Like many U.S. citizens, I spend much of my free time thinking about the future of sports and the future of our children. This is because I care deeply about sports.
In the spirit of both, I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come. But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country, and that soccer will eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying, and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana. After the U.S. placed eighth in the 2002 World Cup tournament, team forward Clint Mathis said, “If we can turn one more person who wasn’t a soccer fan into a soccer fan, we’ve accomplished something.” Apparently, that’s all that matters to these idiots. They won’t be satisfied until we’re all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth[35] is somehow noble. However, I know this will never happen. Not really. Dumb bunnies like Clint Mathis will be wrong forever, and that might be the only thing saving us from ourselves.
My personal war against the so-called “soccer menace” probably reached its peak in 1993, when I was nearly fired from a college newspaper for suggesting that soccer was the reason thousands of Brazilians are annually killed at Quiet Riot concerts in Rio de Janeiro, a statement that is—admittedly—only half true. A few weeks after the publication of said piece, a petition to have me removed as the newspaper’s sports editor was circulated by a ridiculously vocal campus organization called the Hispanic American Council, prompting an “academic hearing” where I was accused (with absolute seriousness) of libeling Pelé. If memory serves, I think my criticism of soccer and Quiet Riot was somehow taken as latently racist, although—admittedly—I’m not completely positive, as I was intoxicated for most of the monthlong episode. But the bottom line is that I am still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or—at the very least—convinces people to shut up about it).
According to the Soccer Industry Council of America, soccer is the No. 1 youth participation sport in the U.S. There are more than 3.6 million players under the age of nineteen registered to play, and that number has been expanding at over 8 percent a year since 1990. There’s also been a substantial increase in the number of kids who play past the age of twelve, a statistic that soccer proponents are especially thrilled about. “These are the players that will go on to be fans, referees, coaches, adult volunteers, and players in the future,” observed Virgil Lewis, chairman of the United States Youth Soccer Association.
Certainly, I can’t argue with Virgil’s math: I have no doubt that battalions of Gatorade-stained children are running around the green wastelands of suburbia, randomly kicking a black-and-white ball in the general direction of tuna netting. However, Lewis’s larger logic is profoundly flawed. There continues to be this blindly optimistic belief that all of the brats playing soccer in 2003 are going to be crazed MSBL fans in 2023, just as it was assumed that eleven-year-old soccer players in 1983 would be watching Bob Costas provide play-by-play for indoor soccer games right now. That will never happen. We will never care about soccer in this country. And it’s not just because soccer is inherently un-American, which is what most soccer haters (Frank Deford, Jim Rome, et al.) tend to insinuate. It’s mostly because soccer is inherently geared toward Outcast Culture.
On the surface, one might assume that would actually play to soccer’s advantage, as America has plenty of outcasts. Some American outcasts are very popular, such as OutKast.[36] But Outcast Culture does not meld with Intimidation Culture, and the latter aesthetic has always been a cornerstone of team sports. An outcast can be intimidating in an individual event—Mike Tyson and John McEnroe are proof—but they rarely thrive in the social environment of a team organism (e.g., Duane Thomas, Pete Maravich, Albert Belle, et al.). Unless you’re Barry Bonds, being an outcast is antithetical to the group concept. But soccer is the one sport that’s an exception to that reality: Soccer unconsciously rewards the outcast, which is why so many adults are fooled into thinking their kids love it. The truth is that most children don’t love soccer; they simply hate the alternatives more. For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game. These are the kids who are afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they’re now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls. Basketball games actually stop to recognize their failure. And football is nothing more than an ironical death sentence; somehow, outcasts find themselves in a situation where the people normally penalized for teasing them are suddenly urged to annihilate them.
This is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification; it’s the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1–0 or 2–1.[37] A normal eleven-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions. Soccer feels “fun” because it’s not terrifying—it’s the only sport where you can’t fuck up. An outcast can succeed simply by not failing, and public failure is every outcast’s deepest fear. For society’s prepubescent pariahs, soccer represents safety.
