The Only Winning Move

At the request of Jeff Metcalf, I’m posting some thoughts on why I like Soccer. I’m not honestly sure how I feel about this. Which sport you follow is a matter of taste - and while I do think there are generally articulable reasons for why we like the things we do (”it’s a matter of taste” is not the end of the discussion), those reasons are often as complex as they are inconsequential. Meaning: all this might come out sounding a little fussy and silly[UPDATE: this is a poorly-chosen word. What I mean is just that the reasons for why we like the things that we like aren't always very revealing about our character. Sometimes listening to someone ramble about why he likes what he likes is boring, and I suspect this to be one of those times.]. So be it. Also - I guess I should apologize for picking on NFL - but that just seems kind of inevitable in discussions about Soccer. It’s the closest analogue, really, and probably for that reason it does seem to be the NFL fans that have the hardest time living and letting live on this (and so I always feel like it’s NFL that I’m on the defensive about). And yes, in spite of Jeff’s request that we call it “AF,” I’m sticking with “NFL.” I understand that NFL is not the governing body for all of American Rules Football, but it’s certainly the most important organization in that sport, and anyway it’s just a matter of ingrained habit now to call Football “NFL” when comparing it to Soccer. I get Jeff’s concerns, but they’re not important enough to me to cause me to change my speech patterns. (Jeff, feel free to call Soccer “FIFA” in the comments in retaliation!)

Things I like about Soccer:

(1) Visible agility. I get that a lot of sports require great agility, but it’s rare in a team sport to be able to see it so clearly. In the case of both NFL and Hockey, there are just too many entirely-too-bulky people clustered together wearing too much crap for me to be able to see athletic ability unfolding in real time. You can catch it on the slowed-down replay with the help of a commentator and fancy camera angles, but for that I might as well just watch the highlights. In soccer, you can see the fancy footwork as it happens. Granted, not as well as in the replay, but it’s at least there. In this field, Basketball and Soccer got the goods, and that’s really about it. Otherwise, you’re watching individual sports, like UFC or Tennis.

(2) Normal people. There’s a kind of freakshow quality to Basketball and NFL that I’m just not in to. At the end of the day, I like athletes to look like healthier-than-average adults, but nothing too extreme. When I’m looking at people like Shaq, it feels a bit like being at the zoo - in the sense that I marvel at the powerful beast, but it just doesn’t seem entirely human. I like watching humans. So - Tennis, Soccer, etc. UFC, NFL, NBA - not so much.

(3) Scoring is rare. This is VERY important to me. Before I liked Soccer, I always thought it would be the opposite - that Basketball was the superior sport on account of its finer scoring resolution. But now I get it. The rarity of a Soccer goal is what makes it meaningful, and Soccer is a much more intense sport than NFL, Basketball or anything else, really, for it. A goal is everywhere and always a game-changer, and it provides a real anchor point for going back and thinking about the game after it’s over. It has been said that the rarity of goals in Soccer leaves too much to chance. It’s true enough that the difficulty of scoring a goal means there will be edge cases where a lucky goal decides a game in favor of a team that didn’t really deserve it. But in the general case I think “expensive goals” make Soccer much more accurate in terms of choosing the winner - and for the same reason. In the general case, if you got a goal, it’s because you were good enough and worked hard enough to get it - and we know that precisely because the other team was working so hard to prevent it.

(3a) Defense is as important as offense. Yes, you can say this about any sport, but not as sincerely. The “expense” of goals guarantees it’s truer of Soccer. Soccer teams simply don’t have the luxury of sleeping on defense and hoping to make it up by outscoring their opponents. It’s a much more balanced game in this regard than any other team sport I know. Like Chess, Soccer is as much - maybe even more - about making sure no one scores on you as it is about scoring on the opponent.

(3b) It can end in a tie. Why not? The convention that one team absolutely must win is artificial. Sometimes you need more than 90minutes to decide who’s better. If you don’t have more than 90minutes, then that’s just life. If two teams are evenly-matched, I would rather the score reflect that than to have one of them be declared the winner because they happened to be on a scoring streak as the gun fired!

