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A Thinking Fan in Qatar: Notes on the Narratives of Hosting a World Cup in 2022

When hosting rights for the 2022 men’s World Cup were awarded to Qatar way back in 2010, there were two major competing narratives. FIFA, for one, claimed it was about the opportunity to host a World Cup in the Middle East - one of the last major world regions to never host a sporting mega-event. Much of the Western media and Western soccer fans, for another, claimed it was about corruption and the absurdities of global sport. I’ve always wondered whether both could be true. 

Is it possible that even amidst all the corruption and inequality that comes with contemporary global mega-events such as the World Cup and the Olympics, the 2022 World Cup really is a chance to engage with the contemporary realities of a Muslim majority country in a region that is rarely engaged by the Western media on human terms?

In part as an effort to answer that question, in mid-October I took advantage of my university’s week-long Fall break to make a trip to Qatar. With my eleven-year-old son as my trusty side-kick and with the opportunity to connect with a few other “football scholars” who are working in Qatar (one at the Georgetown-Qatar campus and one at Northwestern-Qatar), I went to Qatar hoping to use this World Cup as a chance to engage my version of “thinking fandom” - the mix of intellectual curiosity and critical consciousness that I argue can enrich the game. 

[Photo outside the Aspire Academy with the '2022' building in the background]

I’ve read and watched all the stories in the western media about why Qatar shouldn’t be hosting this World Cup. I wanted to see for myself what it means that they are. And while I didn’t get any definitive answers in my week-long visit, here are three general observations that I found myself considering amidst the more pervasive and polar narratives.

One: Qatar is a relatively young country actively trying to figure out how to navigate sudden wealth and the complexities of being an Islamic country engaging with modernity and global capitalism. 

This struck me most vividly in a visit to the National Museum of Qatar - one of many architectural marvels in Doha that tells a compelling story of Qatar’s rapid journey from a sparse population of desert nomads and pearl divers to a country that has leveraged the ability to liquify natural gas into an oasis of wealth, power, and inequality. In just a few short decades the country has gone from a reliance on camels, knives, and desert tents to sovereign wealth funds, luxury shopping malls, and global cultural events. That kind of transition takes some figuring out.

[Photo from inside the National Museum of Qatar]

This struck me most forcefully when I was giving a talk about American soccer at the Georgetown-Qatar campus - a lovely building in the Education City complex that hosts a variety of American university campuses and one of the most interesting mosques you’ve ever seen. I was trying to explain how some of the U.S. soccer system’s idiosyncrasies derive from us being a relatively young country — at least compared to much of Europe. But then I realized that Qatar was a British protectorate up until 1971 — nearly 200 years after U.S. independence. And Qatar didn’t have its first university until 1973 — the U.S. campus of Georgetown was founded in 1789. If the U.S. is a relatively young country, Qatar as an independent nation state is an absolute baby.

Recognizing the relative newness of Qatar as a nation state helped me make sense of the feeling that the place really is trying to figure out how to be in the world. Multiple people we met on our trip referred fondly to Sheikha Moza - the mother of the current Emir, the co-founder of the Qatar Foundation, and the striking women who was in many of the famous images of the Qatari royals celebrating at the FIFA ceremony when they were awarded the World Cup hosting rights. Her family is full of complicated characters, sometimes using their wealth toward obnoxious extravagance, but she herself was an early graduate of that first University in Qatar and she does clearly care about education - having been a central figure in bringing Georgetown, Northwestern, and other major universities (including also Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth, and Weill Cornell Medicine) to Qatar. 

She has also been a prominent face for women in the Middle East, with the ‘‘face’ cliche being significant - Sheikha Moza does wear head coverings, but she has led most younger Qatari women in not adopting full hijabs or face coverings as a nod to a more modern version of Islam.

[Paintings for sale in the Souq, including one of Sheikha Moza]

The overall narrative I left with was about the relative youth of Qatar as a country, along with their significant investment in education, arts, and culture, making for a society actively working out how they want to be in the modern world. There are very real issues in Qatar around human rights, economic inequality, environmental exploitation, and more - but I took away a sense of a place actively learning, navigating, and negotiating how to work it all out.

Two: Qatar is serious about trying to create a healthy sport culture, and is making some worthy investments in sports infrastructure.

Doha often felt like a World Cup theme park. Every few buildings were plastered with twenty story images of iconic players from each World Cup team. Soccer themed murals, banners, and installations occupied most prime street space. Architecturally interesting stadiums loomed behind the skyline in every direction. 

And most people didn’t even call it “the World Cup” - instead, the common short-hand was just “FIFA.” As in, “we don’t know how busy it will be for FIFA” or “it’s really hard to get tickets for FIFA.” As if the event really was only for the global soccer aristocracy.

Which made it all the more interesting to me that there really was an accessible sporting infrastructure in parks and near stadiums that conveyed some genuine thought for the local population. On our day-long tour of all eight World Cup stadiums (it took about six hours including stops for lunch — try doing that for all the stadiums in 2026!) I was perhaps most surprised by the fact that the majority of stadiums had some combination of park space, playing fields, playgrounds, running trails, bike paths, and other sport amenities immediately outside the gates. True, many were still in the final throes of construction and security preparation - so I couldn’t see if they would actually be used by the community. And also true that it was 98 degrees during the day at the start of the cool season — so I could only trust assurances from our local guides that people really did come out at night and in the winter to use the facilities. 

[Photo of a bike path to Al Thumama stadium still under construction]

But I was still impressed. It made me realize that I can think of very few U.S. sport stadiums that actually include any publicly accessible recreation facilities. There are, I suppose, a few MLS stadiums and college football stadiums that are near to other playing field complexes. But most major sporting arenas I know of in the U.S. are either surrounded by ‘entertainment districts’ full of bars and restaurants or they are surrounded by parking lots. Neither does much to inspire a sport for life ethos. Qatar at least spent the money to try.

And even away from the World Cup stadiums, I was impressed by the visible presence of park spaces, running paths, bike routes, padel ball courts, fitness centers, and other resources for engaging with sport and fitness. I particularly enjoyed visiting the “3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum” — which was surprisingly expansive, and included a whole floor devoted to an “Activation Zone” that included interactive opportunities to track physical literacy skills and scheme out more healthy lifestyles. It was like a free fitness consultation for the eager museum goer. I expected there to be some standard-issue FIFA / Olympic style pablum about the wonders of sport — and there was a bit. But there were also very substantive exhibits about the history and anthropology of early sport cultures around the world, and well curated information about the sports history of Qatar (including everything from modern efforts in global football to traditional desert sports such as falconry).

[Photo from inside the "3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sport Museum"]

I’m very conscious of the fact that much of this may have been for show — a PR effort to accompany the festival of marketing that is the men’s World Cup. But even if the biking trails and playground equipment and soccer fields were being used as props, they really were available for use and play. My son climbed to the very top of the rope tower to prove it.

[Photo from outside Al Janoub Stadium]

And in all the scholarly work I’ve done on sport and development, I still genuinely believe the best thing a government or NGO can do is give communities spaces to play. 

Three: Global capitalism weaves a tangled web.

The most common critique of the Qatar World Cup is that much of the infrastructure has been built by poorly paid and poorly treated migrant labor. The most extreme version of the critique derives from a 2021 Guardian article implying the 6500 migrant workers died building the World Cup stadiums — in fact, that is one estimate of the total number of migrant workers who died in Qatar since the World Cup was awarded. Out of a population of about 2.7 million people, about 2.4 million are guest workers of varying types from manual laborers to teachers to oil executives and over the course of ten years several thousand of those people have died - most of causes unrelated to their immediate working conditions. It is the case that the conditions for construction workers in Qatar are brutal, and it does seem true that at least 37 have died building World Cup stadiums — 37 too many. But the ease with which the western media perpetuates assumptions of base malevolence — selling stories of “corrupt Arabs” who have contempt for basic human rights — is itself a story worth unpacking.

Here’s the story I heard multiple times in Qatar: yes, working construction in Qatar is a rough job. It is brutally hot, and the companies are under intense pressure to build things quickly. The migrant labor camps often pack large numbers of men into tight quarters, and compel them to work long hours. 

And, importantly, the World Cup has actually made many of the conditions in which those men (and other guest workers) labor better.

The World Cup has brought intense global attention to work conditions in Qatar, I was told, and while there is a long way to go things have improved significantly. The rules associated with the ‘kafala’ system, for example, have been dramatically shifted to allow workers the autonomy to leave companies and leave the country if they want. There have been, I was told, crack-downs on recruiters who made false promises to poor laborers in poorer parts of the world such as south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. It is now much more likely to be the case that guest workers in Qatar have consciously agreed to work in conditions that are objectively bad, the local story goes, and yet still better than those many of the workers would find in their home countries. There are official minimum wages for different types of labor that add up to more than could be earned by uneducated workers in places such as Bangladesh or Nepal or Sudan, there are no income taxes in Qatar, and there is decent quality health care. Is the way it was explained.

It was, unfortunately, nearly impossible to actually talk with manual laborers so my sources were mostly their compatriots from Pakistan or India or Uganda who worked in hotels, restaurants, or as drivers. They are not, I am aware, a representative sample. But they told a compelling story that is rarely given a hearing in the western media - a story that is a moderate version of the defensive and aggressive story in the local Qatari press — attributing oversimplified critiques to pure “racism” and “Islamophobia” in the European and American media. 

[Screenshot of the Doha News with headlines focused on racism, politics, and the need to keep "English fans in check"]

Who, after all, are the companies and contractors that hire all the guest workers in Qatar? Quite often, I was told, they are American companies, British companies, Korean companies, Australian companies, French companies, and other major players in the global marketplace who are happy to hire cheap labor for the simple reason that it leads to big profits. The Qatari government does not actually build stadiums, this story goes, they simply try to regulate the global capitalists who do. As is the case anywhere in the world, there is a push and pull between the companies and the regulators. The regulations have gotten better, enforcement has gotten better, but profit still makes the companies look for “efficiencies.”

The migrant worker issue is just one of many, but it illustrates the problem of simple narratives of blame. Is the problem the Qatari government? Global inequality and global capitalism (that makes human labor cheap)? Corporations and their rapacious need for profit? FIFA and its European aristocratic roots? Tourists and academics like me who equivocate on how to think it all through? All of the above?

One last example drawn from another contentious issue in Qatar, the question of free expression, may help illustrate my ultimate sense that narratives of Qatar 2022 are more complicated and multifaceted than it might seem. The Education City campus of Northwestern-Qatar had an exhibit in their ‘Media Majlis’ (with a ‘majlis’ literally being the Arabic word for a ‘sitting room’ but figuratively meaning the space where important discussions are had and decisions are made) titled by the question “Is it a beautiful game?” It was a small but nicely organized exhibit, a mix of football history, media, technology, and politics with commentary from serious people. There was a reality-show style recording of Qataris debating the good and bad of football as a general cultural form - is the game rife with discrimination, for example? It was not directly critical of FIFA or the World Cup, but it was also not uncritical of FIFA and the World Cup. 

The exhibit was interesting, thought-provoking, subtle, and seems to have actually closed in mid-November just before the World Cup starts. At least it suggested the possibility that more than one thing about Qatar, and about the World Cup, can be true.