However, the demand for such an oasis disappears once an outcast escapes from the imposed slavery of youth athletics; by the time they reach ninth grade, it’s perfectly acceptable to just quit the team and shop at Hot Topic. Most youth soccer players end up joining the debate team before they turn fifteen. Meanwhile, the kind of person who truly loves the notion of sports (and—perhaps sadly—unconsciously needs to have sports in their life) doesn’t want to watch a game that’s designed for losers. They’re never going to care about a sport where announcers inexplicably celebrate the beauty of missed shots and the strategic glory of repetitive stalemates. We want to see domination. We want to see athletes who don’t look like us, and who we could never be. We want to see people who could destroy us, and we want to feel like that desire is normal. But those people don’t exist in soccer; their game is dominated by mono-monikered clones obsessed with falling to their knees and ripping off their clothes. I can’t watch a minute of professional soccer without feeling like I’m looking at a playground of desperate, depressed fourth-graders, all trying to act normal and failing horribly.
In short, soccer players kind of remind me of “my guys.”
Now, when I say “my guys,” I don’t mean kids who are actually mine, as I am not father material (or human material, or even Sleestak material). When I say “my guys,” I am referring to a collection of scrappy, rag-tag, mostly unremarkable fourth-and fifth-graders I governed when I was sixteen years old. During the summer in 1988, I worked as a totally unqualified Little League baseball coach. This is noteworthy for one reason and one reason only: I remain the only youth sports instructor in the history of my town who was ever fired, a distinction that has made me both a legend and an antihero (at least among “my guys”). And even though I happened to be coaching the game of baseball that summer, this was the experience that galvanized my hatred for the game of soccer—and particularly my hatred for the ideology that would eventually become the Youth Soccer Phenomenon.
Between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I applied to coach Pee Wee and Midget baseball in Wyndmere, North Dakota, the tiny farming town (pop. 498) where I lived and breathed and listened to Guns N’ Roses. The competition for this position was not intense: There were twenty-three kids in my class and only fourteen in the grade ahead of me, and almost all of the other boys had to spend the summer working on their family farms. Theoretically, I should have been in the same position. However, I was too clever to farm and too lazy to work, and I simply had no interest in shit like cultivating (or in cultivating shit, for that matter). Instead, I decided to spend my summer coaching Pee Wee and Midget baseball for $250 a month. I had to deliver my job application to the Wyndmere Park Board, and—since this job was always given to local high school boys—one of the questions on the application asked who my role models were. I wrote “Bobby Knight and George Orwell,” and I wasn’t joking. But it really didn’t matter what I wrote, since I was the only applicant. “We’re excited by your enthusiasm,” said the vaguely blonde Park Board president.
We had practice three times a week. The Pee Wee kids worked out from 9 A.M. to 10 A.M., and this was always a horrifically boring sixty minutes. These were really little kids (like, under four feet tall), and they hit off a batting tee. As long as nobody broke their clavicle or vomited, I viewed practice as a success. Only one kid had any talent (a left-handed shortstop!), but aptitude was pretty much a nonfactor: I played everybody the same amount and generally tried to act like that black dude from Reading Rainbow. I mostly just tried to convince them to stop throwing rocks at birds.
The Midgets, however, were a different story. Though not vastly dissimilar in age (the Pee Wees were eight-and nine-year-olds and the Midgets were ten and eleven), the Midgets were “my guys,” and I intended to turn them into a war machine. At the Midget level, there was real pitching. There was base stealing. There was bunting. And—at least in my vision—there was hitting and running, double switching, outfield shading, middle-relieving, and a run-manufacturing offensive philosophy modeled after Whitey Herzog’s St. Louis Cardinals. I’m convinced we were the only Midget League team in North Dakota history to have a southpaw closer. I even implemented the concept of physical conditioning to my preseason regime, which immediately raised the eyebrows of some of the less-competitive parents. However, my explanation for making ten-year-olds run wind sprints was always well-founded. “The running is not important, in and of itself,” I told one skeptical mother. “What’s important is that ‘my guys’ realize that success doesn’t come without work.” Weeks later, I would learn that this mother respected my idealism but disliked the way I casually used the phrase “in and of itself.”
