It’s worth taking a look at the nature of sport, particularly team sports, in the US to really understand where I’m coming from on this. You see, around the world there are some sports that really catch the imagination of not just nations, but continents as well. Soccer is the prime example of this contagious love for a game that can change lives.
Let’s take Brazil as an example of what soccer means all over the world. How many people can tell you something about one of the largest countries in the world: the Amazon rainforest and… oh yeah, soccer.
Pelé is the undisputed king of football and sums up everything about Brazil for the outside world. An ordinary boy with extraordinary ability, he became the most well-known footballer of all time. The name ‘Pelé’ is familiar to all children in Europe, Asia and Africa: he is the player they want to become, the game he wanted to play. But in America kids grow up wanting to play a sport that will probably never see them outside of their own backyard!
football : Played almost exclusively in the US, and yet it is one of America’s biggest sports. It is impossible to imagine that this game could have been devised from something other than Rugby, with a big helping of protective padding to allow even weak kids to join in! All that protection and a separate team for offense, defense and kicks, and yet it’s played at such a pace that it takes nearly four hours to get through.
Baseball : It could hardly have been more like rounders if you tried, the only difference is that Rounders is for girls! I can understand that some might even suggest that it is actually Cricket that may be the non-American version of baseball, but there would be ten times as many who would swoon at the thought. Cricket has become one of the most important parts of life in some of the poorest areas of the world such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Baseball, on the other hand, is limited to the US, with a Japanese team included to make a World Series!
Basketball : Like baseball, many Americans’ favorite is derived from a European girls’ game called basketball. Not being able to abide by the rules, the USA boys started running with the ball and bouncing it, they gave it a new name and now we have Basketball.
So am I being un-American here? Certainly not. US sports fans love their game of choice, just like the rest of us around the world. We have our superstar footballers and they have Michael Jordan. The problem is the perception of those of us who share a global fascination with the same sports, while the US seems to avoid international competition by inventing its own sports and not letting the rest of us participate. In my opinion, there would be nothing better for soccer than Americans backing it 100%, throwing an obscene amount of money at it, and making it the only truly global game. The chances are slim, but we can only hope.
