Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2008 book by David Goldblatt:

* The British historian Eric Hobsbawm encapsulated this oddity when he wrote ‘The twentieth century was the American century in every way but one: sport.’ This is not exactly news to anyone, but it remains an extraordinary and under-explored anomaly; an almost unique reversal of the dominant patterns of global influence and power.
The Ball Is Round attempted to answer Hobsbawm’s question by looking at the reasons why soccer had fared so poorly in the United States. The main lines of the argument are well known. Basically, soccer’s timing was bad. By the early 1870s when soccer, played according to the FA rules of 1863, was beginning in America, baseball had already claimed the emotional and cultural high ground of America’s emerging sports culture.
Through the rest of the nineteenth century, soccer thrived in the United States amongst certain working-class communities, but was indelibly marked as European, foreign and in some quarters as un-American. The predominance of ethnic affiliations in team names—from Hakoah New York to Brooklyn Hispano—is testament to both soccer’s deep local roots and its still unbroken connections to the old world. The cultural space and market share available to soccer was further narrowed over the twentieth century as, successively, ice hockey, American football, and basketball went professional.

* The central pillars of American sports culture—American football, baseball, and basketball, along with hockey—have enjoyed only a limited global embrace, which has, I believe, entrenched their American rather than universal characteristics. This in turn has helped consolidate a wider American sports culture that finds soccer not merely foreign but alien, both incomprehensible and reprehensible. The private and mysterious timekeeping of the referee in soccer is contrasted with the open, public, and democratic clock in American football, basketball and hockey. The draw is considered nonsense at best, an outrage at worst. The rarity of not only goals, but clear scoring opportunities, is anathema not merely because it appears, at first sight, tedious, but more profoundly because it allocates such a large role to chance in determining the outcome of the game. The enormous number of scoring chances in basketball and the immense length of the baseball season are two devices that ensure, over both individual games and entire seasons, that luck evens out and other factors prevail. It is the same distaste for unaccountability and chance that finds the diving, faking, gamesmanship and chicanery of soccer unbearable.
Perhaps most fundamentally of all, soccer offers modes of storytelling and narrative structures that the American sporting public finds unsatisfactory. You have had, after all, a century of the most extraordinary and compelling sporting stories to savor and reflect upon. America possesses a literary culture that has, like no other, risen to the challenge of expressing them—a dual heritage I found condensed in Red Smith’s homage to the “Shot Heard Round the World,” Bobby Thompson’s homerun that clinched the 1951 National League pennant race for the New York Giants after an epic chasing down of the Brooklyn Dodgers: ‘Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.’ I now see that when this kind of performance is on offer, soccer, both domestic and international, appears to many, at best, a distraction.
Soccer can match the epic quality of the 1951 pennant race—European leagues have often featured season-long slugging matches between two or three top teams only resolved on the final day in the final minutes of multiple games. It can also offer the condensed moments of brilliance, beauty, and meaning that Thompson’s homer exemplifies: Maradona’s Hand of God, anyone? However, on a day-to-day basis, the level of narrative quality control is lower. Although soccer can do fantastical last-minute comebacks, collapses, turnovers, winners, and equalizers, there are less than in American sports. For all the really compelling 0-0 draws there are an awful lot of excruciating ones. For all the simple 5-0 routs and hopelessly unjust 1-0 victories for the poorer team, there are reams and reams of confusing, avant-garde, and just plain boring scripts. Ultimately, the entire logic of American sports culture chaffs at soccer’s draws and low scores.
One could argue that American sports exceptionalism, its sense of glorious self-isolation, is in fact a perfect expression of the only superpower left standing and its willful unilateralism. However, American power has always rested on more than free agency. Its global hegemony has rested on the capacity to shape international institutions in its own image, determine the rules of the game to its own advantage, to force, cajole, and pressure others into accepting them and adapting to them.

* A number of key decisions and local preferences shaped Australian Rules football to create a sport quite different from association football. In the first place, the topography of gum-tree fields made any accurate or regular implementation of an offside rule impossible. In any case, the English public-school disapproval of sneaking and goal-hanging that the rule was designed to offset did not offend the sporting or social sensibilities of Australian colonial society where neither the chancer nor the short cut were objects of moral opprobrium. Second, while the debates in England over the rules were constantly driven by deep-seated disagreements between different public schools, determined to preserve their distinct traditions of handling or kicking, these differences and their social significance were meaningless 12,000 miles away. Rather, the founders of the code sought the most enjoyable game, consciously looking to draw upon the best of every previous code. Above all, the new football was to be open, accessible and available to the new colonists streaming into Melbourne.