[sportsandideas]

Producing Players: The (Very) Social Science of Soccer’s Talent Development Systems

(Photo from FIFA web-site)

In my book Soccer in Mind the chapter titled “Players” is subtitled “Talent Development Versus Human Development.” It starts with a question: “What does it take to make a great soccer player, or a great anything? This general question is at the center of a robust self-improvement industry, a large sector of the business world, a significant portion of educational endeavors, substantial government policy making, many researchers studying talent development—and pub conversations among soccer enthusiasts all over the world.” 

This question will be on many minds during upcoming World Cups, when watching the best players and teams in the world prompts us to think about what made them great — and why some places seem to produce more greatness than others. The question has also been a focus of recent discussions with my World Cup in Mind and Society class, where we started by looking for answers to that abstract hypothetical in the practiced real of our contemporary soccerscape: What structures have been set up to develop soccer talent, and what do those structures assume about what it takes to make great anythings?

The specific task for students was to “research a sport talent development system you know or are curious to know (could be a soccer system, but could also be another sport” and to write up a brief summary that integrates concepts from social science while also unpacking the underlying understanding of human development embedded in the given system. What, in other words, does Barcelona do, or the Portland Timbers / Thorns academy, or an elite club volleyball program, in their quest to produce great players? And within those efforts, what are the common practices, the best practices, and the concerning practices?

We started by brainstorming questions and “variables” based on reading about a few national talent development systems I discuss in Soccer in Mind: the more technocratic approach of the Dutch (particularly at the Ajax academy), the romantic approach implicit in the combination of street soccer and secluded academies in Ghana, the humanistic approach in Iceland that draws on nordic ideologies, and the odd mish-mash of approaches found here in the USA. That gave the students some example questions to investigate, looking at academies, youth clubs, national systems, and related efforts with asks such as:

How much emphasis is put just on athletic talent development vs more broad based human development?

How expensive is it to participate?

How many players actually "make it"? (and how does the system define 'making it'?)

How is it funded?

What is the relative emphasis on play, training, and/or competition?

How are players grouped by age?

At what ages are players expected to specialize?

How often are participants in the system playing / training?

Who is held up as an icon of "success"?

With the autonomy to draw on their own interests in picking a talent development system, the class ended up with a mix of: 

US soccer clubs (including the Washington Rush, the Portland Timbers/Thorns academy, the Olympic Development Program, the US Player Development Program, the IMG Academy, and Sparta Tacoma)

National soccer systems (including France, Japan, Serbia, Finland, Sweden, and Ireland)

Other sport systems (including US Swimming, a southern California club volleyball system, DME basketball academy, China’s Olympic training program, the Dominican Republic baseball system, and state level swimming in the US)

Only one student picked a global soccer academy (Barcelona), so we ended up with an eclectic mix. But even within that mix, and with just a bit of discussion, it was not too hard to find some common practices, best practices, and concerning practices that both illuminate and reflect the very social science of talent development. 

Common Practices:

Almost all the systems have some kind of talent pyramid — efforts at a broad base of participants, filtering up toward a smaller focus on elite players. As one example, the Washington Rush program is part of one of the largest franchised youth soccer clubs in the world and shares a fairly conventional looking model on their website:

(example shared by student Taylor Schindler)

Beyond just the Rush program, what students noticed in most of the talent pyramids is a disproportionate amount of attention, time, and money going toward ‘sharpening the tip’ of the pyramid rather than ‘broadening the base.’ Though there are a few exceptions, the vast majority of talent development systems seem to primarily rely on a broad base of participants in order to identify a few elite prospects. While this can payoff in a few elite players in the short term, that disproportionate emphasis also risks diminishing the overall size of the player pool and the possible long-term benefits of youth sports participation. It risks, in other words, trading talent development for human development (when in concept you could have both).

None of the talent development pyramids we saw, for example, had any offerings of routes from the more recreational base toward things like school sports or life-long health and fitness. It’s a system designed to cull. And, as in the case of the Washington Rush, that culling seems to start quite early — noting the tip of the pyramid already includes U8 players (ie, 6 and 7 year olds). There are interesting developmental assumptions built into the idea that a typical regional club team should be separating out “elite” players around the time they start  elementary school.

Concerning Practices

The disproportionate emphasis on elite players in most talent development pyramids also relates to several of the concerning practices identified by students, including the most commonly noted concern: costs. Two students (Jenna Blevins and Rebecca Scharrenberg), for example, looked into the famous IMG Academy in Florida - where soccer is only one of many sports offered as part of their boarding school designed explicitly to promote elite talent development. While our web research suggested some admirable pieces of the IMG model, including what seems to be a genuine effort to mix academic preparation with time on sports, it does not come cheap:

Given that there are options all the way from 6th grade through post-graduate experiences, a family could hypothetically be looking at over $500,000 dollars to get a girls soccer player through high school. While I doubt many young athletes attend IMG for that long, even just a year is still a massive investment that is just an extreme version of our American ‘pay to play’ soccer system that creates a concerning focus on profit over people from a very young age.

And yes, we know programs like these offer some scholarships. That can be great for a few kids and families. But, if we’re thinking like social scientists, we have to recognize that scholarship programs may only exacerbate underlying structural inequalities — making the system seem meritocratic, when access actually depends primarily on luck and perpetual inequality. Scholarships only work at the system level when combined with structural efforts to broaden access (through things such as community and school sports).

Best Practices

When discussing best practices, students often observed elements that have indeed succeeded in producing elite players — emphasizing creativity, providing expert coaching at appropriate points in development, creating intense training environments, etc.. There was also a consistent emphasis, at least in the public rhetoric, on allowing talented youth players to combine athletic training with academics — it’s hard to find a program that says good players should really just forget about school (though I can’t help but wonder if that message is sometimes more for public consumption than internal practice).

If, however, we’re looking for programs that best combine talent development with human development then the standouts here were national programs that seemed attentive to social goods. So, for example, the Serbian effort as part of UEFA’s Women’s Football Development Program (as researched by student Kelli Coughlan) seemed noteworthy for being targeted around appropriate ages (U13 and U15), emphasizing nutrition and health, and promoting the importance of developing women coaches and referees in addition to players.

A browse through the UEFA website about national associations also led one student (Emily Hughes) to Ireland’s “Home Programs” as a grassroots effort to help players navigating the isolation of COVID-19 in the transition period back to team trainings. The program takes advantage of basic technologies, such as YouTube videos, and emphasizes training for injury prevention and basic physical skills - mixing in games that emphasize both fun and skill development. Any such grassroots effort that prioritizes access and engagement seems like a wise investment for the long term. 

The ultimate take-away here is that there is no one perfect talent development system. Instead, there are a range of systems designed with varying degrees of attention to talent development, human development, money, access, luck, geography, social issues, and all the other many factors that intersect in the contemporary soccerscape. Where our systems invest time, attention, and money reflects our assumptions about what makes great soccer players and (perhaps more importantly) what a society values.

[sportsandideas]

Why We Watch: Notes on World Cup Fandom

I’m convinced that if an alien social scientist from another planet was studying all the strange dimensions of human behavior, soccer fandom would be one of the standouts. The simple fact that we soccer fans spend so much time and treasure watching other people exercise, sometimes taking joy from a scoreless draw, is odd on its own. But then add in our rituals of fandom, the costumes we’d never wear in daily lives, the songs we sing off key, the bipolar outbursts of ecstasy and anger, the temporary bonds we form with total strangers, and it really becomes hard to jibe with all our other norms of social behavior. Which makes it all the more fun to try to think like that alien social scientist.

That’s exactly what I asked my ‘World Cup in Mind and Society’ students to do last week for our collaborative blogging. We tried to defamiliarize fandom, starting with an overview of relevant theories, going heavy on social identity theory, the team identification - social psychological health model, BIRGing (basking in reflected glory), collective effervescence, theories of nationalism, and the like. And then the students took to the field - interviewing someone excited about at least one of the upcoming World Cups, and crafting short case study summaries of what motivates them to watch. 

It wasn’t an entirely systematic sampling, and our methods were the best we could do in the second week of class, but it did unveil some useful proofs for our concepts. The ultimate question was less how to explain soccer fandom, and more how the strangeness of soccer fandom might say something about people and society. So here’s five themes that could help our alien social scientist make sense of the strange.

(Photo from dw.com)

1) We watch because global soccer reinforces our cultural and national identities. As the famous Eric Hobsbawm quote suggests, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” World Cup soccer is a rare space where nations are made incarnate, put on display, and sorted by performance. Combine that with rituals (such as the signing of national anthems), emotions (embedded in the joy of victory and the agony of defeat), and media investment in national stories and you have a potent brew of emotional nationalism that can be both dangerous and delectable. 

In one case study, for example, a student astutely pointed out the way a USWNT fan emphasized “we” in describing a team of distant celebrity players: “I am a huge USA fan, I know you’re asking about the men’s World Cup but the women’s team is my favorite. We are the best in the world and we’re always the team everyone has circled. I have a bunch of jerseys and scarves and stuff from games I’ve been to, and I am obsessed with the players.”

In another case study, a student concisely observed both the way we embody nationalism through our clothes and our social connections - observing that her case study participant “likes to dress in ‘America-themed clothes’ and support the USA with her friends, or support England with her English friends.” As the fan described it: “it’s such a cool way to bring a country together.”  (reported from an interview conducted by Olivia Duboise)

(Photo from scoop.upworthy.com)

2) We watch because global soccer allows us to express and explore cultural affinities. Even beyond helping to define our actual citizenships and heritages, the global scope of soccer gives us a rare chance to identify the places and people we admire. We kind-of also do this with our preferences for foods, travel, clothes, art, music, etc.. — but those often involve acts of consumption rather than feelings of identification. Soccer fandom gives us the rare opportunity to root for the other, and that experience often helps us situate our own selves.

The idea is that these affinities are different from our actual affiliations — one fan, for example, enjoyed supporting a team with which she had no direct connection:  "I've always loved Argentina. I love Leo Messi. Even though I know nothing of Argentina, I still find myself compelled to support the country through soccer" (reported from an interview conducted by Mia Aguilar). This example also hints at the personal affinities that compel us, as when another fan talked about liking the US Women’s National Team because she “grew up watching Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe and I looked up to them a lot when I was playing soccer.” (reported from an interview conducted by Sydney Cathersal). 

(Photo from abcnews.go.com)

3) We watch because global soccer gives us an excuse to go “crazy.” Fandom of many sorts offers people a liminal space where the expectations for conventional behavior become loose — when supporting a team we can say things, wear things, and do things that would rarely be part of the rest of our lives. Something about this feels good — psychologists sometimes call it ‘eustress’ or ‘catharsis’, and while it is not always healthy it does have a strange primal appeal. It seems remarkably common for fans to talk about the experience as an enjoyable version of going “crazy.”

As one fan described “My old teammates and I would go to someone’s house and we would have a party where we all would watch the World Cup together. We would get crazy and sometimes I would catch myself screaming at the TV, which is something I would never do anywhere else. But, everyone else was doing it so it didn’t really matter and I didn’t want to be that one person just silently watching.” (reported from an interview conducted by Abigail Echavaria) 

Another fan described the pleasure as an “adrenaline rush that we get from not knowing what is going to happen in the game and you’re yelling along with thousands of other people.” When asked if this was a good thing the fan replied “it’s just what makes the game fun. Obviously, there is a line drawn and it shouldn’t get violent, but this type of conduct is what is expected and allowed at pro games.” (reported from an interview conducted by Taylor Schindler)

(Photo from mirror.co.uk)

4) We watch because global soccer helps us engage our families and communities. Fandom is by nature a social experience - it requires some identification with others. In many cases, those others are people in our neighborhoods or even our own houses — an event such as the World Cup gives us an excuse to get together and celebrate with people who broadly share our interests. In cultures that value individualism, that excuse allows us to connect to our social natures. In cultures that value interdependence, that excuse allows us to reinforce our social ties.

