By Robert Whiting (2014)
Thoughts at the conclusion of the World Cup
I don’t really like soccer. Now that the World Cup Tournament has finished and the frenzy has subsided, I feel free to tell you that I think there is something fundamentally off-putting about it. Every game seems the same: 90 minutes of endless non-stop meandering back and forth across a vast field that in the end amounts to a scoreless tie. A great big nothing. You see soccer players kicking the ball down the field to their teammates, only to have it intercepted by the opposing side, who take it back up the field, only to have their own passes intercepted, and then back the other way everyone goes. It all amounts to a lot of movement but really not much action at all—save, of course, for the occasional burst of genius by Messi or some other futbol superstar.
To someone like me who has grown up with the crack of the bat in baseball, the 95 mile per hour fastball, the steal, the hit and run and the other rich tactics of the game, soccer looks to me like sheer luck, a sport devoid of strategy. Scoring is random, rare and, much of the time, accidental. It lacks drama. Of course, that’s not exactly true all the time, but that is certainly the perception you get. For every stunning move you see in soccer, there are a hundred broken, amateurish plays—an expected consequence in a sport where you can’t use your hands.
Part of baseball’s genius, to me, is that although it is a team sport, it is, at its heart, a game of individual matchups: each pitch is a moment frozen in time, the isolated product of mostly discrete and intelligible forces, including talent, research, park effect and planning. Each moment is a data point, each game a data set. It is the perfect arena for statistical inquiry, and, indeed, MLB is awash in statistics of every imaginable type.
On the other hand, soccer is a game of flow. The clock never stops, the whistle never blows, and the action hardly ever resolves neatly, at least until the ball has hit the back of the net. FIFA keeps few statistics more advanced than pass completion percentage, and goals are so rare that—when they aren’t being waved off or ignored by the referee or mucked by the goalie—they seem mostly a matter of pure serendipity.
Also, there is more sportsmanship in baseball. Unlike teams in the World Cup, baseball players do not push and shove when the umpire has his back turned. You don’t see a first baseman grabbing onto a base runner. Most of the time, you see the first baseman give the opposing player a ‘good game’ nod after he gets a single. Moreover, nobody fakes an injury. Soccer players, for their part, fall every five seconds, screaming to the official that they have been mortally wounded.
I am not alone, by the way, in thinking this. Most Americans agree with me. The US has had a professional soccer league for many years now, and while the average value of an MLS team has risen from $37 million to $100 million since 1984, TV ratings have always trailed those of the NFL, NBA and MLB by a significant margin. MLS averages only a mere 174,000 viewers, and the MLS Cup averaged only 505,000 viewers, a fraction of what the recent NBA finals or last year’s World Series drew, with 15.5 million and 14.9 million respectively.
True, 25 million viewers tuned in to watch the U.S. play Portugal, which was more than the 15.5 million viewers who tuned into the NBA finals. But then again, that’s only for the World Cup. It only happens once every four years.
Consider this: millions of American kids have played soccer over the past half century, and admittedly the game has grown as a youth sport. In 1974, there were only 103,432 registered soccer players on American youth teams. Now there are over 13 million (compared to 26.3 million who play basketball and 11.5 million youths playing baseball, which incidentally has been losing ground).
But that is primarily because soccer is a game that parents want their kids to play because it forces them to exercise. They drop their kids off at soccer and they know they’re going to run around like maniacs for an hour. When they watch baseball practice, they often see them standing around in the outfield while the coach throws batting practice.
However, it is telling that those millions of youth soccer players do not grow up watching professional soccer on TV.
As a friend of mine put it—a man who played youth soccer in America but can’t stand to watch it on TV—”It’s a 90 minute borefest with little to no action. Goals are rarely scored and 80% of matches end 1-0 or worse, in ties! Stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.”
As former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar put it in a recent Time magazine essay, “Soccer doesn’t fully express the American ethos as powerfully as other popular sports. Americans are a country of pioneers, explorers and contrarians who only need someone to say it can’t be done to fire us up to prove otherwise. As a result, we like to see extraordinary effort rewarded. The low scoring in soccer frustrates this American impulse.”
Japan, like America, is another country where soccer is not the most popular sport. In Japan soccer trails behind baseball in all fan surveys of spectator sports by a factor of almost 2-1. Interestingly, most of the highest-rated televised sporting events of the past 20 years have been soccer matches—special one-off events such as the Asian Cup, World Cup qualifiers, etc., events that stroked the national ego. In normal times, however, the J-League lags behind the NPB and even Koshien high school baseball.
To be completely fair, however, it all comes down to what you grew up with, doesn’t it? Grow up with baseball, you are a lifetime fan; grow up with soccer, you are a soccer nut for life. Indians and Pakistanis, for their part, are crazy about cricket, which has a long history in those two nations. Cricket is a sport I tried to learn when I was living in Karachi but was unable to appreciate. (Indian TV is even making an Indian cricket version of Kyojin no Hoshi.)
I once tried my best to convert a friend from Switzerland, a dyed-in-the-wool soccer fan, to baseball—I took him to Korakuen Stadium, spent hours explaining the game, but he never did take to it. When I complained to him that I preferred baseball to soccer because in soccer no one ever scores, he replied that in baseball, no one ever moves!
In the case of Japan and the US, both countries have a long history of playing the game, dating back to the 19th century. It’s part of the national culture and the national character in both nations. In fact, baseball was Japan’s first real group sport.
In poorer countries soccer is ideal because, unlike baseball, which requires equipment, uniforms and a proper field, soccer costs barely any money to play. It is cheap entertainment and a way out of poverty. Poor people all over the world who can barely read can become pros easily.
Soccer enjoyed a mini-boom in Japan in the early 90s and gets a lot of attention during international play, as mentioned earlier. But it is baseball that fills Japan’s need to be internationally recognized. In baseball Japan has a chance to compete and win against the best, while in soccer it does not, despite the best efforts of big media in Japan to promote that idea.
Japan has produced some of the best baseball players in the world, including a pitcher capable of becoming a Cy Young Award winner and MVP winner at the same time. You probably think I am referring to Tanaka, but I could just as well be referring to Darvish or Iwakuma.
The day when Japan produces a soccer player of that magnitude is, I fear, a long, long way away. So I think that Japan, along with America, will remain a country where baseball reigns supreme.
Tokyo Junkie 