(4) Pacing. Perhaps this is repeating the last point a bit, but there’s something about the pacing of Soccer that mirrors my tastes in other things as well - in Literature, in Music, TV, games, even History! I like things that operate on two levels, one mundane, and one transcendent. It seems unrelated, but it’s not - it’s the same thing that led me to choose Flannery O’Connor as the subject of my senior thesis as an undergrad, the same reason that I’m fascinated with the 1970s, the reason I like Chess, the core reason that Empire Strikes Back is great and A New Hope merely entertaining. I like things that muddle along according to their own inner logic for a while, only for something to happen that exposes that consistency as false. And no, I don’t mean I like plot twists - that isn’t the same thing at all. I mean something comes along that exposes that consistency as false - in the sense that you knew all along it was false, but you couldn’t see for yourself how, and then something happens that shows you how. Put differently, the revelation that the universe is much bigger than you thought. I admit it’s a stretch to look for such lofty themes in sports - but there are physical, gut-level analogues to such themes after all, in the way we react to them. Soccer isn’t “about” anything the way Literature is, it isn’t transcendent, and it doesn’t show you the meaning of life - I KNOW. I’m just saying it has the same pacing as these other things that DO express those themes. We muddle along in mundania - possibly for the whole game, actually! And while we’re muddling along it looks like things are pretty evenly matched - but the truth is they’re not. One of these teams is better, and sooner or later, whether because the other team makes a mistake or simply doesn’t have the stuff - the clouds will lift, there will be a breach in the defense, and the goal will come shining through. Half of the fun of the game is looking to spot how, when - trying to see the weakness before it’s exposed. It’s the same sort of thrill that a good mystery novel gives you - that satisfaction of NOT having figured it out by the end, but knowing that you could have, in fact slapping yourself on the forehead for not having seen it.

(5) Bigness. I don’t mean the players or the ball, but the field. I like how things are always just out of the field of vision, how the field is just slightly too big to pay attention to all at once, how the goaltender is dwarfed by the size of the goal he has to defend, how there are always too many players on the field, and how the ref, like me, is overwhelmed trying to keep up with it. Other sports seems small by comparison.

(6) Teamwork. I feel like other team sports are kind of “team in name only” a lot of the time. Usually, they’re vehicles for the one or two stars; what combinations there are mostly serve to set up the big guy. Well, that’s not what team sports are for. Individual sports are about celebrating the individual; team sports are interesting primarily for their combination plays. It’s the same way that Chess games that involve clever sacrifices and complicated coordinated attacks are more interesting than those that are simply about straightforward attacking to thin the herd. Soccer seems to involve a lot more cooperation (I guess it isn’t accused of being “Socialist” for nothing!) than most sports, and I appreciate that. Baseball is too diffuse to really count as a “team” effort for me: there’s too much emphasis on the pitcher/hitter opposition. Basketball might as well be Hollywood - most winning teams are just vehicles for some superstar (or two). I hardly know what the point of the rest of the team even is. NFL and Hockey do a LOT better here. They can be and are team efforts. But in both cases the setup still seems artificial. NFL is still about setting up a runner: there’s a team stage when play begins, but the nature of the game whittles it down to one person in the spotlight. It’s ultimately Baseball-like in that one guy represents his team against the defense. Once it’s revealed who’s making the play, he either breaks away or he doesn’t, and then things stop and start over again. Soccer is a lot more fluid: although it’s necessarily true that only one person can have the ball at a time, the fluidity gets us really close to being able to say that it’s a team, more than a person, that has possession. Hockey is arguably the same - and maybe it even is, I don’t know. It certainly comes close. Notwithstanding, it doesn’t appear to be much of a team effort. What it looks like to me is just a bunch of people clumsily scrambling for a nearly-invisible dot. And since the guys are so huge, and have on so much armor and carry around these clubs, and the puck is sooooo tiny, the whole thing just ends up looking faintly ridiculous - like chasing a mouse around or something. But alright - I suppose if I played Hockey, or at least took the time to watch it more often, it wouldn’t look so clumsy. All the same, the setup would still feel artificial, and that’s because the rink just isn’t big enough to really require a team effort to get the puck into the goal. There is no reason in the world why you can’t play two-on-two, or three-on-three, or even one-on-one Hockey, which just exposes it. In Soccer, the field is big enough, and the goals are big enough, that eleven people per side seems necessary to deal with the situation. Granted that all sports (all games, actually) are artificial and arbitrary - Soccer does the best job of maintaining the illusion that the number of players is an organic reality, and it certainly does the most convincing job of rewarding real teamwork. A team stands or falls on its ability to work together to a MUCH greater degree in Soccer than in any other team sport I’m aware of.