One fan again used ‘crazy’ as a descriptor: "The sense of community in the soccer world is crazy. The people I watch it with, my teammates, my friends, and family, it creates my own world cup environment and I get to see favorite players that I have been watching from a young age perform on the biggest stage in the world."  (reported from an interview conducted by Jayde Harris)

For another fan it was less about the global spectacle, and more about the local connections: "The community that was made through the youth soccer leagues gave me a sense of belonging with the other parents and kids that [we] grew up with." (reported from an interview conducted by Colin Bui)

(Photo from discover.hubpages.com)

5) We watch because global soccer puts human excellence on display. Anybody who has ever tried to cultivate a skill (which means pretty much everyone) can appreciate the artistry, aesthetics, and craft of players who are the best in the world at what they do. There is something magnificent and inspiring about peak human performance, and many fans watch the game with a connoisseur's eye.

Fans often use aesthetic terms to describe this motivation; as one explained: “it’s beautiful to watch each team's strategies and how they navigate the field.” (reported from an interview conducted by Jenna Blevins). Or, as another articulated, “As opposed to [gridiron] football, the art of the game can be seen with every pass….for the average fan, football gets exciting in the red zone (the last couple of yards where it is very possible something exciting will happen)...In soccer, every pass/ play carries weight, everybody is moving constantly and, from both sides of the ball, art is being formed.” (reported from an interview conducted by Justin Tucker)

(Photo from canadasoccer.com)

So what would all this tell our alien social scientist about our strange species? First, as a sociological lens can confirm, we are intrinsically social beings — craving both imagined and real communities that help us make meaning of our own places in a complicated world. And second, as a psychological lens might endorse, we are pleasure seeking beings — craving both raw emotional stimulation and more nuanced aesthetic engagement. Soccer fandom is a rare space where we can do all that (and more) at the same time.

[sportsandideas]

Portland Fields Forever: Learning about a place through soccer, and about soccer through a place

When I travel I always look for fields. I find that soccer, and sports more generally, provide rich access points for understanding the cultural geography of a community — enacting a mix of the universal and the particular through the physical spaces and rituals around how people play. Soccer allows a traveler to look through the lenses of social science to learn about local meanings.** **

In past years I’ve used these lenses to learn about some far flung places, posting photo essays on Icelandic Fields Forever and Tanzanian Fields Forever. In 2022, with the start of a Fall academic semester teaching a class at the University of Portland on ‘The World Cup in Mind and Society’ (a cross-listed psychology and sociology class that also counts for the new ‘exploration level’ of our University Core Curriculum - offering students interdisciplinary opportunities to engage timely issues) I decided to turn those lenses on the community I share with my students: Portland, Oregon. 

The idea was to help students explore the value of social science lenses by taking their own pictures of soccer in our town, and also finding publicly available material on the web that seems to say something about the meanings of soccer in Portland. The students initially did this individually, ideally connecting their findings to the types of psychological and sociological questions social scientists might ask, and then we put them together for a discussion of the patterns and meanings.

I started them off with an old Timbers Army tifo as an example of how much symbolism is embedded in a kind of display rarely seen anywhere except at major sporting events:

(Photo from soccer.nbcsports.com)

Only one of the students in the class is actually from Portland, and none of the students recognized the Portland city flag on the left or the Cascadia flag on the right — with the Portland flag representing the green forests and intersecting rivers of the Willamette and Columbia, while the Cascadia flag (aka, “the Doug”) was designed to symbolize the bioregion of the western Cascades that runs from western Oregon through western Washington and up to Vancouver, British Columbia.(and adopted by the region’s soccer fans as a cultural identity - and even sometimes as a claim to nation-like status) The students also didn’t recognize the face of Clive Charles in the middle — but they do know his name quite well, since it adorns our campus stadium. The broader point: soccer offers a rare space to display local pride, tribute historical icons, and identify with a region (the presence of the Cascadia flag contrasted with the absence of a US flag is meaningful here!).

The professional game and its accompanying fan base then became one of four entry points we identified for the cultural geography of soccer in Portland, accompanied by school soccer, club soccer, and recreational soccer. Each involves multiple levels of meaning — some that would be similar anywhere in the world, some that are more characteristic of American soccer writ large, and some that might be particular to Portland.

On the fandom side of things, for example, we agreed that Portland’s support for the Portland Thorns in the NWSL has elements of the universal — in the tendency of fans to don colors, scarves, and team merch that creates a feeling of shared identity — and the particular — in the implicit emphasis on gender empowerment embodied by Portland’s particularly vociferous support for the women’s game.

(Photo from Oregonlive.com)

And, speaking of scarves, one student contributed a shot of a campus dorm room decorated with scarves that situate Portland fandom amidst a melange of global soccer — tributing the Thorns and UP icon Megan Rapinoe alongside the USA, Chelsea, and the Tiburones (maybe referring to a small Mexican club?). 

(Photo by student Kimberly Cortez)

The “Rapinoe” scarf here, even if not tied explicitly to her UP alumni status, also connects to the curious phenomenon of college soccer in the US — and the fact that schools such as the University of Portland rely heavily on sports to try to build community and communal identification. Take, for example, the Villa Drum Squad — a residence hall based tradition at UP that has long created a supporters' culture around both the men’s and women’s soccer teams at UP, while also creating their own ‘annual soccer derby’ to establish bragging rights (and reinforce communal identities?) between residence halls.

(Photo by Jeffrey Braccia from The Beacon, identified by student Declan McGinnis)

We also talked about college soccer at a place such as UP as an interesting space for bringing international students to diversify our community, and as a place where gender inequities still seem to loom - despite the historic success of the UP women’s team. Yet the men’s and women’s players themselves support each other and build their own community at the games - as per the creative photo taken by a student superimposing a polaroid of some of the women’s players watching the a men’s game.

(Photo by a student with a preference for no attribution)

The general idea of playing at a place such as UP as a potential end goal for young players is another distinctive feature of American soccer culture, and one that is changing over time as club soccer has professionalized. As a scholar of youth development, I have some concerns about the trend to send 12 or 14 year olds to mythical ‘national championship’ tournaments and about the broader disconnection of American soccer from an educational mission. But the students are less concerned than I — finding pictures that mostly celebrate the joy young Portlanders get from the game.

(Photo from Timbers.com, identified by student Justin Tucker)

(Photo identified by student Charlie Ma)

Which then brings us to recreational soccer — an all-ages category that takes place all over town in lots of forms, usually with a distinctively American touch of commerce and structure. Several students, for example, have worked with the ‘Soccer Shots’ program that introduces very young kids to the game through a fun (but also structured and programmed) version of street soccer.

(Soccer Shots at the playground; Photo by student Henry Ryde)

Others work with local recreational soccer programs that sometimes serve as feeders for higher level clubs, and sometimes function just as an end point for the less talented or less serious players. One was involved with a season-opening Fall jamboree, and snapped a picture that seems vividly symbolic of youth soccer American style — where even the ‘pick-up’ games are programmed with signage, bags of balls, pre-set cones, and more equipment than players (though I was assured the players did come later!).

(Photo by student Kelli Coughlin)

The structure and programming also hints at another particular characteristic of American soccer — the pay-to-play model that commercializes what might otherwise be a public good. One student saw this in a photo of the empty turf field available for rent at a local business park:

(Photo by student Braden Williamson)

Fortunately, Portland does also share with the rest of the world a few places where a player can just drop in to a game for whatever reason moves them on the day: exercise, community, mental health, the thrill of competition, or any of the many possibilities embedded in my favorite universal symbol — a ball and a field…

(Photo by student Cole Saldana)

[sportsandideas]

Coming Soon to MLS: Hoodoo Yaller Dogs, Bizarre Tennis Cults, and a New Portland Stadium with Old Soccer History (A rescue job from 2010)

[On the eve of the 2021 MLS Cup Being hosted in Portland’s Stadium - now known as Providence Park, but having gone by many names over many years - I find myself thinking back to a piece I wrote for the late, great pitchinvasion.net back in 2010 during the last minor league Timber season. Much has happened since, including two remodels and several more name changes. But the fact that the stadium, and Portland soccer, has a fascinating history remains...]

The future home of the Portland Timbers, which opened a final USL season Saturday in the midst of a remodel to ready it for MLS in 2011, has been hosting soccer games with various degrees of success for over 100 years.  But while we Portlanders can be proud of our soccer history, we also must be honest: the stadium itself has never really been a good place to watch a game.

Please don’t misunderstand. There have been many glorious crowds, magnificent atmospheres, and bravura games in Portland.  On Saturday alone the place was packed with over 15,000 fans to watch a minor league match against the Rochester Rhinos in a stadium configured for baseball—a hearty Portland crowd significantly bigger than those that watched half of the MLS games that same night, and several thousand more than bothered to show up at New York’s sparkling new “soccer palace.”

Yet Portland’s building itself has always been more like Javier Zanetti than Lionel Messi, more Kasey Keller than Clint Dempsey – always there, always valuable, often intriguing, but never likely to steal the show.  I’ve heard several local fans of both soccer and baseball describe the stadium as feeling ‘soulless’ – which is reasonable as a description for the feeling of the structure itself.  The gently sloping seating areas, currently off-set in a way that makes a soccer crowd disturbingly asymmetrical, are cramped and crumbling.  The moldy grey cement walls that border much of the field look melancholy and cheap. The surface has been slippery, ugly versions of artificial turf for over 40 years.  But saying that the structure feels ‘soulless’ is very different from saying it has no soul. 

In fact, more than any other current MLS stadium (with the possible exception of RFK in Washington DC—which the league is desperate to vacate anyway) Portland’s future home will offer the league true American soccer history.  From a ‘Pacific Coast Championship’ contested by teams of immigrants at a 1905 World’s Fair, to the late 1970’s glory days of the NASL, to the rise of American support for US National Teams, to the vanguard of modern supporters’ culture, the Portland stadium has seen it all.  And now, if they can get the latest remodel right (a topic I may return to in future weeks), if they can actually make it a good place to watch the game, the Timbers MLS home has a chance to be a truly unique place for American soccer fans: a new stadium with meaningful history.  

(Photo of the stadium pre-2011 when it had been configured primarily for minor league baseball. From: wikimedia.org)

The Pre-Timbers Years

The name of the stadium is as good a place to start as any: though currently known as PGE Park, Pacific Gas and Electric only bought ten years worth of naming rights in 2000. Immediately prior to that it was known as “Civic Stadium,” though upon its founding in 1893 place was called “Multnomah Field” after the blue-blood Athletic Club (and, in turn, the county) that still borders the playing surface.  It also had a period after its first major upgrade in 1926 as “Multnomah Stadium” until being sold to the city in 1966 by the Multnomah Athletic Club (known colloquially as “The MAC”).  And now PGE’s naming rights are set to expire just in time for MLS to arrive—with little word as to what name might come next.  

(Set up for American Football in 1959)

So for reasons of both historical flux and personal bitterness (due to having my jacked up PGE rates fund the types of exorbitant CEO buy-outs and Enron business practices that represent all that is wrong with the American economy), I’m going to just call it Portland’s stadium.  It has, after all, been the city’s primary site for sport and spectacle of all types for almost 120 years—and its coming incarnation will likely be a prominent face of the city for many years to come.  