To be honest, I was merely coaching these kids the way I had wanted to be coached when I was in fourth grade. I was a pretty fucking insane ten-year-old. I was the kind of kid who hated authority—but sports coaches were always an inexplicable exception. For whatever the reason, a coach could tell me anything and I’d just stand there and listen; he could degrade me or question my intelligence or sit me on the bench to prove a point that had absolutely nothing to do with anything I did, and I always assumed it was completely valid. I never cared that much about winning on an emotional level, but winning always made sense to me intellectually; it seemed like the logical thing to want. Mostly, I just wanted the process of winning to be complicated. I was fascinated by anything that made sports more cerebral and less physical; as a consequence, my coaching style became loosely patterned on the life of Wile E. Coyote. We’d practice conventionally from 10:00 to 11:00, but then we’d spend forty-five minutes memorizing a battery of unnecessary third-base signals (I recall that tugging on my “belt” meant “bunt,” because both words start with the letter b). I also assaulted their fifth-grade cerebellums with dozens of strategic hypotheticals: “Let’s assume our opponent has runners on first and third with no outs, and they send the trail runner to second with the count at 0–2,” I would theorize. “What is our objective?” One frail kid with eyeglasses answered pretty much everything; most of the others just discussed their favorite flavors of Big League Chew. I constantly questioned their commitment to excellence.
Still, four or five of “my guys” were oddly enthusiastic about my Pyramid of Success, and that was enough to kill (or at least scare) most of our early season opponents. But what I kept noticing was that the other fifteen kids on my squad didn’t care if we won or lost. They didn’t seem to care about anything, really, or at least nothing that had an application to baseball. I couldn’t tell what they found more excruciating: when they didn’t get to play (because sitting on the bench was boring), or when they had to play (because that meant another two strikeouts and an hour of praying that no fly balls would be hit in their general direction). In fact, some of “my guys” started complaining to their mothers. And near the end of June, I was told to attend the next Wyndmere Park Board meeting for a “free-form discussion about my coaching style.”
Now, it should be noted that Wyndmere didn’t really need a park board, because Wyndmere doesn’t have a park. Wyndmere does have the Rock Garden (not a rock garden, but the Rock Garden), which is a stone enclosure that’s as big as a city block and augmented by a forty-foot replica of a Scottish castle (it also has a basketball court and several uncomfortable picnic tables). When, who, or why the Rock Garden was built remains a mystery on par with Stonehenge, so living in Wyndmere always made you feel a little like Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of. And what’s even crazier is that the Wyndmere Park Board had no clear jurisdiction over the Wyndmere Rock Garden; the Wyndmere Park Board seemed to exclusively serve as a legislative body for Little League athletics. When the secretary read the minutes from the May meeting, the only item was, “Board approves motion to hire Chuck Klosterman as baseball coach.”
Now, had I only been meeting with the actual park board members, I suspect the whole affair would have gone smoothly: I would have outlined my goal-oriented mission statement and expressed deep affinity for the future of “my guys,” and I would have exited the meeting with nothing more than a gentle reminder to keep everyone’s best interest in mind. I have no problem pretending to be conciliatory if the ends justify the means. Unfortunately, a few mothers showed up at the meeting that night as well. And—as we all know—there is nothing more frustrating than a mother who cares about her children.
Predictably, these were the mothers of kids who really had no interest in baseball, or in sports, or in competing against other children in any meaningful way. And that’s fine; these kids were great people (possibly), and have gone on to fine careers (perhaps) and wonderful families (I assume). There’s nothing admirable about having the kind of killer instinct that always felt normal to a weirdo like me. I mean, these little guys didn’t want to spend two months chasing a stupid leather sphere through the stupid green grass in stupid right field; they just wanted to do something that kept them under the radar until they got to tenth grade, when they could quit pretending they cared about sports and start listening to Replacements cassettes. I’m sure my guys would have loved youth soccer.
