Viva futbol!

I got to the Seattle airport early, figuring that
between Boingo’s wireless and the
Delta
Crown Room that I’d be able to get some work done.
Of course, I didn’t count on the World Cup.
The TV was tuned to ESPN, which was broadcasting the

Korea-Italy game. I started watching just after the 23rd minute and ended up
watching, off and on, for the rest of regulation time.

Korea’s strength is its
relentlessness: they are fast, they swarm on offense, and they never, ever quit.
I was a little surprised by the number of times that Italian players blew shots
by rushing; they’d have had an easy win if even half of the blown shots had hit
home.

Since I coach
AYSO youth soccer, I may have slightly more
appreciation of soccer than the average American, but it’s a fascinating game in
many respects. It demands a great deal of coordinated teamwork, like basketball,
but it combines that teamwork with a requirement to exploit the field spaces
(and gaps between opposing players) in a way similar to baseball or hockey. I
read an interesting editorial the other day in the Alexandria Town Talk;
its thesis was that soccer hasn’t caught on here because its loose structure
(and the presence of a single ref, instead of the multiple zebras found in all
American sports) doesn’t appeal to rules-minded Americans. I’m not entirely sure
that this is true; I think that the the emergence of new sports provides a
better explanation. MLS hasn’t caught on to be as popular as Major League
Baseball or the NFL yet, but it is almost certainly more popular than the WNBA,
arenaFootball2, the NBDL, and other second- or third-tier pro sports. (Actually,
the Columbus Crew is the only MLS team that consistently makes money from
attendance, which puts MLS squarely in the same boat with most of these other
leagues).

That’s OK. The US doesn’t have an official religion or language, and
there’s no reason to expect that a single sport will continue to be dominant.
Soccer may never become as popular here as in, say, Brasil, but I suspect that
as the young kids I coach grow up and have kids of their own that soccer will
eventually become coequal with pro baseball, football, and basketball.
(Personally, I’d be happy to export the entire NBA to some other country and
have soccer take its place; I have no use for the kinds of behavior and attitude
exhibited by all-too-many NBA players and owners.) And don’t get me started about Major League Baseball.