Why Americans Don't Watch Soccer

It's a little bit us...

Americans don’t watch soccer. Every four years we try, especially if the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT) is in it and poised to make a respectable showing as it did this year. But ultimately the interest wanes and we go back to watching the big three of football (American), basketball and baseball. There’s lots of discussion about how soccer is boaring or how Americans are just too American to pick up the nuance of the great game. But I think there’s a more interesting discussion to be had about why the American sports viewer just doesn’t stick with soccer.

I’m very much enjoying watching the World Cup. The way the games show up on modern viewing experiences is awesome. And there’s something to being connected to the broader focus of humanity. It’s what the Olympics were before they turned into more of a global political spectacle and too many of the competitions drifted into obscurity. I understand sports very well and if given time, I’d be a good student of the soccer. But I know I’m not watching many soccer games over the next four years after tomorrow. So I’ve spent a little bit on why.

Let’s get one part out of the way up front:

The writhing. Americans struggle with the performative writhing. I don’t believe for a second that I am materially tougher than an elite soccer player. I played football for 10 years and competed in another sport in college at an elite level before on to 10 years on active duty mostly in the Special Forces. I’ve been hurt. But I don’t know how many times in my life I’ve rolled around on the ground in the sort of agony that happens, honestly, a dozen times a half in major men’s soccer matches. And it’s hard to take. I understand why they do it. We all understand why they do it. But it’s hard for us Americans. It just is. But I’m willing to give it a pass. Viva la différence…. It’s not really why Americans don’t like soccer.

Americans don’t like soccer for a simple reason. We find it boring. Notice I didn’t say that it was boring. I said Americans find it boring. Some reflection on why we find it boring is required though. Because it’s hard to really understand why so much of the rest of the world finds it the opposite of boring when we are too bored to watch it at all. But there’s a pretty clear culprit.

It’s not as simple as a lack of scoring, though it’s really, really hard to ignore the fact that the USMNT triumph in making it to the knockout round consisted of three whole games in which the U.S. scored one goal. For the first two games, the USMNT had one shot on goal for each of the two whole games. Suffice to say that even die hard non-American soccer fans find parts of the pool play boring. And that’s pretty much all the USMNT plays in. The World Cup hypes the pool play like it’s the start of something awesome. And it is…sort of. But not really. So excited and eager potential American soccer fans tune in and regularly get hit with watching two teams content to not win. It’s like a Floyd Mayweather fight. He was great. No serious boxing fan will tell you otherwise. But his fights were boring. How long can you appreciate the genius of a guy not getting punched? And so how long can you appreciate the genius of the game ending with the same result as if it had never been played. No score. Nearly no chances.

Diving face first into pool play is one thing. But I don’t think it’s the big thing. Nor do I think it’s that if Americans simply took the time to understand the game, then they would enjoy the subtleties and appreciate the invisible losses and victories on the field. In contrast, American Football is the most complex professional sport that there is. There are 22 players on the field and they run 160 or so different plays in a game. The coaching staff for an NFL team is as large as 13 with dozens more quality control, technical and training staff members supporting them on the sideline or in the booth in the stands, actively calling plays and making in-game adjustments. Running an NFL game is closer, and this isn’t a stretch, to running an active military operation than anything I’ve ever seen. The average American football fan understands a fraction of what’s happening on the field. Likely less than they get for a soccer game, even after decades of eating it up. Yet they can’t get enough of it. So it’s not that Americans don’t “get” soccer that stops us.

It’s not the speed or activity, in literal sense, of the game either. Soccer matches are shorter, the ball is in play longer and there are less breaks. This amazing graphic from nationalarmsrace.com, for which I can’t confirm accuracy but looks directionally right, shows just how much more active the game of soccer is relative to others.

So, it’s not the action. It’s actually the type of action. And this is really what matters most to the discussion. It’s how one defines action. And if we define action by something other than movement or pace, and instead by clearly decisive moments, we get to the bottom of what bores Americans about soccer. There’s just not enough clearly decisive moments in the game. Now, before you get too excited about how we don’t understand the decisive moments and therefore miss them, I agree. We miss them. We probably miss most of them. But even if we didn’t, even if we gobbled up every off ball victory, every nuanced shift or crafty pass that led to nothing, they wouldn’t compete with American sports.

Take baseball, my favorite but admittedly the slowest and often most tedious of the American sports. There are about 75 at bats per game. Every single one of them is a clearly defined win or loss. Some are more dramatic than others. But it’s either an out or the player reaches base. Even more granularly…there are 300 pitches. These discrete packets of sports entertainment quanta are what we Americans need. American football has 160 plays that either result in something good for the defense or something good for the offense. Basketball has 200 possessions per game that result in a shot, turnover, foul or shot clock violation. Even hockey has 50-60 shots on goal. Though hockey does often lose Americans for the same reason soccer does. There can just be a lot of movement with nothing really happening. In fact the horrible play in the 90s of dumping the puck into the corner and letting the Detroit “left wing lock” grind the game to a halt lost me. They’ve since changed the rules but I never came back.

Americans will tolerate a lot of things in their sports. They’ll tolerate the game being 80% commentators talking about the last play and showing replays. They’ll tolerate an hour of commercial breaks out of three. But they won’t tolerate ambiguous outcomes. And we won’t settle for the decisiveness happening at the end. We want it constantly throughout the game. We want to cheer a third down and 8 or a second inning strikeout along the way. Soccer comes in tense build ups and waves and explosions of triumph and catastrophe. Watching Lionel Messi in the semi-finals was as close to sports perfection as I’ll ever find. But Americans have been delivered outcomes every 30 seconds in their sports, en masse, for sixty years on their televisions and longer via radio. We’re not likely to come off that dopamine rush for soccer soon. We just don’t have the patience for it.

It’s a bit about us. But it’s a bit about the game. It’s not a great fit. One day young American athletes may become keen to the fact that being a world class professional soccer player is orders of magnitude better quality of life than the meat market that the NFL is. And we may start to get the very best American athletes playing football. Making us a powerhouse and creating household names may keep our attention for long enough to bend our preferences in sports. But that’s a decades long phenomenon. And we don’t have patiences for that sort of thing either.