Americans have many ideas for making soccer more exciting, but for billions of people, soccer is just fine as it is.<\/p>\n
I gave up long ago trying to talk people into fandom. It either works for you or it doesn’t. If you didn’t get the taste in childhood, you’re unlikely to develop it as an adult. <\/p>\n
There’s no objective standard for sporting excitement. The value that sports gives a man depends on the energy he creates with other people around the sport. If he loves the people and he loves the energy, he’ll love the sport. <\/p>\n
If you have happy memories built from a shared love of cricket with your family and community, you’re likely to keep loving it as an adult. <\/p>\n
If humans are tribal from start to finish and deeply socialized from childhood, there is no autonomous individual consciousness to cultivate, nor is there a uniform, universal human spirit waiting to be discovered in a text or in a sport. There’s no objective standard by which the NFL is more exciting than soccer. The Western literary canon is not a collection of transcendent, objective truths; it is the specific, sophisticated socialization mechanism of the European elite. The humanist belief that reading Shakespeare can liberate a man from his tribal instincts is an illusion. Literature does not transcend the tribe; it encodes it.<\/p>\n
A sport like a text or a song or a practice is a set of internal goods that only make sense to people formed inside it. The American who wants to fix soccer by adding timeouts and bigger goals is not making an error of analysis. He is applying the standards of his own tradition to a ritual that belongs to someone else. It is like a Baptist visiting a Catholic mass and suggesting they cut the standing and kneeling to tighten the show. The suggestion misses what the thing is for.<\/p>\n
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) made a similar point about the Balinese cockfight. The cockfight is not entertainment plus gambling. It is the Balinese telling a story about themselves to themselves. Cricket in a Yorkshire village or an Indian street works the same way. The five-day Test match, which strikes Americans as a bureaucratic punishment, encodes an entire ethic: patience, attrition, the long rhythm of sessions, the honorable draw. If you were not raised inside that rhythm, the draw looks like a defect. Inside it, the draw is a moral outcome. Nobody arrives at the honorable draw by reason. You inherit it, usually from a father or an uncle on a couch on a Saturday.<\/p>\n
Fandom research keeps finding that team allegiance transmits through family, especially fathers, and forms early. The emotion attaches to the people before it attaches to the game. The game becomes a container for the relationship. When a man in his fifties watches his boyhood club, he is partly watching his dead father. That is why fandom survives decades of losing. No rational consumer would stay. A son stays.<\/p>\n
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) gives you the engine. Collective effervescence: the crowd generates the sacred, and the sacred attaches to the totem, whether the totem is a flag, a wafer, or Fulham. The stadium is one of the last places in secular life where men sing together. Strip the crowd and the shared memory away and what remains is grown men chasing a ball, which is why sport looks absurd to outsiders and holy to insiders. Same physical facts, different worlds.<\/p>\n
A few limits.<\/p>\n
First, conversion happens. My model predicts that a man without childhood memories of a sport will not develop the love later. But millions do. Americans who never kicked a ball adopt soccer in their thirties through a World Cup, a pub, a marriage, a move abroad. Indians adopted cricket, a game imposed by their colonizers, and remade it so thoroughly that the sport’s economic center now sits in Mumbai. The deeper variable is not childhood. It is community. The convert to soccer at thirty-five is doing what you did at seven: bonding with particular people through a shared object. Childhood attachments run deepest because childhood is when we are most open, but the door does not close. You of all people know this. You converted to Orthodox Judaism as an adult. The liturgy you now live inside is not the one your father gave you. If sacred practices only take root through childhood transmission, your own life refutes the theory.<\/p>\n
Second, the practices generate their own trans-local standards. Say there is no objective standard for the fan experience and you seem to license total relativism, but the traditions themselves refuse this. A cricket lover in Lahore and one in Melbourne, who share no nation, religion, or language, agree on what a great innings looks like. The standard is internal to the practice, not to the tribe. That means the standards travel wherever the practice travels. They are not universal in the way physics is universal, but they are not locked to one people either. MacIntyre’s word for this is a tradition of enquiry: it has a home, and it also has doors.<\/p>\n