(7) Beauty. Or “organic unity,” or “naturalness.” Call it what you like - Soccer has an ineffable quality that I don’t see in any other (team) sport. I made this point also in the comments section of the post that inspired this - but there’s a kind of analogue in sports of “willful suspension of disbelief.” Sports are ultimately kind of silly - the situation is contrived and so there’s nothing real at stake. It isn’t war. So, like with fiction, part of the job of the players is to make me forget the artificiality of the setup, and Soccer really shines here. It has simple and consistent rules, and not very many of them, it uses a minimum of equipment, every player on the field seems equally necessary, we understand, without needing a Master’s Degree, why every rule is the way it is, and the game starts when it starts and ends when it ends and we don’t have to stop all the goram time inbetween to remind ourselves that what we’re doing is actually pretty contrived. It’s the English Garden of sports - the team sport that seems like the kind of thing nature could have designed, as opposed to those silly French gardens where everything is in impossibly precise rows. This is why Soccer is the “beautiful sport.” NFL, by comparison, is a kludge.

And I guess that’s about I can think of now. There may be other things - but off the top of my head, that’s what I get out of Soccer - why it is, to me, anyway, not only the best existing team sport, but probably pretty close to the best possible one.

Why do Americans hate soccer? Well, do you want a real answer to that question, or are you just looking for an excuse to do some dimestore pop psych? Because I think the real reason is probably as mundane as “inertia.” Americans don’t hate soccer, they just don’t have time for it. Your average American sports fan has spent most of his life gaining expert knowledge in one of NFL, MLB, NBA or (in some states) NHL. In his spare time, he follows maybe two others of these, but not to the same degree. And that’s really it. There just isn’t time to keep up with everything, he’s happy with what he’s got, and so the burden of proof is really on soccer to prove that it’s awesome enough to be worth starting over for. Americans react in the natural way: until they’re sure it’s worth it, it’s just easier to dismiss it. I think this is probably the real source of all the bone-headed “soccer is socialist” nonsense.

But even nonsense has to be responded to when it’s widespread enough, so here’s my own dimestore pop psych about why Americans “hate” soccer: it’s because it’s NOT socialist. Actually, because it’s more meritocratic than NFL, MLB, or NBA. And probably NHL too (I don’t know too much about that one).

Wanna hear my theory?

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset: ALL team sports are “socialist.” If you’re really such a rugged individualist interested in personal achievements based entirely on athletic merit, then what the fuck are you doing watching team sports in the first place? There is absolutely no shortage of individual events. Some of them are even televised - such as boxing, tennis, UFC and golf. Watch those instead you capitalist poseur! Because when you’re taking one team sport and holding it up as some individualist ideal over another team sport, you really are comparing Swedens to Norways, and you look every bit that ridiculous.

But OK, for the sake of argument, let’s just go to make-believe la-la never-never-land and pretend that all sports are teams sports. That’s all there ever is on TV, so even though your inner Marlboro Man is screaming for some good live-action bucking horse, you have to sigh and make do with all the collectivist fare that the liberal media is willing to serve you. So which’ll it be, NFL or Soccer?

What’s striking to me about soccer is that it looks a lot more meritocratic than NFL. For one thing, everyone is just out there in regular clothes. There’s no added equipment necessary - just the players, two nets and a ball. And then there’re the rules. NFL’s are labrythine - like American tax laws - which is to say, you need a lawyer to know what they really say. Soccer, by contrast, is very simple. True, there’s a distinction between law and legislation in soccer in a way that there isn’t in NFL, but the rules as written for soccer fit inside a 50-page pamphlet (and most of that is about the size of the field and things like that, stuff ordinary players don’t need to know anyway). But most tellingly for me, there’s body type. Soccer players look like you and me. Well, they look like MUCH FITTER versions of you and me - but basically they’re skinny runner types. Which is to say - whatever the actual truth of the matter - it looks like the kind of sport that if you just work hard enough at, you can be good at. It’s about effort and dedication. Contrast that with NFL, where body type is VERY important, and you’ve pretty much just gotta be born huge or it’s hopeless.

Now which of these sounds like a meritocracy to you? The one where you have to be born into it, where the rules are arbitrary and unclear, and where you can’t even play it without all kinds of addon accessories? Or the one where ordinary people just pick up a ball and the team that works the hardest wins?

Yeah.

