Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism

by Andrei S. Markovits, Steven L. Hellerman

Soccer is the world’s favorite pastime, a passion for billions around the globe. In the United States, however, the sport is a distant also-ran behind football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Why is America an exception? And why, despite America’s leading role in popular culture, does most of the world ignore American sports in return? Offside is the first book to explain these peculiarities, taking us on a thoughtful and engaging tour of America’s sports culture and connecting it with other fundamental American exceptionalisms. In so doing, it offers a comparative analysis of sports cultures in the industrial societies of North America and Europe.

The authors argue that when sports culture developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nativism and nationalism were shaping a distinctly American self-image that clashed with the non-American sport of soccer. Baseball and football crowded out the game. Then poor leadership, among other factors, prevented soccer from competing with basketball and hockey as they grew. By the 1920s, the United States was contentedly isolated from what was fast becoming an international obsession.

The book compares soccer’s American history to that of the major sports that did catch on. It covers recent developments, including the hoopla surrounding the 1994 soccer World Cup in America, the creation of yet another professional soccer league, and American women’s global preeminence in the sport. It concludes by considering the impact of soccer’s growing popularity as a recreation, and what the future of sports culture in the country might say about U.S. exceptionalism in general.

Genres: Sports, Soccer, Sociology, Nonfiction, Football, History

367 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2001

About the author

Andrei S. Markovits is Professor of Politics in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous books, including The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond and The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe.

Reviews

[Garrett Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a researcher and enthusiast of soccer this book offers a sobering message on the reality of soccer in the United States. Though this book is now rather dated and some of its predictions have came and went, it shows the optimism American soccer fans felt after the US hosted the 1994 World Cup. It also showed how exciting the prospect of the MLS at its beginning. But, this book also reveals a disappointing truth that in the 20 years that have passed since the publishing of this book, soccer has not firmly planted itself in the American sport space. And as much as current fans of the USMNT like to claim that we are living in a golden generation, soccer as a whole still has miles to go before the US will ever become a true contender in global men’s soccer. Overall this is an a some study that teaches way more about the entire history of professional team sport in the US than one would expect.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Markovits argued that soccer did not catch on over the 20th century in the top 3.5 sports (baseball, gridiron football, basketball, and in some places hockey) of the US because it was crowded out by hegemonic sports that took hold during industrialization’s formative years in the late 19th century. Even when soccer was popular in the United States in the early 20th century, advocates sought to “Americanize” it and largely isolated it from international play. Now, it has been crowded out by other institutional sports, and seen as too middle class and female to surpass the other major sports in the United States, which reinforces the game’s isolation as there are few homegrown American stars, though this has shifted since the books publication in 2001 somewhat. Even as international foods and other popular culture have penetrated American culture, the international love of soccer has largely remained on the margins, limited to immigrants and suburban girls leagues.

Key Themes and Concepts
-Soccer has been “crowded” out compared to the development of basketball, which did not directly compete with baseball or football.

-Culture is a sticky subject, of which class and popular perception are deeply tied, which the author invokes Marx and Weber.

[Tymon Burghy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a research novel, full of great information, not an easy book to read.

[Doreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the fizz of the Euro 2012 Championships had died down, I found myself in serious need of a football fix, so got this from the local library. It was a lot denser than I thought it would be: though it's a sociological study, I'd expected something more readable, along the lines of Moneyball or Soccernomics. Don't get me wrong, it's not that the writing is at all turgid, but the authors have a lot of ground to cover, and if sports history (and, to a certain extent, sociology) isn't your thing, then this definitely isn't the most accessible book around.

However, if you enjoy spectator sports as much as I do, and wonder at why America and the rest of the world are so often at odds with one another over what constitutes a "worthy" sport, then you should definitely read this. While I'm a big fan of DC teams in addition to my beloved Gunners, I've found myself incredibly reluctant to cheer on America in the sport I love most. This book not only helped explain that to me, but actually came very near to convincing me to change my mind. I'll tell you why I still don't/won't though, and it has little to do with the quality of play itself. An anecdote from pg 292 is very illuminating as to the average American's view of the beautiful game:

Longtime sport columnist Joe Falls of the Detroit News: "I asked the Swiss coach, an English chap named Roy Hodgson, if he knew we were about to crown our hockey and basketball champions and if he cared about it. He said no, he didn't care at all. But we, I gather, are supposed to care about them."

Misters Markovits and Hellerman try to paint this as a valid reason for why Americans are touchy about the Big Three And One Half ("if they don't care about ours, why should we care about theirs?") but fail to see that only egotism could persuade America to believe that its domestic competitions should be of interest to international coaches in other sports. It's like asking Garth Brooks if he cares about the winner of Eurovision. It'd be nice if he were interested, but why would anyone be offended if he weren't?

Overall, though, the book does a great job of explaining how different sports came to occupy similar cultural spaces in America and worldwide, and offers an optimistic view of soccer's growing role in the American consciousness in the years to come. As this book was published in 2001, there has elapsed, of course, over an entire decade in which MLS has made great strides, even as the women's league has been, sadly and very recently, folded (the thought of which still makes me huff, "See, America, this is why we can't have nice things!") I'd love to read an updated version of this text, or even a new entrant to the field of sports history along these lines.

And I can't finish this review without adding also my favorite quotation from the book, explaining the appeal of spectator team sports:

"Marriages fail, relationships end, jobs disappear, anything can happen; only one red thread remains reliably through life: team loyalty." -- Roman Horak

Also, Arsenal won their first trophy in years today, teehee! COYG!

[Michael Greening · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read for football aficionados and, more importantly, general sports fans in the US. Much historical review of the development of professional baseball, spherical football, and basketball juxtaposed with the lack of said development for soccer

[Kien Pham · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive review of soccer and America and an explanation on why it never makes it to be the top sport in the country. I wish this book wasn’t so outdated. Would be great if the author writes and update to it.

[Andy Landis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed discuss of soccer in the US and why it hasn't taken off as in the rest of the world.

[David Allan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very heavy going with academic jargon and phrasing. I ended up skimming entire sections that I wasn't really interested in (the history of basketball - pro, college - and youth?)

[Beau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little dense for people who aren't used to reading academic prose, but the analysis is first-rate.