War may still be the world’s most popular team sport, but soccer does better in the TV ratings. In 1986, the global TV audience for the culminating match of the quadrennial World Cup was half a billion people. That’s five times the audience for a Super Bowl, and many times the live audience that watched our invasion of Panama (which resembled the World Cup in many ways).
Why have all attempts to build a mass TV audience for the world’s game failed in the U.S.? Partly because of TV. Television does not do a good job of translating the game of soccer for U.S. audiences—at least according to Joan Chandler, a British-born anthropologist who teaches at the University of Texas. Her study of the ways sports cultures are reflected on TV in the U.S. and Britain resulted in the 1988 book Television and National Sport, published by the University of Illinois Press as part of its “Sport and Society” series.
Seen on TV, the paucity of play is disguised. The viewer is distracted by commercials, promos, and replays. Indeed, a generation of fans that grew up with such distractions grows restless in a stadium; the aim of the giant replay screens and annoying rock music between innings at baseball games is to simulate the TV version of the game that audiences have become used to.
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The aim of TV coverage in soccer-watching nations is to duplicate the experience of being in the stadium. The longish shot from cameras high in the stands that is the staple of match coverage preserves this illusion. Cameras and microphones are modestly deployed so that (apart from occasional close- ups and replays) the fan at home sees very little that his counterpart in the stadium cannot see.
This resolute focus on the field frustrates U.S. producers eager to create—and if necessary invent—the atmosphere of a live stadium event. For instance, in 1986 an NBC producer griped to Soccer America magazine that the feed from Mexico showed too many (usually three) replays of goals. As a result, the camera stayed too long away from the hoopla of the postgoal celebrations by players and fans. To the audience in the rest of the world, the goals were what mattered. But although soccer authorities have decried the extravagant postgoal mob scenes as distracting and wasteful of time, it is precisely those qualities that would make such footage attractive to U.S. TV producers.
Maybe U.S. coverage would improve if producers quit trying to explain what they would be better off simply showing. At a big soccer match, the real commentary is supplied by the fans anyway. It takes the form of not just boos and cheers but songs, chants (usually derisive, sometimes witty, often obscene), and noise from drums, whistles, and horns. That kind of atmosphere can be found here and there at such U.S. sporting events as college basketball games—any place in fact that admits large numbers of males who are young, drunk, and bonding. Imagine Wrigley Field on a day when two-thirds of all seats are occupied by Bleacher Bums and you have some sense of the brew of merriment and menace that soccer can cook up. You don’t have to be a Liverpudlian to be moved when thousands of home fans serenade the players of Liverpool Football Club, the perennial English league champions, with a lusty version of an unlikely anthem—“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” made popular around Merseyside in the 1960s by Gerry & the Pacemakers.
A historian writes that in 1928 soccer’s powers conceived “a tournament that would bring together the world’s finest players and, under the supervision of the most august and wise referees, pit them against each other in a spirit of international brotherhood, peace, and understanding. Instead we got the World Cup.”
Recent World Cups have been showcases for great players rather than great teams, however. I like the Dutchman Marco Van Basten, the only world-class striker who is not Brazilian. The German Lotthar Matthaeus has impressive versatility and range, the epitome of the modern European midfielder. The Italian Franco Baresi is a fluent, cagey sweeper, which is a cross between a free safety and quarterback. Brazil’s Careca still knows how to shoot the ball, a skill most of the rest of the world seems to have forgotten. England’s Peter Shilton, like all great goalkeepers, demonstrates how much athleticism owes to intelligence.
And of course there’s Maradona. This is his third World Cup. He left the first in disgrace and was hailed as a hero in the second. He’s older now, much abused by opponents, and like all top players today has been asked to play much too much soccer. He is prone to theatrics that mar his game, but is as close to a Michael Jordan as the game has had since Pele. Maradona plays professionally in the Italian league, for Naples, and I saw him play at least a dozen matches this season. Even during lackluster performances he manages to do two or three things that astonish. I recall how, on a breakaway, he . . .
Never mind. Watch some games and get your own memories. And may the referees protect them all.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Peter Hannan.
