World Cup 2014 by Different Ethnic Groups. 
• In his 35-year presidency of Real Madrid, Santiago Bernabeu transformed a middling team into the greatest club of the 20th century. 
• The end of the World Cup as we know it: Club soccer has surpassed the international version of the sport in just about every way — better pay, better players, better teams. 
• Jacqueline S. Gehring on how the left and the right talk differently about the ethnicity of German soccer players. 
• Uri Friedman on why Americans call soccer “soccer”. 
• Eric Wills reviews Why Soccer Matters by Pele. 
• The introduction to Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta. 
• The cyborg era begins at the World Cup. 
• A philosopher's theory of soccer fandom: Simon Critchley on why there is no such thing as a bad World Cup. 
• James Dawson on why the World Cup is not a reliable political football. 
• The beautiful data set: Ignacio Palacios-Huerta on how the World Cup can help test economic theories. 
• Why did Borges hate soccer? Shaj Mathew on how mass culture was anathema to the Argentine writer. 
• Omer Aziz on how the World Cup doesn’t bring people together — it tears them apart. 
• Pele, Cruyff, Best, Maradona, Zidane — and Pindar: Brian Cummings on football’s offer of hope against experience, and its roots in a classical past. 
• David Runciman on why goalkeepers don’t catch the ball. 
• How much do Americans really hate soccer? Nicholas Hune-Brown wonders. 
• The not-so-beautiful game: As it becomes trendy, soccer is losing its old frisson of hooliganism. 
• Poor, poor pitiful you: Nick Paumgarten on diving at the World Cup. 
• Aaron Gordon on how the U.S. military shaped American soccer.

* * * * *

The Future Of Soccer In The United States

What would it take for the United States to become a world soccer powerhouse? We’ll kick it around.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook | June 25, 2014

US players kick off the World Cup soccer match between the USA and Portugal at the Arena da Amazonia in Manaus, Brazil, Sunday, June 22, 2014. (AP)

World Cup fever has hit, of all places, the United States of America. The big global latecomer to soccer. Millions of American hearts went way up the Amazon Sunday night for the heartbreaking tie with Portugal. Millions celebrated the nifty first game win over Ghana. Millions more will tune in tomorrow for the big game with Germany. Team USA is performing better than expected. Of course, US women took the World Cup in ’91, ’99. What would it take to put US men’s soccer firmly up in that top tier? This hour, On Point: World Cup fever, and building an American soccer powerhouse.

– Tom Ashbrook

Guests

• Andrew Das, assistant sports editor for the New York Times. (@AndrewDasNYT)
• Paul Kennedy, Editor-in-chief and General Manager of Soccer America, a US Soccer magazine. (@pkedit)
• Andrew Lewellen, writer for Grantland and former college soccer player. (@AndrewHLewellen)
• Mike Burns, general manager for the New England Revolution.

From Tom’s Reading List

New York Times: How Jurgen Klinsmann Plans to Make U.S. Soccer Better (and Less American) — “‘We cannot win this World Cup, because we are not at that level yet,’ Klinsmann told me over lunch in December. ‘For us, we have to play the game of our lives seven times to win the tournament.’”

Fusion: When the U.S. Made A Baby Step in Basel — “As good as the Swiss looked against Austria was as bad as they looked against the U.S. Only 16,500 showed up in the Herzog & de Meuron-designed St. Jakob’s Park—all the starchitecture was in Basel—and they booed their team off at half time and full time. Michael Bradley scored the only goal in the eighty-sixth minute in an ugly game but a brave performance for the U.S. team. Winning ugly was something it needed to learn how to do—the hell with wining over new fans.”

The Wall Street Journal: At World Cup, South America Is Ascendant – “South American sides haven’t had the pleasure of playing on home soil since 1978, and they are taking full advantage of it. Thursday, Uruguay pushed England to the brink of elimination with a 2-1 win that came just hours after Colombia notched a 2-1 win over Ivory Coast in front of thousands of delirious yellow-and-blue clad fans at Estadio Nacional in Brasilia.”

Video

Soccer fans in Kansas City celebrating John Brooks’ goal in the US match against Ghana at the World Cup in Brazil.

The World Cup Has Begun - All You Never Needed to Know about 2014's World Stopping Event

 

Goooooooooooooooaaalll! For fùtbol fans around the world (that's soccer for you yanks), it's the global celebration of the beautiful game (per Pelé).

According to Vox, there are 10 things American's need to know about the World Cup:

1. The World Cup is the pinnacle of soccer
2. The World Cup finals are a multi-stage tournament
3. The US team is in the "group of death"
4. Brazil and Spain are two of the favorites
5. Soccer is a complex game
6. There are millions of dollars at stake
7. Many Brazilians are protesting the World Cup
8. The matches are spread thousands of miles apart
9. Many teams ban their players from having sex during the World Cup
10. You can watch on the matches on ESPN and Univision

Of course, Vox goes into more detail on each of those. These links come from Bookforum's Omnivore blog.