And it’s not just NFL that’s a meritocrat’s nightmare. If you notice one thing that all American sports seem to have in common, it’s that it’s easy to eyeball who the good players are in the lineups before the game even starts. In NFL, you have to be born big. In NBA, you have to be born tall. Baseball and hockey don’t fit my generalization as well, but it’s still the case that good baseball and hockey players tend to look like alpha males in some way. Which is to say, for all it prides itself on being a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps country, that isn’t the myth America tunes into when it comes to spectator sports. And that’s consistent when you think about it: our movie stars look like royalty too, and God knows stardom has as much to do with looks and charm as acting ability here!

Now, I don’t think anyone needs to conclude from this that America turns out to be a closet aristocracy. Just the opposite, actually. Remember - sports are fantasy (at least when you’re watching rather than playing, which is the kind we’re discussing here) just like Hollywood is fantasy, and the fact that a people dreams about aristocracy is probably a good indicator that it doesn’t see much of it in real life. I’ll let you the reader do my homework for me, but I understand that there are pretty reliable numbers showing that social mobility is much greater in the US than in other western countries, even when you control for the greater income gap. That’s an unambiguous good, if you ask me, but it does have its down sides as well: if you fail, that’s on YOU, and that can be hard to live with. Meritocracies are more just, but also more stressful. It isn’t too surprising to me that people who live in one (or, more accurately, live in the closest thing we have to one - America, as any American well knows, is not a perfect meritocracy either) might dream about a world where it was just clear who should be on top so the rest of us could just relax! The soothing thing about sports like NFL is that since there’s no chance of my ever being one of those guys, I don’t need to feel lazy for watching them. Soccer, by contrast, is a good sport for countries where aristocracy is the norm. True, life in those countries is less stressful. They tend to have generous vacation and social insurance, so if you don’t get the job you want you can blame it on “the system” and continue to live acceptably well. But this has its own stresses. If everyone is contantly fussing about inequality and trying to level the playing field to compensate, you’ve gotta get frustrated after a while that you could be doing a lot better than you are if only people would leave you alone and let you achieve. “Look,” you (hypothetically) think to yourself, “I’ll take my lumps, just get off my back and let me work it out on my own for once!” Well, that’s soccer. Whatever the truth of it is, it really looks like the kind of sport where if you just push a little bit harder than everyone else, you’re the one still running near the crucial end of that exhausting 90minutes. Just train harder and you can do it. It must be a nice escapist relief for people who are constantly being managed to watch hard-working people who look like them doing well on a largely unsupervised (there are only three refs who matter, and there’s no replay) and unregulated (the rules are minimalist) field!

Ultimately, that’s what all these “soccer is socialist” columns are missing: that sports are fantasy, and fantasy is not a direct reflection of reality. People who watch a lot of science fiction might, for example, be dreaming about a technocracy where they didn’t have to deal with backward bumpkins. But is that really what they want? On some level yes it very much is. But if they actually had to live in a real technocracy where school was everything, then they wouldn’t be so extraordinary, and it would be so easy to hold themselves above all the bumpkins they so love to feel superior to. And I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of nerds pushing a technocratic agenda in politics. I mean who knows, it might work out for them and they might be happier in that kind of world, but it’s telling that they themselves don’t seem to be sure of that. Fantasy is fantasy - it’s revealing, but not always in straightforward ways.

So no, I don’t think America is socialist for watching more socialist sports. But I DO think American sports are more socialist - or, more accurately, less meritocratic - than soccer, and our commentariat would do well to recognize that.

I’m not a big sports fan. I enjoy watching soccer, badminton, tennis, UFC, and can get myself worked up about college basketball under the right circumstances. NFL and baseball put me to sleep, and I think that pretty much exhausts the list of sports I even really know about. For the most part, it’s that I just don’t care. The old nerd’s curse of given that time in life is limited, I can usually think of better things to be doing when there’s a ballgame on TV.

But the Olympics I actively hate.

And here’s one of the reasons. This is one of the most childish articles I’ve read that makes a good point. And it’s a classic: if you take out the judged sports, national team X drops dramatically in the medal count and so aren’t the “real” winners.

First of all, shit like this puts the lie to the idea that the Olympics are about sports and not national pride. In theory, the issue should be which individuals and individual teams are doing well at which individual sports. There’s no sense in which the US has “a team” that I can tell, unless we’re griping about who has more funding for training. And yet, author Chris Chase seems worried that someone might not know that the US has a high count in judged sports, and apparently because a lot of people actually are interested in national medal counts.