One of the main explanations for the stadium’s local prominence is its location in an old heart of town: just west of the downtown business district, just east of the moneyed West Hills, just south of a yuppified shopping/dining/drinking district, and just off a mass transit line, the original Multnomah Field was built on a site that the the history of the Multnomah Athletic Club describes as having been a ‘natural amphitheater perfect for athletic use.’ That ‘natural amphitheater’ was created partially by Tanner Creek Gulch, a water source that also made possible an 1840’s tannery central to early Portland’s commerce, along with a series of ‘Chinese vegetable gardens and shanties.’  With the coming of the athletic field, however, Tanner Creek was gradually diverted underground—an old landscape feature that has created some modern challenges to construction work on the current re-model, along with local calls for the new stadium to tribute the ‘historic course of the creek.’ I’ve also heard some vague (and so far unsubstantiated) claims that the gulch is one reason the space would be hard to maintain as a grass playing surface—the natural drainage patterns are apparently more conducive to a bog garden than a football pitch.

(The gulch pre-stadium)

Football was, nevertheless, among the original tenants of the field—though in the 1890’s the specific type of football to be played was still somewhat uncertain.  The “intercollegiate” rules for what would become ‘American football’ were still being negotiated on the East Coast, and amateur athletic clubs such as The MAC were prime sites for experimentation.  As such, according to The MAC’s history, when the first interested ‘football’ players gathered at Multnomah Field in the 1890’s the specific code they’d use was uncertain: one of their organizers had introduced ‘rugby and association football’ at a local academy, but others “insisted they play the new version.”  American football, including many college games played by the various state universities in Oregon, eventually did become a feature of the early decades of the Portland stadium—but is interesting for a soccer fan to note that with a few twists of fate it could have been otherwise.

Soccer did not, however, disappear entirely.  In fact, thanks to a tip from eminent soccer historian Colin Jose, I learned that in 1905 Multnomah Field hosted what I’ll claim to be a precursor to the Cascadia Cup—a “Pacific Coast Championship” held in conjunction with the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition (Portland’s version of a World’s Fair).  Invitations went out to teams from California, Washington, and British Columbia, and the Portland team prepared by playing teams of sailors from British ships cruising the Pacific coast; one report from the August 27th 1905 Oregonian has the locals “defeating a team of sailors from the British ships Tottenham and Comeric by 6 to1.”  If it is true that history repeats itself, I like the sound of Portland defeats Tottenham 6 to 1.

Unfortunately, like too many Cascadia Cups, the actual Exposition tournament didn’t go well for Portland.  Only one of the invited teams actually showed up, from Ladysmith BC, and they soundly beat Portland to take the 1905 title.  As the September 29th Oregonian reported “The Portlands were outplayed and outweighed, man for man, although they played a plucky game.”  The paper went on to describe the great ancestors of the Timbers Army: “The attendance?  At the busiest part of the game a careful computation of the occupants of the grandstand revealed 18 young men and one ‘yaller’ dog.  Whether this combination formed a hoodoo against the Portlands is not known.”  Damn that yaller dog.  

(Article from September 29, 1905)

The Portland stadium would host more soccer in coming decades, but prior to the arrival of the NASL Timbers in 1975 it was more known for its eclecticism: it hosted undistinguished US Presidents such as William H. Taft and Warren Harding, an artificial ski jump competition that delighted “40,000 cheering spectators” in 1953, an Elvis Presley concert that prompted a 1957 Oregonian headline of “Stadium Site of Bedlam,” and 22 years of greyhound racing that made for the stadium’s primary income from 1933-1955.  Even now, the stadium is a stop on the “Fasten Your Seat Belts—It’s Been a Bumpy Ride” bus tour of “Portland’s discriminatory past:” according to the Willamette Week, “In the 1920s, Oregon had the largest Ku Klux Klan contingent west of the Rocky Mountains, with about 70,000 members and over 50 ‘klaverns’ (KKK chapters) statewide.  The KKK held rallies at Civic Stadium, now PGE Park, when voicing its opposition to ‘Koons, Kikes and Katholics.’” (According to some other sources, the focus for the Oregon KKK was mostly on being anti-Catholic—though I’m sure Oregon’s small African-American population wasn’t too popular either).

(A 1926 remodel)

Greyhound racing was displaced as the stadium’s primary tenant in 1956 when Portland’s minor league baseball team moved from a demolished Vaughn Street Park, leading to a decision all soccer fans must rue: in 1969 the stadium achieved the dubious distinction of becoming “the first outdoor baseball facility to install artificial turf.”  And because I agree with most American soccer fans that artificial turf is a detriment to the game, I have a sad confession to make: in looking at many pictures of the stadium field through its early history I’ve yet to see one where the grass looked to have been playable.  In its grass days Multnomah Field was always a muddy, wood-chipped, patchy mess.  It was, and I fear always will be, a pitch conspired against by long rainy days, a busy schedule, a subterranean playing surface, and a previous identity as Tanner Creek Gulch.  

The Post-Timbers Years

Despite its bastard turf, however, recent incarnations of Portland’s stadium have hosted some pretty good soccer.  In the NASL Timber’s very first year, for example, they beat the Seattle Sounders in front of a 31,000 person home crowd—leading to a good old American style pitch invasion and a run to ‘Soccer Bowl 1975.’   With teams of primarily British imports including Clyde Best and Clive Charles, the first iteration of the Portland Timbers then averaged 20,000 in 1976 (its second year of existence), only falling below 10,000 during their final season in 1982 when the NASL was well into its fatal decline.  Their attendance figures were not the best in the league, but considering Portland’s relatively small population they are impressive enough to make a current MLS team like FC Dallas blush.

(Placard from inside Portland’s stadium near the suites)

Portland was also chosen as the host for the 1977 Soccer Bowl – and though the Timbers failed to make the playoffs that season, the stadium turned out over 35,000 fans to watch the New York Cosmos defeat the Seattle Sounders 2-1 in what would be Pele’s last competitive game.  As Clive Gammon described it in Sports Illustrated: “It was a huge fiesta in the rain. The lucky ones sat in the stands and the rest on open benches, drying out a little when the sun fitfully appeared, and roaring their hearts out as if this were Munich on World Cup day, not a soaking Sabbath in Portland. All 35,548 of them were crammed into creaky old Civic Stadium that was built in the '20s with greyhound racing in mind but which in the future may be recognized as the place where soccer in North America had its coming-of-age party.”

(Placard from inside Portland’s stadium near the suites)

Sadly, however, claims of a ‘coming-of-age’ party for North American were premature.  The NASL Timbers, along with much of the league, were gone by 1982—reincarnated briefly in 1989, and then in its current form in 2001. So the stadium experienced another relative big-event soccer lull, albeit one interspersed with some significant appearances by US National Teams.  

Of the US National Team appearances, perhaps the most significant men’s game came in 1997.  The US was in the midst of a sloppy qualifying campaign for the 1998 World Cup in France, and needed a pro-American venue for a crucial qualifier against Costa Rica.  With the help of Nike (headquartered in nearby Beaverton), the US Federation created an atmosphere that many have cited as an early crest of soccer enthusiasm for our own national team.  As Tim Crothers reported “The capacity crowd of 27,396 at Civic Stadium did muster plenty of enthusiasm, albeit somewhat orchestrated by a certain local sneaker company of national repute that, in its role as a sponsor of U.S. Soccer, passed out noisemakers and urged fans to wear white clothing as a sign of unity. This request was largely honored, resulting in a scene that could have passed for a convention of some bizarre tennis cult.”  

Yet, however bizarre the scene, when Tab Ramos scored a late goal for a 1-0 victory that “virtually clinched” a World Cup spot Portland felt like the capital of the American game. Even Big Soccer’s Dan Loney, with his entertaining tone of informed mockery, has cited the game in Portland as something close to a genuine highlight of American soccer fandom: “For a long time, Portland in September 1997 held that prize [of greatest moment in US fans’ soccer-watching lives].  There was a fan section!  We won! It was a sellout!  Soccer was here to stay, and Portland was destined to get an MLS team!”  

While the MLS team obviously took a while longer to arrive, within a few years the Portland stadium did earn the inadvertent distinction of being one of the few places in the world to host games for consecutive FIFA World Cups—the 1999 and 2003 Women’s World Cup (with the US serving as an emergency fill-in for China in 2003 after a SARS outbreak).  In 1999 Portland only hosted group games, drawing decent crowds including over 20,000 for games such as the decidedly non-glamorous North Korea – Denmark clash (neither team advanced).  In 2003, with the stadium having been remodeled two years prior partially in a failed effort to make it more baseball friendly, Portland hosted a semifinal doubleheader with temporary stands and an imported grass surface.  In one of those games the US lost to Germany 3-0, a contest that symbolized both the waning on-field dominance of our women’s team and its nascent off-field potential: it drew huge local interest along with a sold out crowd—including a colleague of mine who gladly paid $500 dollars to a scalper for two tickets just to be able to say he was there.

(Photo from September 28, 2003 - with temporary stands and grass for a Women’s World Cup game between Australia and Ghana. From http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/article/129425)

The Present and the Future

In more recent years Portland has been enjoying its new version of the Timbers, and wrangling its way through a sometimes contentious debate about what having an MLS team will be worth.  Whether or not you like the team, the minor league version of the Timbers has offered an impressive example of how an American city can foster a large and passionate fan base for soccer—despite the team being in a minor league and playing in what is in current form is basically a bad baseball stadium.  

And this, ultimately, is the rub.  All the meaningful soccer history embodied in the Portland stadium exists at odds with the fact that it has never really been a very good place to watch the game.  So yes soccer purists, the MLS version of the Timbers will have to share the stadium with some Portland State University football games, and yes it probably doesn’t make sense right now to put down a real grass playing surface.  But for the first time in its 100+ year history Portland is going to have a stadium designed primarily to cater to soccer.  And, hopefully, to make more history.

In that vein, it may be appropriate to return one last time to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition, where Portland’s team captain explained his team’s failure to win the championship to an Oregonian journalist by noting: “I wish to say that I am not in the least discouraged at the showing made by our team.  On the contrary, I am proud of their work…I am confident that in a year or so, with the support of all admirers in Portland of association football, we shall be able to turn out a team that will be a credit to this city and carry off the laurels in this branch of sport.  We can do nothing without enthusiasm….”

And if by including the qualifier ‘a year or so’ the captain was allowing for the possibility it could take 106, then he might be right—with a new stadium and old history Portland may just yet “carry off the laurels in this branch of sport.”

[sportsandideas]

Tanzanian Fields Forever

Back from a year as a Fulbright scholar in the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania, it’s time for a long awaited (mostly awaited by me) follow-up to an old post on fields and soccer spaces in Iceland. The cultural geography of Tanzanian fields is not-surprisingly different, an inevitable contrast between a country with 357,000 people and a GDP per capita of $73k per year (Iceland) vs a country with 57.3 million people and a GDP per capita of $1.1k per year. Ah, global inequality.

What the countries do share is a landscape full of fields. In Iceland the fields seemed part of massive public investment in healthy recreational spaces; in Tanzania the fields seemed driven by a massive popular interest in soccer as a necessary part of life for kids (mostly – but not exclusively – boys), schools, and communities. As per much of sub-Saharan Africa, every reasonably open and flat space not used for agriculture seemed to soon grow goal-posts and at least rough edges. There were plenty of the iconic, if stereotypical, scenes of youngsters improvising fields for impromptu pick-up soccer. But if the fields of Iceland were characterized by a Nordic pragmatism and planned recreation, the fields of Tanzania were characterized by an impressive East African entrepreneurial spirit, an improvisational creativity, and a love for play. All the pictures here were taken by me sometime in 2019-2020 (please don’t re-use without permission!).

