Since June has become the month of soccer for Europe and the Americas, many have dusted off their national flag sweatsuits and vuvuzelas. However, for U.S. fans, it’s difficult to start parading around with American flag capes. The U.S. needs better players, and to get them, Americans have to play soccer.
The problem is Americans don’t consider soccer as a formidable national sport. Soccer’s what parents sign their children up to play, either because a basketball is still as big as the child or the parents don’t want to spend money on a baseball bat. However, this trend may be changing. This year is the first year the Copa America has ever been played in the U.S. According to a poll by ESPN, soccer has become the second-most popular sport among 12- to 24-year-olds. So, is this wave of international tournaments what plants the seed for soccer to grow in America? No, Americans still aren’t ready.
Let’s face it: Americans love scoring, and soccer gives fans anything but scoring. Here’s how watching a soccer game usually goes: “Oh look, he almost scored.” Americans don’t watch sports for proper technique. They want someone to get dunked on, a free safety to take someone’s head off, a grown man to hit a ball 400 feet with a stick.
While soccer may have the occasional moment that displays athletic prowess, these moments simply do not occur often enough in a soccer match for the American attention span. Just take the final game of the Copa America this past Sunday. It was supposed to be a match between the two best teams in the Western Hemisphere. How did it end? 0-0. The game was decided by penalty kicks. I don’t even want to imagine the NBA Finals concluded by LeBron James and Steph Curry shooting free throws. What if the Super Bowl was decided by field goals? Soccer is just the kind of game where even best players don’t score every game, and it is precisely this that will keep Americans at arm’s length with soccer.
It also has to do with the way we learn sports: family. When I was little, it used to be that football or basketball merely consisted of the red team playing the blue team. It wasn’t until my father taught me sports that they became about more than just a game.
Soccer may take hold in the U.S., but it will take a generation or two before the future Kyrie Irvings and Russell Wilsons are kicking around a soccer ball.
Joshua Udvardy is a UF mechanical engineering sophomore. His column appears on Thursdays.
