Binary Opposition

Things in this world exist in binary opposition. For every yin there is a yang, north has south, and up has down. Apparently in this country football and the other football exist in much the same way except for the fact that both desire the destruction of their opposite. Some people blame this on an American desire to be completely cut off from anything else that the world enjoys, or, even simpler, to the fact that the game wasn’t invented inside of our borders. A lot of Americans will even argue with me that the “other football” shouldn’t be called football despite being played near exclusively with the feet and predating American football by roughly 40 odd years. This is not an argument I wish to merit here.

This is something that I remember seeing growing up. It escalated into high school and seemed to peak a bit, but has not gone away in college. This isn’t true for all schools, but my small, Midwestern college does seem to subscribe to this destructive ideology. The football team (American football that is) always has snide remarks when the soccer team loses and it brings a similar reaction when the American football team loses on Saturdays.

Even so called level headed adults become irrational sometimes and point to diving, low scores, and hooliganism as reasons why the game is evil. I even witnessed a few people cheering against the United States in the World Cup simply because of the sport it entailed. Boy were they mad when coverage continued after the US was eliminated.

Why is it that these two sports can’t exist in the same culture? Germany certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem with it after soaking up nearly every franchise in the ill drawing NFL Europe. Is it because, as my roommate and soccer player pointed out, they share the same field. This isn’t a claim that can be easily dismissed, in fact it has a lot of merit. Wars have been fought for decades over a similar sized piece of ground…just ask Israel.

But I don’t think that we can completely contribute the disdain of these two great sports to simply a turf war (no pun intended). Instead I feel that these sentiments are fueled by jealousy. American football and its fans are jealous of the support that soccer gets around the globe. American football is the undisputed number one sport in America, just as soccer is the biggest sport in the rest of the world. No matter how well the Super Bowl draws the NFL knows that they can always be trumped in an argument with the ratings of the World Cup final.

This issue is not going to go away any time soon, in fact I can only see it getting worse as soccer gains more popularity in the United States. It is the fastest growing youth sport in the country and I am of the ilk that feels that this will turn into a large fan base for an expanding league format, or formats if you don’t think that the USL and MLS will EVER combine. As this happens I think there will be a reaction from Major League Baseball (who run at the same time as the MLS) and from the NFL as they panic about possibly losing fans. I don’t think that soccer will overtake any of the five major sports (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, and NASCAR) in my lifetime, but if things are done right we can force this jealousy out into the open and show the beautiful game for what it is not what fans of the other sports want us to think it is.