Here’s one of the iconic improvised fields, the photo capturing a rare pick-up penalty kick, from a village on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro on a random Sunday:

And here’s another improvised field sitting unused in Moshi town – the medium-sized city where I lived for the year:

And another, more tropical scene, from a rural village on the island of Zanzibar:

And one more from the slopes of Kilimanjaro, where you have to look hard for the goal posts and not as hard for a couple of cows taking a break from their grounds keeping / grazing duties:

I love these types of fields. Their improvised and improbable nature conveys something about a raw love of the game that feels powerful and connective. But that feeling is also pandering a bit to a romanticized version of poverty and homogeneity in African soccer. The reality is much more multi-faceted.

Here, for example, is a shot from Ushirika Stadium in Moshi where Polisi Tanzania FC (PTFC!) played home games in the Tanzanian Premier League (Ligi Kuu Bara) in front of a tidy, fun crowd of several thousand:

Here’s a week-end casual game at the field just outside the University where I was based (Mwenge Catholic University – that’s the church in the background!):

Here’s a rare artificial turf mini-pitch in Iringa, a charitable legacy of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa that was getting a surprising amount of use the day I visited (I’ve been critical of the ’20 centres for 2010’ project, and stand by those criticisms – but it was interesting to see a centre offering robust programming).

And here’s the scene at a youth tournament in Arusha – where a local business had sent up a tent full of big screen tv’s set up for kids to play FIFA ’19 during breaks between (on-field) games. Not something I expected to find at a youth tournament in East Africa, but a reminder that soccer always ends up mixing the global and the local.

Then there were the school fields, part of what I was actually trying to research. Nearly every school had a pitch set up somewhere on the grounds, often used by students during breaks, for intramural tournaments (the most common type of competition), and for occasional interscholastic games – usually friendlies. Some of these fields were pretty nice, such as this one from a secondary school in Moshi:

Some were a bit overgrown from a year of heavy rains, and interspersed with some brutal termite holes, such as this one from rural Kilimanjaro near the Kenya border:

Some came with odd angles, such as this one up the hill (and continuing up the hill!) from my University:

Some had been commandeered for construction projects, such as this one on the way to Marangu gate:

And many had worn paths that made for what seemed to be a difficult playing surface, such as this one on the Mkuu side of Kilimanjaro:

Then, aside from the fields themselves, there were a number of ancillary services around the game that reinforced Tanzania’s entrepreneurial ethos. The local second-hand clothing market in Moshi, for example, had a few booths devoted specifically to used football boots – suggesting that neon was going out of style in Europe or North America:

Most shopping areas also included small ‘soccer huts’ or ‘soccer centers’ where people could pay a few Shillings to watch satellite feeds of games from Europe or from Tanzania’s big league. Here’s the outside of the Kuvuuni Soccer Center near my University:

And the inside with a board advertising a match-up between two Tanzanian teams: Yanga vs Coastal:

And, of course, the big brewers also got into the game – schlepping beer with generic wishes of good luck when the national team was getting ready to play Sudan in a second tier African confederation tournament:

And, finally, there were youth academies using soccer to schlep something a bit more optimistic that makes for a nice final note: happiness.

[sportsandideas]

A Mental Game: On Happiness, or Does it Matter Who Wins? [A rescue job from 2010]

[Here’s something I wrote over eight years ago in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup; many of the names have changed, but the story is (basically) the same...]

(photo from: The Daily Echo)

Originally posted MAY 3, 2010

Re-posted July of 2018

Why do we care?  Why will hundreds of millions of fans watch the World Cup this summer and hinge their lives around game results?  Why does it matter whether the millionaire players, coaches, and owners of Inter Milan beat the millionaire players, coaches, and owners of Bayern Munich in the Champions League final?  Why does anybody, no matter how few, bother going to watch FC Dallas play?

Presumably at some level most soccer fans invest ourselves in what, after all, is twenty-two men or women in short pants chasing a ball because we enjoy it.  Somehow the game makes us happy.  But why?

As it happens, studying happiness is hot right now in the social sciences.  Psychologists have realized they spent way too long focused primarily on pathology and dysfunction, failing to learn about the other side of human experience.  Economists have realized that people are as motivated by irrational emotions as they are by rational cost-benefit analyses.  And soccer, it seems to me, can be a pretty interesting place to apply some of their ideas.

The explosion of scholarly interest in happiness does not, unfortunately, make for easy answers.  Happiness is tough to define and measure.  Most research tends to operate with the assumption that it’s best to just trust people and simply ask: On a scale of __ to __, how happy are you?  The problem is that when the question is that blunt and superficial, most people say they are happy.  It misses the proverbial ‘masses who lead lives of quiet desperation.’  It misses those FC Dallas fans.

The alternative is to try and measure the things scholars think associate with happiness.  Though those things include a wide range of characteristics from autonomy to environmental mastery, in my read of the literature they boil down to that old Freudian formulation: what matters is a combination of ‘love and work’, people and purpose.  We tend to be happiest when we balance engaging social relationships with a sense that what we do matters, be that a job, raising a family, contributing to a community, or maybe even supporting a team.

But focusing just on people and purpose also fails to tell the whole story because it doesn’t address the classic social science problem of causality—do good social networks and success in one’s endeavors cause happiness, or are happy people more likely to have good social networks and succeed?  In fact, it turns out that statistically, when dealing with large data sets, the single best predictor of happiness is something we don’t have much control over: personality.  Optimists with a sunny disposition are happier than pessimists ridden by anxiety almost regardless of the circumstances of their lives.  A sanguine Aussie will consistently out-happy a dour Englishman no matter their relative fortunes in South Africa this summer.

While this may not be revolutionary stuff, the science of happiness does highlight some ways that our fandom can lead us astray.  One recent PR company survey, for example, found that 93 percent of England fans would “give up food for a week to see England win.”  This makes news because it seems to say something about how much the game matters to people—because it seems to say how happy it would make them to see their team win.  But they are wrong.

Predicting Happiness

Say hypothetically I want to predict how happy English football fans will be one year from today.  And say I have to make that predication for two potential scenarios: 1) England wins the 2010 World Cup; 2) England is knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina in a game where Carlos Tevez scores with a balled fist, Wayne Rooney gets dismissed on a second yellow for diving in the box, and Diego Maradona celebrates by belly sliding across Frank Lampard’s bow wearing a t-shirt saying ‘the Queen can stuff it.’  Here’s my prediction: in either case, English fans will be exactly as happy as they are today.

(photo from Reuters UK)

My prediction is based on a famous study in the science of happiness that evaluated the ‘real life’ equivalents of that English soccer dream/nightmare: in 1978 a group of psychologists compared two groups at the extremes of what we imagine to define our well-being—people had won the lottery, and people who had been paralyzed for life.  Immediately after their respective fateful events, there reported dramatic differences in their emotions—the lottery winners were ecstatic, the paraplegics were devastated.  Of course.

But over time a funny thing happened: they adapted.  The lottery winners started to realize that they still couldn’t afford everything they wanted, that they couldn’t trust people who had been good friends, that money changes but does not eliminate the stresses of everyday life.  Those who had been paralyzed came to realize that they could still engage in fulfilling relationships, that it could be rewarding to make little bits of progress in dealing with new challenges, that their physical limitations changed but did not eliminate the meaning of their lives.  After six months or a year, each group (along with a control group who had experienced no dramatic life events) expected to be back to the exact same level of happiness they’d reported before fate intervened. Extending the results of that study to virtually any life events, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (of Stumbling on Happiness fame) goes so far as to say “If it happened over three months ago, with a few exceptions, it has no impact on our happiness.”*[see end note]

Granted, objective events and circumstances do make a difference in the short-term; the night of England’s World Cup win/loss will undoubtedly be an alcohol-lubricated orgy of joy/woe.  And great games do offer aesthetic pleasures, along with the types of emotional highs (and lows) that constitute the immeasurable part of human experience.  But even in the short term an interesting range of variables mediate between events, between the win or the loss, and our emotional response.

The Social Relativity of Happiness

One key mediator between events and happiness is our relative perspective on what could have been—what academics call “counterfactuals.”  While competitive sports are alluring precisely because they delineate clear winners and losers, feelings of ‘success’ are relative to our expectations and our imaginations.

A famous research example here drew on the Barcelona Olympics to compare the emotional responses of silver and bronze medal winners.  As Victoria Husted Medvec and colleagues reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, objective raters consistently found bronze medal winners to be happier than silver medal winners.  In a follow-up study with amateur athletes they confirmed that this inversion of objective results was because people were thinking about what could have been: the bronze medal winners were comparing themselves to those who came in fourth, while the silver medal winners were comparing themselves to those who won it all.

In soccer terms, this suggests that fans’ happiness at the World Cup depends less on where they finish and more on where people think their team could have finished.  Subjective perceptions of what could have been matter more than objective results.  In fact, I’d hypothesize that on average English fans would be happier with a second round exit than a loss in the final—because they wouldn’t have to torment themselves with how close they came to winning it all.

(photo from Sky News)

This subjectivity of fans’ emotional reactions is further compounded by that other key variable in our happiness equation: people.  Both in the short term and in the long term we tend to be happier when we are engaged in healthy relating with others.  One relevant study here was done by María-Angeles Ruiz-Belda and colleagues in Spain, who video-taped soccer fans watching televised games from the World Cup and from La Liga.  The best predictor of whether or not the fans seemed happy during the game had nothing to do with goals being scored or favorable results; what mattered was the presence of other people.  Although Ruiz-Belda and colleagues use these findings to question the relationship between smiling and emotional experience, from a soccer perspective the results suggest that the full glory of the game only happens when shared.

The social essence of happy fandom also shows up in theoretical efforts to explain our irrational attachments to our teams.  Why do we identify with players we don’t know and franchises that use us for our money?  Probably the most common theoretical explanation is called the BIRG effect: Basking In Reflected Glory.  The idea is that we unconsciously use teams to orient our social identities in a way that tells us something about whether we are good or bad: when the US was up 2-0 at the half against Brazil in last summer’s Confederations Cup I was irrationally happy because of a vague sense that the score line reflected well on me.  When the US proceeded to lose 3-2 I was irrationally miserable because of a vague sense that I myself, sitting dazed in front of a pub TV 10,000 miles from the actual game, had failed.  But while BIRGing makes some sense I’ve never accepted it to be the full story—there are too many people willing to stick with their teams through too many lean years  (think again about the English and the World Cup) to make BIRGing the only thing that matters.

So I was pleased recently to stumble across some scholarship from a psychologist named Daniel Wann who has offered Team Identification-Social Psychological Health Model as a complement to the BIRG effect.  Ok, the name is not as catchy, but the idea fits with everything else I know about happiness: Wann has good evidence that fandom facilitates happiness because it offers us the types of real, imagined, temporary, and enduring connections to others that our human nature craves.