But ANYWAY, suffice it to say the mothers of these kids didn’t see it that way. They seemed to believe their sons actually adored baseball and were being discriminated against, apparently for being crappy baseball players. I decided to prove them wrong by grabbing a dictionary and reciting the exact Webster definition of “discrimination,” which inadvertently proved their point entirely. But—somehow—this still felt like a draw. Their second argument was that I was setting a bad example by starting the same nine kids in every game, and that the starters should either be selected randomly or alphabetically; I argued that this was like giving every student the same grade on a test no matter how many questions they answered correctly (not a flawless analogy, I realize, but I was always good at rhetorical misdirection). They went on to propose that every player should get to try every position over the course of the season, a suggestion I deemed “unprofessional.” And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: “Why are you telling me how to do my job?” I asked. “It’s not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies.”
In my defense, I did not mean to imply that these women were only suited for cookie-oriented purposes, and I was fully aware that the particular person I told this to worked in a bank (which actually might have made things worse). My statement was to be taken at face value and as a point of fact. However, the park board found this “exchange of ideas” rather damaging to my case and immediately adopted all of the mothers’ suggestions, all of which I unabashedly ignored in our very next game (a 16–6 drubbing of our hated rivals from Fairmount). When I jumped into my father’s pickup truck after the contest, I noticed an envelope under the windshield wiper: I had been terminated for “insubordination.” This did not strike me as an especially brave way to fire a sixteen-year-old, but I knew that was how the industry operated; one year later, the same thing would happen to Tom Landry.
Now, perhaps you’re curious as to how my ill-fated experience as a baseball coach has anything to do with my maniacal distaste for soccer; on the surface, probably nothing. But in that larger, deeper, “what-does-it-all-mean?” kind of way, the connection is clear. What those anti-cookie-baking mothers wanted me to do was turn baseball into soccer. They wanted a state-sponsored Outcast Culture. They wanted to watch their kids play a game where their perfect little angels could not fuck up, and that would somehow make themselves feel better about being parents.
Soccer fanatics love to tell you that soccer is the most popular game on earth and that it’s played by 500 million people every day, as if that somehow proves its value. Actually, the opposite is true. Why should I care that every single citizen of Chile and Iran and Gibraltar thoughtlessly adores “futball”? Do the people making this argument also assume Coca-Cola is ambrosia? Real sports aren’t for everyone. And don’t accuse me of being the Ugly American for degrading soccer. That has nothing to do with it. It’s not xenophobic to hate soccer; it’s socially reprehensible to support it. To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of competition and the capacity of the human spirit. It should surprise no one that Benito Mussolini loved being photographed with Italian soccer stars during the 1930s; they were undoubtedly kindred spirits. I would sooner have my kid deal crystal meth than play soccer. Every time I pull up behind a Ford Aerostar with a “#1 Soccer Mom” bumper sticker, I feel like I’m marching in the wake of the Khmer Rouge.
That said, I don’t feel my thoughts on soccer are radical. If push came to shove, I would be more than willing to compromise: It’s not necessary to wholly outlaw soccer as a living entity. I concede that it has a right to exist. All I ask is that I never have to see it on television, that it’s never played in public (or supported with public funding), and that nobody—and I mean nobody—ever utters the phrase “Soccer is the sport of the future” for the next forty thousand years. Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class. Your hopeless dystopia shall never befall us, Mr. Pelé. Now get back in that Aerostar and return to the killing fields.
1. And losing to Poland!
2. And also Jake Gyllenhaal.
3. My statistically obsessed compadre Jon Blixt once made a brilliant deduction about World Cup soccer: It must be a nightmare for gamblers. “I cannot comprehend how casinos could set the point spread for these games, as it appears the favored nation wins every single match—yet never by a margin of more than a single goal,” he wrote me while watching Italy defeat Bulgaria 2–1 in a 1994 World Cup semifinal, a contest that was immediately followed by Brazil’s 1–0 win over Sweden. “Perhaps they only bet the over-under, which must always be 2 ½.”