Soccernomics by Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski

Author:Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski [Kuper, Simon & Szymanski, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Football, Sports & Recreation, General, Self-Help, Social Psychology, Personal Growth, Soccer, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780007466887
Google: Ve22HvdK_OcC
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2012-05-24T20:13:22+00:00

operated. When American officials wanted an Iraqi to do something, the lawyer said, they would generally call the person into the Green Zone and if necessary “bawl him out.” Sometimes this strategy worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But the Americans summoned Iraqis only when something needed fixing. British officials worked differently, said the lawyer. They were always inviting Iraqis in, for parties or just for chats, even when there was nothing in particular to discuss. This was exactly how the British had operated both in their colonies and in their “informal empire”: they made long-term contacts. The Reverend Harris at Clarkebury school may not entirely have known it, but in effect he was a British agent charged with teaching Mandela Britishness.

By contrast, few American Harrises ever taught baseball or football to budding foreign rulers. There have been a handful of prominent American colonialists, but they are so rare as to stand out. Douglas MacArthur ruled Japan for years. Hollywood makes its blockbusters chiefly for the global market. And in sports, the NBA’s commissioner, David Stern, has spent a quarter century interesting foreigners in basketball. But most American sporting moguls, like most American producers in general, have been satisfied with their giant domestic market.

Baseball’s last great overseas tour was in 1913–1914, after which Americans barely even tried to spread baseball or football abroad until the 1990s.

The American empire’s favorite games have been no good at cultural imperialism. It’s a story told in one statistic: the media agency Futures Sport & Entertainment estimates that of the 93 million people who saw the Super Bowl live in 2005, only 3 million were outside North America.

WHILE AMERICA SLEPT: HOW SOCCER INVADED THE US

After the British Victorians spread their games, sports experienced a century of relative stability. The Indians played cricket, the US resisted soccer, and the isolated town of Melbourne favored Australian Rules football, which barely existed even in other parts of Australia. But from F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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the 1980s, new TV channels—free, cable, and satellite—began mushrooming almost everywhere. They took up the burden of carrying sports around the world. When Britain’s Channel Four was created in 1982, for instance, it began broadcasting NFL games. They were a hit.

Suddenly, there were people in Norwich or Manchester who called themselves 49ers fans. William “the Refrigerator” Perry, the supersize Chicago Bears lineman, became a cult hero in Britain. Alistair Kirkwood, the NFL’s UK managing director, fondly recalls that for a year or two in the 1980s, the Super Bowl had higher ratings in Britain than the beloved soccer program Match of the Day on the same weekend.

It didn’t last. English soccer cleaned up its stadiums, kicked out most of its hooligans, sold its rights to Sky Television, and revived.

Eventually, Channel Four dropped the NFL. The halfhearted American invasion—albeit led by British TV—had been repelled.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, soccer was slowly infecting American life. Even though the US already had

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