Ultimately, as many others have noted, where else other than the sports arena can grown men cry, hug, sing, and dance in a way that enhances both their masculinity and their social networks?  Where else can people of all stripes engage in loud, desperate, eccentric yet culturally endorsed expressions of our full emotional range?  We often think soccer makes us happy when our team wins, but the evidence suggests it actually makes us happy by offering rare opportunities—real or perceived—to connect amidst the penetrating anomie of modern life.  So, if the science of happiness is right, the England fan screaming ‘God Save the Queen’ with arms around mates after a second round loss may actually end up happier than the fan sitting alone on a tropical island watching Rio Ferdinand raise the Jules Rimet trophy. Or at least, if that isn’t any consolation, know that a year later winning or losing probably won’t make one bit of difference.  Right?

*Note: Oddly, one of the exceptions to Gilbert’s claim may be soccer related: in their recent book Soccernomics Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski present some provocative data suggesting that hosting a World Cup does increase happiness in a country even several years after the event—though they also find that hosting other major games does not influence national happiness.  They present further data suggesting that the idea of losing in major competitions as a cause of fan suicide is a myth—in fact, they argue, sports events tend to bring people together in a way that prevents suicide.  So while the whole picture is certainly a bit more complicated than I’m making out, the basic argument holds—major events by themselves don’t matter as much as we expect them to over the long term.

[As a more meta note: Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site: pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. So I occasionally insert a few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really to lose…]

[sportsandideas]

Watching the World Cup Through Social Science Lenses

(note that a shorter version of this framed around sociology specifically is now available on the Engaging Sports blog)

(photo from Huffington Post UK)

In November 2013 a capacity crowd of nearly 40,000 fans at the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb, Croatia celebrated one of the great moments for any team competing in international soccer: by defeating Iceland 2-0, the Croatian national team was among the last of 32 countries to qualify for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil. Amidst the ecstasy, someone made the fateful mistake of handing a microphone to Josip Šimunić.

Šimunić played as a hard-tackling defender for Croatia, and at the age of 35 this was almost certainly his last chance to play in a World Cup. Alone on the field but for a cameraman tracking his every move, Šimunić moved with a manic and youthful energy that belied his gangly 6’5” frame, his receding hairline, and his perpetual five o’clock shadow. As he dramatically gesticulated with the microphone and a jersey in hand, he screamed to the crowd in a call-and-respond repeat “Za dom spremni” – “For the homeland!” In perfect and immediate synchrony, a large portion of the crowd responded “Ready!”

The stadium was pulsating with the raw energy and symbolism that soccer – as the sport with the most genuine claim to being a global game – has a distinctively universal capacity to produce. Unfortunately, Šimunić’s chant was also a clear local reference to a hateful nationalist cry used by the fascist Ustase pro-Nazi regime that ruled Croatia during World War II. Šimunić himself has protested innocence, relying on a defense of simple patriotism and claiming “some people have to learn some history.” Global soccer authorities disagreed; he was suspended through the 2014 World Cup for his “discriminatory” act and never played for the Croatian national team again.

To make Šimunić’s story even more intriguing from a social science perspective, it turns out his moment of nationalist frenzy followed on a lifetime spent mostly nowhere near “the homeland.” Though Šimunić’s parents were Croatian, he was born and raised in Canberra Australia and developed into a world class soccer player at the Australian Institute for Sport – a famous talent factory for Australian Olympians. Professionally, Šimunić spent the majority of his career playing in Germany with teams in Hamburg, Berlin, and Hoffenheim, and in his personal life he married a “Canadian-Croat.” Though he ended his career with the Croatian professional team Dinamo Zagreb and spent several recent years as an assistant coach for the Croatian National Team, it is plausible to suggest that Šimunić’s emotional nationalism was not at all “for the homeland.” Instead, it may have been a way to make sense of splintered and imagined identities – types that powerfully shape our 21st century lives.

Šimunić’s story thus becomes less a morality tale and more a prompt for broader thinking about soccer, and the upcoming World Cup to be hosted by Russia, as a mirror and a lens – reflecting and refracting our social world in ways that both illuminate and distort how we understand our selves and others. Though a growing number of scholars use soccer for that type of thinking on a wide range of social science topics, it is obviously not the reason most people watch, play, and love soccer. Mostly we enjoy the game because it is fun. I get that. As someone who has played and coached soccer at all levels from recreational to professional, I love few things more than the simple pleasure of a beautiful game on a sun-drenched summer day.

But as someone who has spent several decades teaching and researching soccer as a cultural form, I also see events such as the World Cup as an opportunity to better understand people and society. It provides a rare combination of global attention and emotionally engaging spectacle, a combination that offers a unique perspective on critical issues including, but not limited to, nationalism and development. So, if we watch the World Cup as both a mirror and a lens, what might we see?

(photo by Maxim Shemetov—Reuters from Time.com)

Society on display

Global sports mega-events, most notably the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup, derive at least some of their popularity from the rare opportunity to put nations on display. Though United Nations meetings may be more consequential, they don’t make for particularly good television. The World Cup final, in contrast, draws enough viewers to make it the globe’s most broadly shared cultural experience.

Though American marketers occasionally like to claim that the Super Bowl is the world’s most watched sporting event, the statistics suggest that’s not even close to true. Where just under 300 million people tune into a typical modern Super Bowl, estimates suggest nearly a billion people watched the 2014 World Cup final played in Brazil between Argentina and Germany. 26.5 million of those were watching on American televisions – 17.3 million watching English commentary on ABC, and 9.2 million watching Spanish commentary on Univision.  

This kind of mass appeal, both across and within nations, has made global soccer an increasingly legitimate area of study for academics. Though still sometimes caught between the stereotypical disdain of academic-types for sports and of sports-types for academics, recent decades have seen a burgeoning of what some jokingly call ‘futbology.’

The academic study of soccer (or futbol, or football – the question of what to call the game has a contentious history that has been the subject of its own academic inquiry) is often quite interdisciplinary, with a healthy mix of social history, area studies, international studies, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. In the English speaking world academics with a shared interest in the global game regularly fill academic journals such as Soccer in Society, have formed scholarly communities such as the UK-based Football Collective and the US-based Football Scholars Forum, and offer classes on topics ranging from the general sociology of soccer to a University of British Columbia offering on the “Sociology of Cristiano Ronaldo: Futebol, Identity, and Representation.”

For these types of scholars, each World Cup generates social and cultural narratives that are ripe for interpretation. To just cite recent examples, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, as the first World Cup hosted in the Global South, became a forum for discussions about development and division – soccer’s global governing body FIFA trademarked the phrase “Celebrate Africa’s Humanity” as if there was something singular and unified about the humanity of that diverse continent. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil, particularly after massive 2013 street protests surrounding the Confederations Cup warm-up tournament, became about corruption and inequality. There are still regular news briefs about ‘white elephant’ sporting facilities from both Brazil’s World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics – emblems of bread, circus, and massive profits for well-positioned elites. The 2018 World Cup is gestating narratives about cultures of hooliganism and racism that pervade an unfortunate proportion of the soccer landscape in Russia, while the 2022 World Cup in Qatar is already rife with attention to worker’s rights and religious tolerance.

While each of these types of cultural narratives garners thoughtful analysis from scholars and opportunities for the application of social theory around each four-year World Cup cycle, during the month-long tournament itself attention most often shifts to narratives about nations and nationalism. As the British cultural historian Eric Hobsbawn famously (among futbologists) noted, “the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.” The start of a World Cup game, with eleven men from each side donning national colors and saluting their flag, is a powerful visual image of nationhood.

It is also often inaccurate. For one, the simple fact that the players who get the most global attention are men, despite the athletic accomplishments on display in the women’s World Cup, only starts to hint at the many questions about gender, masculinity, and sexuality embedded in global soccer. In addition, World Cup teams often visually present complex stories about race, class, and ethnicity – stories that vary by nation from the relative homogeneity of the Russian national team to the sometimes surprising diversity of teams such as Belgium.

Yet for many the World Cup offers crude representations of nationalism otherwise only available at the most fevered of political rallies. My own experiences of World Cup watching with American fans are colored by ostentatious displays of red, white, and blue – often in the form of Uncle Sam, Wonder Woman, or Captain America. The soundtrack is full of chanting and singing, sometimes creative, sometimes crude, and almost always infused with the emphatic repetition of U-S-A. The emotional climate is a conflicted mix of unity and enmity: we share a pride that depends at least partially on derogating the other – other teams, other fans, other places and people. There is, as many scholars and commentators have noted, a fine line between patriotism and jingoism.

There may, in fact, be no better example of social identity theory in action than the emotional nationalism of a World Cup. The mix of externally defined in-groups and out-groups, visual markers of identification, and competitive social comparison primes the human mind to invest deeply in shallow group memberships.

I experienced it in person at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, watching among a tightly packed crowd of US fans in the corner of Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Tshwane/Pretoria while the US and Algerian teams traded futile surges in a high-stakes game that would determine who advanced to the next stage of the tournament. Each shift in the game’s flow, and each missed chance, brought a visible and visceral tightening of fan bodies – we coiled and reeled as 90 minutes ticked away. Then, after one surprisingly fluid move of the ball from the US goalkeeper’s hands to a winger’s feet to a striker’s deflection, US star Landon Donovan slotted home a winning goal that unleashed in me, and in nearly all my neighbors, a screaming abandon familiar only from the deep recesses of childhood. A massive American flag unfurled over us as if dropped from the sky, and all I could see was red, white, and blue. That moment, though it said nothing rational about my country, may be the single moment where I felt most intensely and irrationally American. It was a World Cup version of collective effervescence; a feeling that immersed me in the moment, and then begged for interpretation.

(photo from The Free Beer Movement)

Development and representation

In my own efforts to interpret the feelings evoked by a World Cup, I’ve found it useful to analyze what the teams actually represent. Where did the players come from, and what are the social forces that shape soccer talent? What does the World Cup tell us about how soccer itself assumes meaning in different places and communities?

Take, as just one example, the players involved in that affecting US goal against Algeria during the 2010 World Cup. Tim Howard, the New Jersey bred US goalkeeper who started the move towards the Algerian goal with a long throw from his own goalmouth, is the child of a Hungarian immigrant mother and an African-American father who spent much of his professional career representing Everton FC in Liverpool England. Jozy Altidore, the player who crossed the ball into the box and forced the Algerian goalkeeper out of position, is the child of Haitian immigrants who plays professionally in Toronto after representing teams in Spain, Turkey, Holland, England, and New York. Clint Dempsey, the player whose initial shot rebounded into Landon Donovan’s path for the final strike, grew up in a Nacogdoches Texas trailer park playing the game mostly with Mexican immigrants until he was shuttled off to an elite Dallas youth soccer club and the blue-blooded Furman University in South Carolina before a professional career based in Boston, London, and Seattle. Donovan, California-bred but born of a Canadian father, never went to college, substituting a brief and somewhat dismal apprenticeship in the German Bundesliga before eventually settling back into a wildly successful professional career in California – with occasional breaks that included a soul-searching ‘sabbatical’ backpacking in Cambodia and time off to manage depression.

The stories of nearly any World Cup team viewed in this way offer a lens, however fractured, on modern societies. The US men’s team, despite failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup due at least in part to systemic failures to integrate diverse American soccer cultures, often offers a genuinely eclectic mix of ethnicity and personality. In fact, according to an analysis of the rosters for all 32 teams in the 2014 World Cup finals by sociologist David Keyes for Pacific Standard, 19 of 30 players in the final US player pool were ‘dual nationals’ – players holding either multiple citizenship or having a parent or a grandparent from another country. This was tied with the teams from Switzerland and Australia for third most dual nationals in the 2014 World Cup, behind only teams from Argentina (with 24 of 30) and Algeria (with 22 of 30). While both the Ecuador and South Korea teams had no dual nationals, Keyes found that overall 30% of 958 World Cup roster players were dual nationals – numbers greater than one would expect based on broader international migration statistics.

