On American Soccer Fans

Back when I interned in Guadalajara, I used my Press Credentials to score free tickets to a Chivas match.  The jumping, singing, instruments, chanting, etc, of the fans, all felt very natural, homegrown, an organic outgrowth of the local culture.  Same when I saw the same at a Real Salt Lake game; the fanbase there is primarily Latino-immigrants, so it simply felt like they'd brought their home culture with them.

But then I attended an MLS match in Portland recently, and it felt...off, for some reason.  Not the match itself, I enjoyed the match, but the fans.  The scarves, the chants, the long songs...it didn't feel like an organic outgrowth of a local culture, no--it felt like an elaborate affectation, an appropriation, a performance.  It felt less like American Soccer fans behaving like Soccer fans, than like Americans trying to act like Europeans.

Simply put, this style of fandom is not how American sport fans naturally behave--Europeans, and Latin-Americans maybe, yes, but not North Americans.  Americans shout their own individual slogans, wave their own individual signs, show off their own individual dance-moves, and aside from the occasional breakout of "the wave," this tribal unity of long-chants and colorful-scarves simply isn't out style.  We join our voices together in our cheers, yes, but each in his/her own way.  Americans cheer distinctly different from Europeans.  (And give American sport fans credit where credit's due--however obnoxious and meat-headed we may be, Americans rarely start riots or murder someone over a game.)

(Also, it has been my experience that some of the most nuanced, in-depth, numbers-driven, rationale discourse I've ever encountered in America have not been about politics, but about sports; intellectualism didn't disappear from America, it just moved to sports...probably because rationale thought is better contained and neutralized in the sports ghetto, but that's a topic for another day).

In other words, American Soccer still feels by and large like sports for people who don't usually like sports; it's sports for people who prefer the posturing "civilization" of the "classy" Europeans across the pond, who are no more trying to be civilized than we are.  European culture simply informs their fandom differently than ours does.  Soccer fandom in America comes off not as some spontaneous outpouring of excitement, but as a form of privilege and pretension.

I'm reminded of a student essay I graded once, which argued the reason America always sucks in the World Cup is because all of American's Soccer stars are products of elite, expensive Soccer Academies, making Soccer a Class issue here.  Prestigious academies are simply not how star athletes are produced--not in the NBA, not in the NFL, not in MLB, and certainly not in other Soccer playing countries!  Over in Europe (which all these American Soccer fans are clearly aping), star players are produced on the streets, in the fields, among the lower-classes.  It is not an elitist sport, but the game of the common man.

This may be the single greatest hurdle Soccer must overcome if it is ever to enjoy mainstream success in America: it cannot just be the game of the rich, the privileged, the elite, the European-affectionate, no; we must understand what the Latin-Americans, Africans, and working-class Europeans already instinctively understand, that it must be the sport of the masses.  It must be enjoyed by Americans acting like Americans, and not just by the privileged striking a pose.