Friday, January 18, 2013

Soccer: The Dirtiest Word You Can Say

I am an American soccer fan. And with that statement alone, I am able to aggravate the majority of people within this country, and perhaps even more abroad.


Domestically, we know that most people dislike soccer. We've seen our countrymen sneer in disgust when soccer highlights take up precious airtime on SportsCenter. It's just become a generally accepted fact in our culture that soccer isn't for Americans, and the few who dare to question why and defy the rule are greeted with eye rolls and shaking heads.

Internationally, we may fare even worse. The only things that make the contempt from overseas moderately bearable is that they have reasons to dislike us. The very word "soccer" is seen as an attempt to distance ourselves from the sport that almost every other country in the world calls "football"*. Another reason is how fed up the rest of the world has become with American hegemony. Soccer was one of a decreasing number of places where the world could look smugly down at our bumbling attempts at adequacy. But even this has been slowly chipped away by some American successes in recent years. As a Mexican fan described it in Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy, "When the Americans like something, they take it over."

As American soccer fans, we are not well liked. We are not fully understood. And we are absolutely not a significant voice domestically, or internationally. But we are growing, day by day. And this blog is meant to help facilitate that. "Soccer" may be a dirty word now, but us fans are continually finding new places to shout it, and new voices to add in the chant. Someday it will be sung with pride and well respected by people around the world. With our combined efforts, we are bringing that day closer.
One match at a time.



*Let me attempt to dispel this small matter once and for all by saying it's not our fault. We didn't invent the word "soccer". It's short for "association football" and was coined in England in the late 19th century. In fact, many other countries use variations on the term "soccer" to describe the sport, typically countries in which the name "football" had already been given to another sport, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and parts of Ireland.

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