World Cup teams may therefore be less representative of national character and more indicative of global hybridity. Part of the beauty of soccer as the one truly global game is that the players come from everywhere. The World Cup has players who learned the game on the streets of South America, in the community sports clubs of northern Europe, in professional team academy outposts in west Africa, and in the elite government sports schools of east Asia. But as player development has become a significant global business for professional teams, the labor flows of global development and inequality have often reproduced themselves on the soccer field.

The biggest money professional soccer leagues are primarily in Europe, with the English, Spanish, German, Italian, and French top divisions usually identified as the ‘big five.’ In fact, a Pew Research Center analysis of 2014 World Cup rosters found that over half of all players were professionals in one of those five countries. The English league was a professional home to the most 2014 World Cup players with 15% of the global total, figures that have combined with a rapidly declining proportion of English players in their own Premier League (and the mediocre performance of the English national team) to raise concern in the English Football Association. A report they commissioned in 2014 begins: “In twenty years the number of English players playing in the top division of English football has fallen by more than a half and the trend remains downwards. Our Commission was set up to ask what, if anything, could be done about this.”

The English are essentially asking whether we can’t just stop this globalization thing. The answer is likely no. And while that might potentially be bad news for English national team players who can’t get a game in their own nation’s top league, in the way of globalization it is also a challenge for developing countries who end up exporting much of their top talent. The World Cup teams from talent rich nations such as Nigeria and Colombia will only have two or three players who suit up professionally in their home nation, most having been “bought” by European professional clubs at young ages. The 2014 Pew Research Center analysis found that 93% of players on the five African teams in the World Cup played elsewhere professionally.

In 2015 FIFA felt compelled to start vigorously enforcing a rule to prevent players from being “transferred” (ie, bought) away from their home countries before they turn 18 to counter the potential and real exploitation of young players from poor countries. Whatever the rules, through a social science lens the exportation of labor as a raw material from poor counties for the manufactured pleasure of soccer fans in rich countries looks uncomfortably neocolonial.

Partially as a minor salve for this discomfort, another version of ‘development’ has gained popularity around World Cup soccer in the form of charitable efforts to use the nearly universal appeal of the game as a hook for community development programming. These types of programs, along with the broader endeavor of what is often called Sport for Development and Peace (SDP), have proliferated in recent decades alongside the general move in international development from large government initiatives to the decentralized work of non-governmental organizations. FIFA itself has regularly integrated “corporate social responsibility” initiatives with World Cup hosting, though these are easy to critique as greenwashing for the big business of sporting mega-events and the notorious corruption of FIFA as an organization.

The appeal of soccer as a development tool, however, derives at least partially from a version of the same emotional pull that makes the World Cup itself such a powerful spectacle. The international development trope of the barefoot child joyfully kicking a handmade ball in a destitute patch of dirt is affecting because it symbolizes joy and potential overcoming hardship and poverty. But, as sociologists Douglas Hartmann and Christina Kwauk articulated in their 2011 “overview, critique, and reconstruction” of sports and development more broadly, sports and development programs that swoop in to the Global South from the Global North with a belief in “sport’s ability to resocialize and recalibrate individual youth and young people” actually serve to “maintain power and hierarchy, cultural hegemony, and the institutionalization of poverty and privilege.” Poor communities in the developing world rarely need additional soccer games as much as they need decent health care, living wage jobs, functioning schools, and safe places to live. And, as Hartmann and Kwauk suggest, sports may best contribute to those types of goals through consciousness raising more than through rolling out a ball.

The World Cup as a whole is a good test of whether soccer can genuinely serve to raise a critical consciousness, or whether it serves primarily to reproduce dominant structures. When the US beats Mexico in a World Cup knock-out game, as happened in 2002 during the US men’s team’s best ever World Cup performance, does that reinforce the idea of separation and distinction in an era of mass migration? Or do the many contributions of Mexican-Americans to the US national team help to challenge visions of what it means to be “American”? When France lost to its former colony Senegal in that same World Cup, with Senegal fielding a team where only the two back-up goalkeepers did not play professionally in France, was that a further example of colonial resource extraction? Or was that a statement of shifting global power dynamics?

The answer to all these questions may be yes: global soccer is open for multiple interpretations. Watching the World Cup like a social scientist offers an opportunity to see the game in a way that raises consciousness about the dynamics of global society, recognizing ways the raw emotion and global appeal of the World Cup make soccer itself a distinct mirror and lens.

The appeal of interpreting the World Cup is also reflected in a final addendum to the Josip Šimunić story. Since his banishment from the 2014 World Cup, and in a quest for exoneration, Šimunić collaborated on a documentary film titled Moja Vlojena Hrvatska – My Beloved Croatia – that argues his moment of nationalist fervor was an embodiment of noble pride rather than a hateful screed. The English language trailer for the film begins with the claim “Soccer, to Croats, is much more than just a game” and segues into interviews with Croatian World Cup players talking wistfully about the patriotic emotions of playing for their national team. Even Šimunić’s father, the Australian emigree, makes a tearful appearance describing his pride at seeing Josip in the distinctive red checked uniform of the Croatian national team.

Viewing the whole story as both a soccer fan and a social scientist ultimately leaves me conflicted and curious for more. I don’t know for sure what motivated Šimunić that fateful day, but I do know the way a World Cup game can capture one’s emotions and distort one’s intellect. The complexities of the World Cup, both Šimunić and futbologists seem to say, is something you have to really watch to understand.

[sportsandideas]

The aging of ‘The Soccer Tribe’: A tale of socio-biology

I recently stumbled across a new (2016) edition of The Soccer Tribe by Desmond Morris, the peculiar tome originally published in 1981 with a mix of text and illustrations making a case for what amounts to an evolutionary  socio-biology of soccer. Morris, most famous for The Naked Ape, explains that he was motivated by anthropological curiosity:

“Hardly anyone seems to query the importance attached to the game. For those who do the kicking and those who watch it so avidly, the whole matter is taken for granted. Football is football, and of course it is fascinating, so what is there to question? For those who ignore it, it is plainly a stupid waste of time, so why bother with it? It is not worth discussing. Both sides overlook the fact that, viewed objectively, it is one of the strangest patterns of human behaviour to be seen in the whole of modern society.”

(Original 1981 cover on left, 2016 edition on right)

In seven sections and 44 chapters full of pictures, illustrations, and quirky charts, Morris then lays out an analysis of soccer in its ‘tribal’ dimensions: roots, rituals, heroes, trappings, elders, followers, and tongue. The whole thing is amazingly odd; in its scope, it compares to nothing else I’ve seen or read about soccer. In analyzing uniforms as tribal costumes, referees as tribal judges, or fan songs as tribal chants the book exhibits an imagination and ambition that I love (and have cited before here).

But since initially stumbling upon the first 1981 edition a decade ago something has always felt just a bit off about the book. It took this new edition, which seems to have been updated mostly in its illustrations (along with a few minor segments of text), to make me dig into that feeling.

The couple hundred words José Mourinho ‘wrote’ as a foreword to the new edition sets the tone:

“Total football has led to global football—on and off the field. And whoever fails to realize it doesn’t understand anything. Those who only know football know nothing about football.”

This blustering certainty is familiar from Mourinho, but it is also fundamental to the underlying premise of The Soccer Tribe – that all the patterns and rituals of modern soccer, and modern society, are a direct inheritance from humanity’s hunter-gatherer past. If Mourinho would have gone the academic route, I realized, he would have been a socio-biologist.

To be fair, Mourinho goes onto say something more interesting:

“Those who only see twenty-two men chasing after a ball fail to understand its geometry, its ballet, its psychological depth, its true nature. It is the most faithful representation of human nature and its may faces. It is a tribe where the rationale of tactics, emotion, and the fun of the game all prevail.”

Though still a bit grandiose (and not overly convincing as to the question of whether Mourinho actually read the book), the basic idea of their being more to the see than ‘chasing after a ball’ is the real value of The Soccer Tribe.

The problem, however, was well articulated back in a 1983 review of the original book by Ian Taylor in the journal Theory, Culture, & Society.

The Soccer Tribe and socio-biology, in other words, present a totalizing account of human behavior that ignores the dynamism of culture. Women’s soccer is a key counter-example. If soccer is a male warrior ritual to satisfy our hunting and fighting brain modules, what to make of women’s soccer and women fans? Taylor phrases it nicely (if academically):

“The empirical display of soccer as a natural form, spanning all cultures and time, masks the specificity of the game’s significance in particular social formations.”

The game itself, in the phrasing I tend to prefer, is mostly just an empty cultural form.

And, speaking of empty, the other substantive review of the original 1981 Soccer Tribe book that I could find was by the novelist Martin Amis for the London Review of Books. Amis, after a strange and extended prattling on about the English national team’s performance in qualifiers for the 1986 World Cup, dismisses Morris in two withering paragraphs, starting by noting that a soccer manager left alone with the book might “die of inanition”:

“In The Soccer Tribe Morris maps out the connection between ‘ancient blood sports’ and ‘the modern ball game’. Nowadays, the goalmouth is ‘the prey’, the ball ‘the weapon’, and the attempt to score ‘a ritual aim at a pseudo-prey’. Is this true? Or, more important, is this interesting? Morris goes on to say that ‘in England, there are four “divisions”, presenting a parody of the social class system.’ He then traces the analogies between football and religion: ‘Star players are “worshipped” by their adoring fans and looked upon as “young gods”.’ Later on, he develops a far more compelling thesis, arguing that ...

Ah, but the sands of space are running out. That’s enough football for today. I only have time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill etc, and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.”

Amis’s point, beyond being arrogant and dismissive, seems to be that it is hard to be an intellectual interested in football—and Morris fails unreservedly.

But I think that is too harsh. The Soccer Tribe is like much socio-biology (and contemporary evolutionary psychology): simultaneously problematically reductionist and thought-provoking in a challenging way. I find it interesting, for example, that The Soccer Tribe shows up as ‘cited by’ 250 academic works in Google Scholar – though a crude marker, it is clear from browsing those citing works that the book inspired some academics to new ways to think about the game.

But it doesn’t yet seem to have inspired another similar effort--I’ve yet to see another book that takes on the totality of soccer culture in an intentional way. The 2016 ‘new edition’ of The Soccer Tribe thus doesn’t need much updating beyond the pictures both because the analysis freezes culture as permanently set by evolution, and because not enough of significance has come out since 1981 to offer a more dynamic theory of the game as a whole. That may no longer be the way of academic work on soccer – which has indeed done much to chip away at understanding pieces of the game – but it sure would be fun to see.

[sportsandideas]

Sports Done Right: Notes on an Exhibit (at the National Museum of African American History & Culture)

(Photo by author from the start of the exhibit)

“At times, sports leads social change. Other times, sports stymies social change.”

That deceptively simple formulation is one of the four ‘main messages’ listed for the ‘Sports: Leveling the Playing Field’ exhibit at the National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington DC. I had the luck and pleasure of visiting the Museum this summer while on a family vacation in DC. I’d read some of the positive reviews, and was glad to find it lived up to the hype – the whole Museum was powerful, and the sports exhibit was as thoughtful and well-executed as any I’ve ever seen.

The excellence of the sports exhibit was partially about what they had compiled: sharp videos offering brief social histories of major sports; interesting memorabilia representing critical moments in sports history; visually appealing photos and statues conveying the vibrancy of sport.