Second, I’m not seeing a blazing white line between what does and doesn’t count as a “judged” sport anyway. For example, under Chase’s “real” medal count, South Korea moves up a number of places “because of its dominance in speed skating.” SPEED SKATING ladies and gentlemen. A sport notorious for its labrythine rules, in which all sorts of things like “cross tracking” - i.e. cutting in front of someone attempting to pass - that are ultimately up to the gut feelings of the refs can get you dq’d or penalized. So sure, unlike figure skating, there is actually a finish line in speed skating, but there are so many conditions placed on how you get there that I would hesitate to call it a sport where “medals are determined solely by the athletes and not by faceless men and women in garish blazers.” And that goes for lots of other Olympic sports as well.

Third, there’s something a little snarky about lines like this:

In a perfect world, judges would be impartial and fair and every event would be decided by the same set of criteria, but they’re not. Judges are humans who are influenced by outside factors like reputations, nationalities and fan support. This often manifests itself in judging, which makes the results of these sports controversial.

and this:

When throwing out the results of all events tainted by the influence of judges, the U.S. loses its commanding lead in the only medal tally that means anything: golds.

The pragmatic implication of belaboring this point in an article about the “real” national medal count seems to be that most of the American golds this year in such sports are bogus. But if that’s what you think, then you need to make the charge of bias in the open. Anything else is unfair to the athletes who did, in fact, work hard to win these medals. Because included in the realm of possibilities here, after all, is the idea that all nine of those golds that Chase wants to discount the US in the “real” medal count were actually deserved and would have been decided in the same way by an idealized panel of judges under ideal circumstances.

Bottom line - if you think there’s a problem, present your evidence and suggest alternatives. Don’t leave your reader drawing a vague conclusion for himself that you lack the guts to make openly.

Fourth, I’m pretty sure the “judged” events that Chase is griping about are the founding events of the Winter Olympics anyway. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Winter Olympics were founded largely on a push to have figure skating - THE prototypical “judged event” - included in the regular Olympics. So there’s a real sense in which judged events are what the Winter Olympics are all about, and getting rid of them, or otherwise not factoring them into your perception of who “won” - is a serious break with Olympic tradition.

But the fifth and main point is just that sports commentary tends toward childish points of convenience, and this article is a case in point. To repeat:

When throwing out the results of all events tainted by the influence of judges, the U.S. loses its commanding lead in the only medal tally that means anything: golds.

WHY are golds the “only medals that count?” Well, presumably because that’s what most athletes are really shooting for. Fair enough for individuals - but what about for national teams? To say that golds are the only medals that count in determining which country is “winning” the Olympics (which I already think is a bogus category - see point 1) is a bit like discounting round robins in qualification - only single-elimination tournaments count. And yet no one is suggesting, for example, that the Canadian hockey team should now pack up and go home because they lost to the USA! Advancement to the semi-finals is contingent on your overall performance, and you’re allowed to lose a few and still advance. Completing the analogy for medals, a case could be made that bronze and silver medals should count as well, provided they’re discounted against golds. Say - we count three points for golds, 2 for silver, one for bronze?

Note the precision of the wording above: “a case could be made.” I’m not saying it has to be, because I can see it Chase’s way too. And even if we decide to weight medals, there will be arguments about how much more a gold should be worth than a bronze, etc. 10 for a gold, 5 for silver, 1 for bronze? What’s the ideal ratio? I just don’t know, and neither does anyone else, and the point is just that whatever you decide you need to decide it BEFORE you go writing articles like Chase’s. The Olympics shouldn’t be a national competition, but if it’s going to be, then there need to be some groundrules established beforehand as to how these things are determined, and commentators need to state before the competition even starts what their opinions about the groundrules are so that the competitors know what to shoot for.

Sports commentary in general is wearying because there’s nothing REAL at stake, and this frees statistics snarks to constantly raise and lower the bar in clever and arcane ways so that things come out the way they want, even when they didn’t.

Using my weighting scheme, for example, the US and Norway are tied for second, and Germany is first. Using the second scheme I suggested, the US drops to a clear third. And using Chase’s scheme, Norway is first. And all this assumes that the sports Chase favors for “real” medals exhaust the set, which is an argument in itself.

So - sports commentary in general can fuck off, and especially when it has to do with the Olympics. Speaking as a patriotic US citizen, I really don’t care how Team USA is doing in the Olympics, because there is no such thing. But even if I did care, I think I would accept the rules as written in determining who was winning. Fantasizing about who should have won at some alternate-reality version of the Olymics? Even more pointless than the real thing.