* By the turn of the century rugby union and rugby league were proving the most popular winter games in New South Wales and Queensland. Football was stuck as the second or third sport in every state of the country. The game’s revival would have to await a new influx of migrants from Greece, Italy, Croatia and other parts of Europe in the late inter-war and early post-Second World War years. For these communities, football connected them to their homelands rather than to Britain. They created a football revival which, in the context of the narrow and provincial racism of mid-century Australia, only served to reinforce the minority status of football or, as it was derisively known, ‘wogball’. The entry of football into the Australian mainstream would only be possible when these new migrant communities had been allowed admission into ‘white Australia’ in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

* ‘America’s sports exceptionalism … remains inextricably linked to the other exceptionalisms that have rendered American politics, American social relations, and American culture, so similar yet at the same time so different from other comparable phenomena, particularly in Europe …’

* First, America developed without creating a successful or enduring socialist party and the institutions created by its working classes are among the weakest in the Western world. Football, unlike baseball and American football, was an overwhelmingly working-class sport and suffered accordingly. Second, many features of American life – sport and education in particular – have lacked any kind of central national direction or organization and have been shaped by the market and financial forces to a greater extent than their European counterparts. So it has been with football, which has particularly suffered from the fragmentation and market orientation of social life and from its exclusion from the nation’s elite educational institutions.

* The obvious slot for football, if it were to parallel the English model, was as the winter game of the elite in educational institutions and old boys’ clubs, but this had been taken by the newly minted gridiron. This left space for football as a lower-middle-class and working-class recreation and entertainment.

* The sheer distance of Australia and America from Britain was a central factor, if not the only one, in explaining the emergence and then triumph of an alternative football code. In both countries the indigenous version of football came with a certain amount of nationalistic baggage, helping assert the independence and difference of the new world from the old; but in neither case could the explicit politicization of the game be considered a central component of its success.

* Oceania was the land that football forgot. Despite arriving in Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century, football remained a poor relation to cricket, rugby and Australian rules. 24 Until 1974 both nations had attempted to reach the World Cup through the Asian qualifying rounds and neither had succeeded.

* Australia’s relative football backwardness was not derived from the geography of isolation alone. At home, in the post-war era, football remained a minority, amateur sport. It was a distant fourth or fifth in the nation’s sporting affections behind Aussie rules, both rugby codes and cricket. It also remained, like everything else at the time in Australia, a British concern.

* The reception of Southern and Eastern Europeans into Australian society was not a smooth one. Although welcomed by labour-short employers their lack of English and their perceptibly darker skins evoked tiresomely predictable patterns of racism, exclusion and discrimination. Unlike the earlier generations of Italians and Greeks that went to the United States, who assimilated in part by adopting baseball, this generation came to Australia with their sporting preference already formed – and that was for football. To many, Aussie Rules appeared ludicrous, while rugby and cricket were so obviously and self-consciously English games that they didn’t even bother. Football was another matter, and by 1950 ethnic communities were creating their own social and football clubs. Australia’s leading sports newspaper The Sporting Globe was worried.
“The whole question of these New Australians being allowed to form national clubs should be the subject of special investigation and although one does not advocate a boycott of these recent arrivals from the playing fields it certainly would be much better if they were assimilated into the ranks of teams of mainly British stock and thus became better mixers instead of keeping to themselves and in some cases endeavouring to settle political differences on the football field.

The conflict was intensified by an obvious contrast of playing styles and expectations. The Anglo-Australians were shaped by a wider sports culture in which high levels of on-field violence were tolerated; they played an exceptionally rough and physical version of the already characteristically muscular English game. The Europeans, by contrast, were schooled in an entirely different playing culture which was rather more cerebral. There was, among the first generation of footballers and their clubs, almost no assimilation at all, although no ethnic club systematically excluded outsiders. But then why would they have wanted to join Anglo-clubs anyway? The New Australians were proving themselves adept footballers.

