American Soccer Fan Culture

Growing up playing soccer in the United States is both a blessing and a curse. Most of us became fans of the most popular sport in the entire world, yet in the United States the sport has a third tier status that receives only a fraction of coverage and attention of the major sports in the US. I am old enough to remember the rise and fall of the North American Soccer League. There was the New York Cosmos, and everybody else, including my hometown’s team, the Washington Diplomats, which were never very good at all.

Major League Soccer seems to be holding strong. Their “one entity” ownership is more or less working for the moment, but there have been many a discussion between AR staffers about one of the crueler aspects of the league: entry level players barely make a living wage, and by “living wage” I mean living in a group house and eating lots of ramen noodles. Yes, the bigger players, and “washed up” international stars on the decline can do pretty well, but for the beginners, MLS mostly seems to be a pathway to get to Europe where the “real” money is.

It is interesting to see how English-speaking soccer coverage has slowly but surely been expanding in the US over the past decade. [Note I said English speaking. I’ll get back to that.] There used to be Fox Sports World, which had a mix of soccer and rugby—basically it looked like it was set up for ex-pats from England and Australia. In 2005 (according to the all-knowing Wikipedia) They changed to Fox Soccer Channel and dedicated nearly all their programming to the beautiful game (soccer) and countless pre-paid commercial blocks for baldness and acne cures, knife sets, and other ineffective cleaning and automotive products.

Another network on the scene is GolTV, their ownership is based in Uruguay, so the channel has a lot more Spanish speaking programming and coverage, but with the US headquarters based in Florida, there are plenty of games covered in English, including Jeremy’s favorite color commentator, Ray Hudson (who coached DC United for a spell). Before these two football-exclusive channels came along all we had was an occasional bone thrown to us by ESPN and ABC. There were also Spanish-only channels like Telemundo and Univision that would have some soccer on, usually Mexican league. With my extremely horrible Spanish, I never picked up on much.

Albion Road HQ is lucky to be in Washington DC, where a lot of people from different parts of the globe converge. Big international football derbies and the Euro cup used to be reserved for pay-per-view soccer-friendly bar events and embassies. Now there is a lot more on television, and even the Euro-cup is on regular cable.

All of this is to say that things have gotten a lot better, but we need better writing and commentary in the US. There are a few exceptions like the great work by local Washington Post writer Steven Goff [full disclosure, I also work for the Washington Post, though in the circulation side of things]. Nearly all of the most interesting and insightful writing, in English at least, still comes from writers from the United Kingdom. Soccer's lower status in the United States equals not-so-great writing, and the television commentary is marginal. Just all of my fellow footy-obsessed friends complain about butchering the pronunciation of player's names (along with a few teams names and stadiums).

I realize TV commentary is a very large punching bag. Even in my trips to England I was less than impressed with what the talking heads were saying, and that was in the country that invented the bloody sport. In the US we have a few ex pats that do most of the heavy lifting, along with a handful of Americans that do their best. With all sports commentary it's hard to strike the right balance between being informative and insightful versus annoying and chatty. Since soccer coverage in the United States is relatively young there are not that many commentators to choose from. The ex-players all come off as a bit odd to me. The coach types are a bit better.

Please let me know what you think. In the great words of the Alan Parsons Project, “Where do we go from here?”