Third, free speech as Americans practice it grew from a particular history: dissenting Protestants, colonial pamphleteers, the First Amendment settlement. It is not a law of nature. But there is a difference between a taste and a protection. If soccer bores you, nothing happens to you. If your society lacks a norm against punishing speech, specific people go to prison. The particularist account of speech is true as history and dangerous as ethics, because every regime that jails poets makes your argument: our people, our lived experience, our meanings, and your so-called universal rights are just Anglo-American folkways. <\/p>\n
So sports and song and text have no meaning outside a community of practice, and the meaning enters through love for particular people. But communities admit converts, practices carry their standards with them across borders, and the man who says all meaning is local should notice that he made his own life by walking out of one local meaning and into another.<\/p>\n
If John J. Mearsheimer is correct in his anthropology<\/a>, survival runs through the group, so natural selection built us to bond, to absorb the group’s values before our critical faculties come online, and to feel those values as reality rather than as one option among many<\/a>. The boy on the couch with his father watching cricket is not learning a preference the way he might later learn to like whiskey. He is undergoing what Mearsheimer calls value infusion during the long, protected childhood when the mind is open and the reasoning is weak. By the time he can ask whether a five-day match is a rational use of time, the question is unaskable. The draw already feels honorable to him the way incest feels wrong. Reason arrives late and works for sentiments it did not choose. Your point that you cannot argue a man into loving soccer stops being folk wisdom and becomes a prediction of the theory: reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, so argument is the weakest instrument for changing them.<\/p>\n Second, this also explains the American reformer, and this is where the anthropology gets its bite. Mearsheimer’s target is not sports talk. It is liberalism, an ideology that treats people as atomistic individuals bearing identical rights, and therefore assumes that what is good here is good everywhere and that the remaining task is delivery. The American explaining how to make soccer exciting is running the domestic version of the foreign policy Mearsheimer attacks. He takes the preferences his own tribe infused into him, mistakes them for standards written into the game, and proposes regime change: more scoring, a clock that stops, playoffs. The proposal fails for the same reason liberal hegemony fails in Mearsheimer’s telling. The target population is not a collection of individuals waiting for a better product. It is a tribe whose attachments were formed by socialization, and it experiences the reform not as improvement but as an attack on the group’s way of life, which triggers the loyalty the reformer never modeled. Iraq and the shootout are failures of one theory of man.<\/p>\n Third, this sharpens the free speech parallel. If people acquire their moral codes through inborn sentiment and socialization, and if reason sits at the bottom of the hierarchy, then the belief that human rights are universal is itself a tribal artifact, the value infusion of one civilization at one moment, felt from the inside as self-evident truth exactly the way every tribe’s values feel. The Moyn line he quotes makes the point: human rights became the elevated aspiration of a particular era, roughly the postwar decades, and an aspiration with a birthdate has a biography, not a proof. On Mearsheimer’s account the American who says everyone on earth has a right to speak and the American who says every sport needs more scoring are the same man. Both have mistaken the inside of their socialization for the structure of the world.<\/p>\n A few limits.<\/p>\n Conversion happens: the man who finds soccer at thirty-five, the Indian embrace of cricket, my own walk into Orthodox Judaism. Mearsheimer’s framework can absorb these cases but only by loosening its grip. If socialization dominates and childhood is the critical window, adult conversion should be rare and shallow. It is rare, but where it occurs it is often the deepest attachment in a life. Converts out-observe the born. The framework can answer that conversion is resocialization, joining a new tribe and undergoing the infusion late, and that answer is probably right, but notice what it concedes: the engine is the tribe, not the childhood. The window never fully closes. <\/p>\n Mearsheimer treats the tribal acquisition of values as one process, and for explaining attachment it is. But cricket’s standards travel between Lahore and Melbourne, and the norm against jailing poets travels too, while the taste for the honorable draw travels poorly. A theory in which all values are tribal infusions has trouble saying why some infusions replicate across tribes and others stay home. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Americans have many ideas for making soccer more exciting, but for billions of people, soccer is just fine as it is. I gave up long ago trying to talk people into fandom. It either works for you or it doesn’t. … Continue reading