* White Australia’s antipathy towards football was swirled into a minor moral panic by the expression of political differences on the football field and the sporadic violence that accompanied this, particularly when teams from the Serbian and Croatian communities were playing. A small number of Croats had migrated to Australia earlier in the century, but after the war they came in their tens of thousands. Croatia Adelaide was founded in 1952 and teams followed in Melbourne and Sydney. Their members and supporters tended to come from the most conservative and nationalistic elements of Croatian political culture, many fleeing the new communism of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and they included in their ranks many supporters and officers of the brutal Ustashi regime that ruled Croatia as a puppet state of the Germans during the Second World War. While they remained a minority among Croatian Australians, the clubs were fiercely nationalist in their display of Croatian colours and insignia. Serbs also came to Australia, including within their ranks some Chetnik supporters – the royalist resistance groups who were allied with and then defeated by Tito’s partisans. This community gravitated to teams like JUST and Yugal – though their Chetnik connections were sufficiently small that both retained friendly relations with the Yugoslav embassy in Australia and were treated to flights home by Yugoslav Airlines. The bitter conflicts between Serbs and Croats during the Second World War were certainly not left behind in Europe. In the early 1960s a game between Croatia Melbourne and Yugal descended into a full-scale riot, and in 1972, after a particularly nasty incident in the game between Croatia Melbourne and Hakoah, the Croatian team were expelled from the Victoria league and effectively dissolved, although they were back in it five years later.
Australian football provided an instrument of solidarity and partial integration into mainstream society for Southern Europeans in the 1960s and early 1970s. In turn their contribution was to raise the quality of organization and performance to the point where Australia finally qualified for the 1974 World Cup with a squad that included Anglo- and Slavic Australians. Australia’s performance was predictably poor at the finals in Germany, failing to score a single goal, and though the excitement generated around the campaign was enough to convince the football federation that the time had come to create a national league, football remained a peripheral sport in Australia. Its failure to win over the mainstream was in part a failure of its initial policy of de-ethnicization. After the national league was launched in 1977, teams were meant to abandon their ethnic tags and act against overt displays of aggressive nationalism among their crowds. But the clubs were not prepared to take on their hardcore support and the authorities lacked the clout to enforce it. Indeed matters got worse in some ways. A newly created club like Canberra City, which was intended as a model of wholesome non-ethnic family entertainment, became a bitter redoubt of an explicitly Anglo-Australian identity. Worse, as the temperature of ethnic politics in Yugoslavia heated up, the relations between Balkan teams deteriorated, and this state of affairs endured through the 1990s. The ethnic identities and solidarities that had revived and reinvigorated Australian football would also prove the limiting factor in the successful commercialization of the game.

* The high industrial football created in the 1950s and 1960s reached its terminal point in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A measure of its exhaustion was the decline in innovation, for after the development of Dutch total football in the early 1970s European football saw no significant tactical developments until Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan sides of the late 1980s. Off the field, the increasing ungovernability of minority but visible fan cultures in Northern and Southern Europe – of which the Liverpool casuals and Juve ultras were emblematic – had brought the organizational capacity of the game and its commercial viability to breaking point. In the end, however, football was rescued from its predicament by the forces of the market and the application of an unalloyed commercialism that had been germinating through the 1980s. After Heysel, that whirlwind of technological, social and economic change would provide the instruments for the sanitization and selling of football. The slum game, shorn of its most belligerent and chaotic supporters, excluded by surveillance and cost, would be transmuted from social outcast to one of the central collective cultural experiences of the new millennium.

* The St George flag had of course been a staple of the crowds at England matches but not for that long. Its ubiquity was quite new. Looking back to the crowd at the 1966 World Cup, barely any St George crosses can be seen as the stands appear to be waving British Union flags. As late as Italia ’90 the balance between the two flags is half and half. But from 1997, as the devolution plans of the New Labour government took shape and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all acquired a significant level of political autonomy, the Englishness of the football team rose in importance. For it remains the case that there are precious few English institutions around which the notion of a distinctly English civic nationalism could be created. The royal family, the armed forces and parliament remain British; the legal system is shared with Wales. This leaves the Church of England and English National Opera as potential repositories of an English national identity. The England football team remains the most potent public expression of the imagined English national community available.

* First, in contrast to almost everywhere else on the planet, football in the USA became a middle-class rather than a working-class game; by the late 1990s over half of the country’s regular football players came from households with an annual income of over $50,000. Second, the relative significance and prowess of women’s football is greater in the US than anywhere else. Finally, the American national team – male or female – has been unable, despite successful international performances, to mobilize a significant level of nationalist support and public interest.

* For the middle classes, whose emotional and political disposition had been shaped by the parenting techniques of Dr Spock and the enduring psychic ripples of the counter culture, America’s dominant professional sports presented a series of problems. American football was too violent, too confrontational and too authoritarian in its internal structures. Baseball’s high-pressure solitary performances for pitcher and batter were suspect. Basketball was rapidly becoming the game of the African-American ghetto. Football offered a game to the suburbs that could be moulded and made markedly less confrontational and violent than gridiron. It is worth noting that the paranoia of the American middle classes was so great that heading the ball was actively discouraged (owing to potential brain damage) and a small industry emerged attempting to sell protective gear to the enthusiastic header of the ball. Unlike baseball, football offered a game in which teamwork was at a premium over individual performances and in which the precious and fragile egos of the players could be protected.
Football was also feminized. Soccer mums took the lead in organizing the game at a grass-roots level and the number of girls and women playing the game in organized leagues soared. By 2000 the USA had 7 million registered female footballers, compared to around 300,000 in Germany…

* What explains the reticence of the whole nation to follow the men’s national team despite a plausible performance at the 1994 World Cup and successful qualification campaigns for the 1998, 2002 and 2006 World Cups? The former threw up the USA-Iran clash, a game which in any other universe would have served as an irresistible proxy for America’s neurotic relationship with the Middle East. The latter produced a stunningly gutsy series of performances in which the USA beat Portugal and went on to lose the quarter-final to Germany. What would in almost any other nation have brought life to a complete, if momentary, halt barely flickered on the collective radar. Football continued to be suffocated by the mainstream belief that it was just not American.