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Downtown Eugene
125 W. 11th Avenue
exp. 7/31/12
SUN-SAT 9am-8pm
541-342-8666
FOR THE LOVE OF SOCCER
BY KEN PENDLETON
S
occer has been dismissed by American critics for a number of
reasons: There is too little scoring; it doesn’t make sense to rely
on your feet when you can use your hands; and then there’s the
alleged lack of masculinity, especially in comparison to sports
like American football.
There is some truth to these allegations. No other sport that is
popular in the U.S. regularly results in zero-zero outcomes. A game
without goals is perceived as a day without sunshine. It’s a lot easier
to catch or throw a ball with your hands than it is to trap and accurately
kick it with your feet, and soccer certainly isn’t as violent as its
gridironed cousin. In fact, the rules, however liberally applied, make it
clear that physical contact should be kept to a minimum.
There is, however, another way to look at the exact same set of
facts.
Most goalless matches are hard to watch, but the problem is not the
lack of goals; it is the lack of willingness to take the risks necessary to
score them. Soccer is like boxing: Every time you try to land a punch,
you expose yourself to a counter-attack. And sometimes you have
matches, whether in boxing or soccer, where neither side has the guts
to expose defensive vulnerabilities. Conversely, the best matches
occur when both teams have the confidence to take initiative and trade
blows.
Furthermore, the relative lack of scoring in soccer means that most
matches are close. I would be willing to bet that most Ducks football
games are effectively settled midway through the third quarter, which
is why so many fans never return from a halftime drinking binge —
this is rarely the case in soccer. Most matches are settled by the odd
goal and you feel genuinely gleeful the few times your team is winning
by a wider margin, because it happens so rarely.
The fact that players, besides the goalkeeper, cannot use their hands
also adds to the tension during matches. You expect a basketball player
to catch a ball with his hands if it’s passed 30 feet, even if he is being
covered tightly, but it is much harder for a soccer player. This is why
low-quality matches are harder to watch. The basic constituent parts of
play — controlling a pass, dribbling, passing and shooting accurately
— are much harder to master. This is why soccer seems more
disjointed than, say, basketball, but it also makes you appreciate the
few teams, most notably Barcelona, who are able to make something
so difficult look so easy. There is another upside to using one’s feet:
The ball can be kicked farther than it can be thrown, and it can be made
to bend dramatically using the inside or the outside of one’s foot.
Combine all these elements and you can understand why goals scored
in soccer have a richer aesthetic quality than points scored in any other
sport.
Finally, there is the issue of the supposed lack of manliness. I say
supposed because soccer can be pretty rough. The form that violence
takes can range from the inadvertent but inevitable kick on the shin to
ruthless, injurious aggression. The bottom line is that soccer, like
baseball and basketball, is a contact sport that sometimes degenerates
into a collision sport.
The differences between these three sports, on the one hand, and
football and hockey, on the other, is that brutal bodily contact is not
inevitable. Now, if your standard for manliness requires high-speed,
bone-jarring, bell-ringing, slobber-knocking impact, then you are quite
right to condemn soccer and these other sports because they don’t
sanction such carnage. But all these sports, especially soccer, do strike
what might be described as a healthy balance between balletic grace
and physicality.
This is well illustrated by the fact that the best player in the world,
Lionel Messi, is 5’7” and weighs around 150 pounds. He could never
succeed in football or hockey, or even basketball or baseball, but
soccer is still a game that places as much, or more, of a premium on
skill as it does on physical stature. That may be at odds with the
American definition of masculinity, which is based on the ideal that
bigger must be better, but the rest of the world does not share that view
— which is why soccer is the world’s game.
Ken Pendleton earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the UO in 1998, but his fi rst love, for better or
for worse, is sports, and in particular soccer. He currently teaches courses on sports and society in
the Competition Not Confl ict program, which is part of the UO Law School.