The World Cup Is About to Begin

Jun 12 2014
3:00PM

• Stop the world: It's the World Cup. 
• Erik Spanberg reviews Eight World Cups: My Journey through the Beauty and Dark Side of Soccer by George Vecsey. 
• The introduction to Football's Dark Side: Corruption, Homophobia, Violence and Racism in the Beautiful Game by Ellis Cashmore and Jamie Cleland. 
• The World Cup is about to begin, and FIFA's reputation has never been worse. 
• John Oliver goes inside the “cartoonishly evil” organization of FIFA. 
• Throw FIFA out of the game: Dave Zirin on how people don’t have to be displaced and workers don’t need to die for soccer. 
• The growing stink at FIFA: New light is being shed on the choice of Qatar to host football’s biggest event in 2022. 
• FIFA needs to take the 2022 World Cup away from Qatar — now. 
• What is the World Cup worth? Simon Chadwick investigates. 
• Is the World Cup a poisoned chalice? Sol Campbell and Simon Kuper battle it out in the match of the century. 
• As World Cup nears, American “football” fans adapt foreign traditions. 
• Is 2014 the year soccer in America (truly) goes mainstream? 
• Marc Tracy on how Major League Soccer can beat the English Premier League in America: Embrace its inner Brooklyn. 
• Sam Borden on how Jurgen Klinsmann plans to make U.S. soccer better — and less American (and more and more). 
• Contrary to popular wisdom, the playing styles of national soccer teams is not reflective of underlying national cultural characteristics. 
• A look at 53 World Cup cliches you’ll probably hear over the coming weeks. 
• Joseph Stromberg on 10 things non-soccer fans need to know about the World Cup. 
• Ritchie King, Allison McCann and Matthew Conlen on FiveThirtyEight’s World Cup predictions (and more by Nate Silver: It’s Brazil’s World Cup to lose).

1. The World Cup is the pinnacle of soccer
2. The World Cup finals are a multi-stage tournament
3. The US team is in the "group of death"
4. Brazil and Spain are two of the favorites
5. Soccer is a complex game
6. There are millions of dollars at stake
7. Many Brazilians are protesting the World Cup
8. The matches are spread thousands of miles apart
9. Many teams ban their players from having sex during the World Cup
10. You can watch on the matches on ESPN and Univision

How the World Cup Explains the World

From Pacific Standard, here is a brief introduction to the World Cup (not the sports angle, the international relations angle), which begins today with Brazil taking on Croatia.

Welcome to World Cup Week

By Ryan O'Hanlon • June 09, 2014 

(Photo: shine2010/Flickr)

•

A couple of months ago, in response to the occupation of Crimea, two U.S. senators wrote to a powerful international federation in hopes of creating sanctions against Russia, citing “a brazen disrespect for fundamental principles … and international law.” A few days later, Russian officials fired back, filing a similar letter to the same organization, calling for the U.S. to be sanctioned for “military aggression against several sovereign states” and the “numerous cases of human rights violation all over the world revealed by E. Snowden.”

The organization? FIFA. The sanction? A ban from the 2014 World Cup.

"The 2014 World Cup will be the most uniting cultural event
in the history of human civilization."

Alas, no sanctions were enacted. And Russia will be in Brazil, playing with a team that seems in keeping with the nation’s political tides, as the roster—in a tournament where 65 percent of the players play professionally in countries outside their own—consists entirely of Russia-based pros. Except, the team is coached by 68-year-old Italian who was previously the manager of England.

The U.S. will be there, too, led by a German manager who won a World Cup while playing for Germany and who will be coaching an American team with five German-born players, a guy from Norway, and another one from Iceland. Worried that the U.S. isn’t American enough? You can always root for Mexico. And if you’d prefer a different team with an American-born player and an American-born coach, why not throw your support behind Iran?

You get the point. Soccer, as you may have heard, is the most popular sport in the world. The 2014 World Cup will be the most uniting cultural event in the history of human civilization. It’s a game, but it’s also a game played and watched and consumed by multiple billions of people. “When a game matters to billions of people it ceases to be just a game,” Simon Kuper writes in Football Against the Enemy. “Soccer is never just soccer: it helps make wars and revolutions, and it fascinates mafias and dictators.”

Kuper wrote some form of those words 20 years ago, and the world’s changed since then. (For example: We’re writing about soccer on the Internet, and doing it for a national American magazine.) Saying that the sport still “makes wars and revolutions” might not be quite so accurate anymore, but the game, in this country and in the rest of the world, has only continued to grow. “The game remains too good a way of understanding the world to discard,” Kuper writes in the introduction to Soccer Against the Enemy, the 2010 American edition of his first book. “Soccer matters as much today as when I made the journey that became this book, but now it matters in different ways.”

So, all this week, we’ll be looking at some of those different ways. We hope to show how the sport gets tangled up in the different political, social, and cultural issues across the world—but it might be better to say that we just want to see how soccer reflects some of the important issues of 2014. You can find all the exhaustive tactical breakdowns and the lists of players you’ve never heard of but will definitely start hearing about elsewhere. Instead, we’ll be writing about the game’s role in the development of Iran, the most politically volatile matches in the tournament’s history, and why, at the same time, this is both the most important tournament ever played and the one with the least amount of meaning. We’ll also be talking to Kuper himself about many of those things and more.

The games kick off on Thursday, with Croatia playing Brazil, and we’ll be posting multiple stories a day through the end of the week. You’ll learn something—we promise.

Senior Digital Editor Ryan O’Hanlon joined Pacific Standard from Outside, where he was an assistant online editor. He is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, and his writing has appeared in Deadspin, Grantland, The Awl, New York, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @rwohan.