If you have time to add a little reading to your entertainment plans during the coming month, I have a recommendation: Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow. Although I am only a quarter of the way into it, it’s clear that the author’s unhurried and poetic way of depicting the soul in the story of soccer is something special. Galeano’s language resurrects long-dead South American heroes, with much affection reserved for those from his native Uruguay. Was there really magic in their feet, or was the beauty of those wonder goals embellished by the writer’s imagination? It doesn’t matter. Read it and be reminded of the joyful allure of a simple game long before the players grew to larger-than-life dimensions on the world stage.
In one vignette, Galeano describes soccer’s role as a ladder to escape from abject poverty. “The ball is the only fairy godmother he can believe in. Maybe she will feed him, maybe she will make him a hero, maybe even a god.”
I couldn’t shake that metaphor from my thoughts last night.
According to the U.S. Soccer website, all but six of the twenty-three national team members in Germany attended college. This would come as a surprise only to anyone who forgot the raison d’etre of the soccer mom. And that is to manage the extracurricular activities of her offspring, her eyes kept squarely on the prize: building a quality resume to boost Junior’s chances of admission to a good university. An offer of an athletic “scholarship” is icing on the cake. Club fees and expenses even for average traveling soccer clubs demand an investment of at least $1000 per year and elite teams that offer more training and advanced competition cost even more. It takes, you see, much more than a makeshift spherical object and a bit of open space to create an American soccer player.
It is true that those players who exhibit tremendous talent at a young age bypass the university route and accept professional contracts as teenagers. Landon Donovan, Bobby Convey, DaMarcus Beasley, and Jonathan Spector come to mind. Yet these talented players are the exception and not the rule because most Americans are loathe to let go of the dream of higher education.
Much ink has been spilled recently in the search for answers as to why Americans remain, at best, standoffish about soccer. Deeply entangled in this indifference is the related issue of the national team’s performance. It’s a chicken-egg question to which no one has the definitive answer: do Americans dislike soccer because we’ve never come close to winning the World Cup, or have our teams underperformed because of national disinterest?
Maybe all that is beside the point. I began to wonder if Americans would ever be able to compete against players for whom the game is, quite simply, their only means of breaking free from the confines of the economic and social castes into which they were born. The soccer mom is always there to comfort her child and help him (or her) navigate through life well into adulthood. But does she–and the comfortable world of which she is merely a representative–rob those young players of an essential ingredient in the recipe for creating truly great competitors–hunger?
4 comments on “Some Thoughts on Fairy Godmothers and Soccer Moms on the Eve of the Cup”
First off, there is a corelation between per person GDP and soccer prowess. =”http://www.gs.com/insight/research/reports/docs/WCB2006.pdf”>Here is a study by Goldman Sachs on the World Cup, check out page 8. Yes the FIFA rankings are bunk, but they are close enough for this purpose.
It is the immigrants and lower classes in these countries that produce most of the players, just like they do for football and basketball here.
Yes the US has more college players than not. But that is because soccer isn’t where the money is at. To get out the inner city American kids turn to basketball or (american) football the way Brazilian kids turn to soccer to get out of the favela.
If more people watched soccer, more money would pour in, more inner city kids would play as a ticket out. We have plenty of inequality in the US to have poor kids trying to better their situation. Plus there is a world class infastructure to help them along once they show promise.
The chicken and egg problem lives, and once we figure it out, we will have little problem. And the way to figure it out may just be through our immigrant population, who are mostly hispanic and come from a soccer background while not doing as well as the average american.
Not to mention the fact that we are ahead of a whole lot of teams with our good ole college boys.
What’s on today?!?!
An English saying says “A simple question calls for a simple answer”. I know that many hear the typical question, What’s on TV tonight? … oh, this is the moment we’ve been longing for, no need to go through the newspapers …
This goes to the point that soccer in the US is mostly taken up by the wealthiest in the socio-economic strata- who have other goals (pun un-intended)in mind.
Soccer has to find alternate spaces other than ex-urban/ suburban to thrive.
There is the ODP program that addresses just that but it still lacks visibility. DeMarcus Beasley is the only protege of the ODP.
Fred Guzman has some valuable insights into the current state of affairs-
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=364126&cc=5901
Kinney,
Many thanks for the GS report! That will keep me entertained in between matches. I can hardly believe that they got input from Beckham and Edwin van der Sar wrote part of it?
The correlation between per capita GNP and FIFA ranking is at its weakest among the most highly ranked teams (which are the lowest numbers, explaining the negative correlation). The data points are scattered pretty far from the line–so you have both wealthy and relatively poor nations with high rankings. So there’s something else going on and I would suggest that it has something to do with total population and cultural differences. The Czech Rep. truly overperforms given the population constraint and we (USA) definitely underperform. Yes we have done pretty well with the college guys–I’m not saying that college is bad, it’s that our players have a different mindset as they approach their careers.
Yes, if there were more money in US soccer then some inner city kids would turn to it as their ticket out (if funding could be provided, as Shourin alluded to). And it really should be a good means of escape for those kids because not everyone can be a 7′ NBA player or 300 pound lineman.
The point I was trying to get at in my (rambling) post was that soccer is played here by people who have much higher opportunity costs–they have more valuable options that they are giving up than a kid from the “favela.” Shourin is absolutely right in noting that the families of these players have other goals. And inner-city families want their children to get an education even more fervantly. I’m not suggesting that it’s a bad thing about our society because of course it’s a good thing. I was simply wondering if our relatively privileged players can ever match the intense desire of those whose opportunity costs are so low. Maybe the much-scorned American players are equally eager to prove themselves to the world–just for different reasons. Let’s hope so!