(Photo by author from the start of the exhibit)

But, for me, the best thing about the museum was what was not there: the usual pabulum about sports as a great equalizer that directly builds character and community. Instead, the exhibit presented sports as what it is: a rich social and cultural space, always political either implicitly or explicitly, that takes on a variety of meanings depending on the context and actors. “At times, sports leads social change. Other times, sports stymies social change.”

I was actually surprised at the degree to which relatively progressive political ideologies, usually suppressed in sports spaces, were featured at a national museum that is part of the Smithsonian. The basketball exhibit gave prominent space to “I can’t breathe” shirts;

(photo by author from the ‘basketball’ room wall)

The football exhibit included a picture of Rams players entering the field using a ‘hand up, don’t shoot’ gesture;

(photo by author from the ‘football’ room wall)

The commentators in almost all the videos the accompanied exhibits were full of powerful progressive sports voices such as Dr. Harry Edwards and Dave Zirin – along with other thoughtful, if more mildly progressive, commentators such as Jemele Hill and Michael Smtih (thankfully absent are more blustery and, unfortunately, conventional sports voices such as Stephen A. Smith and Jason Whitlock).

(Photo by author shot from one of several videos with rich commentary from Dr. Edwards and others)

And, as has been much publicized, the whole exhibit starts with a statue commemorating Tommie Smith and John Carlos (along with Australian Peter Norman) raising their gloved fists on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics. By making the relationship between sport and social change a core feature of sport history, the exhibit itself becomes a reminder that sports is always political. The exhibit articulates sports as a space where African-Americans, and all Americans, express individuality while also negotiating social rules that constrain that expression. The exhibit ends up putting the conservative instincts of sport (towards segregation, bias, inequality, and stasis) on display, and highlights how often those instincts end up being wrong when viewed as part of a historical arc. Though Muhammad Ali may be the most visible, and he gets much merited space in the exhibit, he is not the only example of how sports positioning can oscillate between villain and hero.

Being an academic, I do have a few minor critiques. It was cool to see prominent sports figures such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James as major donors. For those types of sports stars to leverage their wealth towards this type of exhibit felt right.

(Photo by author)

It was less cool to see tributes to major corporate sponsors such as Nike. Allowing shoe companies to put in claims to African-American sports history felt like another way of privileging corporate sport as a business endeavor over participatory sport as a human endeavor. But, of course, I realize that is just the way the world works.

(Photo by author)

I also thought the displays were a little light on gender issues. There was a small display about Title IX, strangely positioned next to the gloves Brianna Scurry wore during the penalty kick shoot-out final of the 1999 Women’s World Cup.

(Photo by author)

And the Williams sisters got some decent coverage—including one of six statues in the exhibit. But all the other statues were men (Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman at the 1968 Olympics; Jackie Robinson sliding into base; Jesse Owens running at the 1936 Olympics; Shani Davis speed skating at the Winter Olympics; and Michael Jordan's last shot as a member of the Chicago Bulls). And the major quadrants of the exhibit were devoted to baseball, football, basketball, and boxing – meaning, aside from a few mentions in the basketball display, male sports were predominant. Looking carefully back at all the pieces, there is plenty about women’s sports. But the overall layout felt very male.

I am, however, nitpicking. I should reemphasize that this was as good a sports exhibit as I’ve ever seen, and I’d highly recommend it. The curator, Dr. Damion Thomas (who has a PhD in history from UCLA and looks to have been a prof briefly at U of Maryland), would seem to deserve a ton of credit. As he explained to the NY Times: “I very rarely give a sports statistic during these tours…[instead, the gallery] focuses on sports in the larger African-American struggle and fight for greater rights.”

That focus then also lends itself to a broader focus for those lucky enough to visit: a focus on sports itself as less about statistics and more about creating cultural spaces for personal and collective engagement with the social world. That engagement is most often passive, reinforcing the status quo, but the museum might just help ensure a few more are inspired to do (and think) something more.

[sportsandideas]

Women’s Professional Team Fandom - for theallrounder.co

To coincide with the NWSL final today (Sunday October 9th), and to dull the dejection from the Thorns losing in the semis (intellectualization is such a useful defense mechanism!), I collaborated with a student to put together a mix of some general observations and some academic lit on why women’s professional teams don’t tend to get much popular attention. The argument in a nutshell: sports is still a hegemoncially male space, and it’s not usually welcoming to alternative models of fandom. Which is a bummer, and limiting to the potential of sports culture more broadly. But there are some signs of progress, and like any hegemonic culture the norms are constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated. Find the allrounder.co post here.

Here’s a screen shot of the start of the post from the allrounder.co:

[sportsandideas]

About Thorns Fandom, for Thorns Fans: Research Notes on Successful Women’s Professional Sports

(photo from stumptownfooty.com)

Why Portland? Why, when the average team in the Women’s Bundesliga team draws only 1,000 fans per game, when most NWSL teams draw between 2,000 and 4,000 fans per game, and when the WNBA averages around 7,500 fans per game, do the Portland Thorns average over 16,000 fans per game (even when an uncooperative schedule takes away many of the star players for large chunks of the season)? This question lingers in many recent discussions of women’s professional soccer, and is of interest to any women’s sports advocate or any fan of historically marginalized sports. And while several good pieces of journalism have made efforts to find an answer, they often primarily feature perspectives from players and management. This makes some sense; the team does, after all, have a PR department with a vested interest in the question. But it also strikes me as one of those odd ways that we expect people who are good at sports to know lots about stuff that ultimately has little to do with tactics and technique. If I want to know about tactics I’d ask the coaches and players; if I want to hear about business plans I’ll ask management; but if I want to know about fans why not ask the fans? So I did.

A few months back (in May of 2016) I asked for some help from the Rose City Riveters and Portland Thorns fans with a summer research project I was undertaking with one of my University of Portland students (Anne Luijten) to consider why the Portland Thorns are – by the metric of average attendance – the most popular professional women’s sports team in the world. And help you all did. I was initially thinking if we were able to get survey responses from 50 or so fans, and interview another 10 then, combined with general observations at Thorns games and events, we’d have enough to write our academic paper (for a special issue of the academic journal Sport in Society on women’s soccer in the United States). Instead, within a few days of putting out a brief request with the help of Lexi Stern and the Rose City Riveters social media, we had well over 200 completed surveys, 20 people participating in in-depth interviews, and more rich and thoughtful perspectives on Portland Thorns fandom than I ever imagined to be possible. Befitting the inclusive and informed fan culture that I think is so central to the relative success of the Portland Thorns, you all offered diverse and sophisticated perspectives on the basic question: why Portland?

So I’m writing now both to thank everyone, and to share a bit about what we learned. Our full academic paper is currently undergoing peer review with the journal; since academic publishing mostly still works at the glacial pace of  a 19th century medium, I don’t know when it might actually come out (and I don’t know what revisions we’ll have to make). But if and when it does come out I’d be happy to send it along to anyone curious for a more detailed, data-heavy, and jargon filled version. I’d also be interested if people have constructive quibbles with how we’ve interpreted the data. Just send me an email. And if you just want the really short version, here’s a summary: We found that the phenomenon of Thorns fandom is best explained as a combination of relatively equal parts good soccer in a professional environment; a stadium that allows diverse fan types to happily co-exist; a Portland fan community that historically and intentionally emphasizes community and inclusion in a way that appeals to non-traditional sports fans (ie, fans put-off by hegemonically masculine and hyper-commercialized professional sports); and opportunities for creative and values-based fandom that fits well with the generally progressive political ethos of Portland. Now, if you are curious for the somewhat longer and more nuanced version, read on…

(photo from 2016 home opener / Oregonian)

One thing an academic take on women’s soccer fandom has to offer beyond what you might get in a journalistic account, other than really talking to the fans, is a connection to other theory and research about sports fans. It turns out that the vast majority of this literature comes from a sports business and sports marketing standpoint. It’s not really about why fans care about particular teams or sports so much as how to commoditize that care. I blame this literature partially for the history of women’s professional soccer teams in the US trying to sell themselves primarily as a provider of “role models” for young girls. This approach offers the possibility of a relatively safe business niche where players can be marketed using conventional celebrity tactics emphasizing superficial traits. A major problem, of course, is that this has never really worked to create a sustainable fan base (see the previous two failed women’s soccer professional leagues in the US). In our research we did hear from Thorns fans who liked the idea of the players as “role models,” and there may indeed be some social value there. But those fans were a significant minority (about 9% emphasized particularly appreciating the players as “role models”), and we also heard from fans who have kids in the “role model” target demographic and find that an impediment to fandom – for a parent who spends much of their week carting kids around to organized sports practices, the last thing they want to do on a Friday night is go to another soccer game.

One of the other most popular theoretical takes on fandom is often called “BIRGing” – or basking in reflected glory. The idea is that people like following sports teams because when the team does well it reflects well on them personally. And while it is generally true that better performing teams tend to draw more fans, I think the explanatory value here is also limited. First, let’s be honest: in their brief history the Thorns haven’t always been all that good at actually winning games (in their first three seasons they won 27 of 66 games). In fact, when we asked our Thorns survey respondents to rank order 10 possible reasons for fandom, “vicarious achievement” came in dead last (next to last was “role models”). But I do think there is something about reflected glory for Thorns fans – primarily because of an evident self-awareness that Portland does support women’s soccer unlike any other city in the world. In our forced ranking task, “Supporting women’s opportunities in sports” was number one, and “Community pride” was number three (with “Interest in soccer” inserting itself between as number two). In a self-perpetuating loop, we like the fact that we like to support women’s soccer.

The fact that a desire to support women’s sports was, on average, the top response to our survey’s forced ranking task is also significant. In our interviews this was rarely mentioned first – most fans liked to start by just talking about how much they enjoyed Thorns soccer. But soon thereafter fans of all gender identities commonly expressed the importance of gender equity as a value. Many of the older female fans, having lived through eras where women’s professional sports were barely an imagined possibility, expressed deep emotional satisfaction at seeing a women’s professional team get the kind of support historically reserved for men. Many of the younger female fans identify with a feminist politics that makes promoting strong women an important priority. And many of the male fans also felt a vaguely political impulse towards a more egalitarian sports culture. As one fan explained in a survey response “I love that our excellent support of women’s soccer in Portland helps attract amazing international players and it’s really cool when they end up loving Portland and wanting to stay here. It also feels good – as a person, but especially as a woman – to live in a city where so many men support women’s soccer. It makes me feel like I live somewhere where women are respected in general.”

(Thorns tifo photo here)

Building on this feeling of civic pride and community, the theoretical perspective from academic work that I actually most like is called the “team identification—social psychological health model.” The idea here is that people like being sports fans because it gives them the types of community connections that we know are key ingredients for a good life. Sports teams offer easy ways to bond with others, to feel part of something beyond the self, and to sometimes make genuine personal connections to new people. This, I think, offers important leverage on understanding the phenomenon Thorns fandom. When we asked our survey respondents an open ended question about “what you personally most enjoy/appreciate about being a Thorns fan” and then coded responses into categories we could count, the “atmosphere and supporters culture” at games was the most popular response and the only one mentioned by over half of the fans we surveyed. Another 30 percent separately mentioned “community and comradery” with a surprisingly large number using exactly that latter word – I think the choice of “comradery” signifies a feeling of being part of something that has meaning beyond just the sociality of a group.

So what is that “something” that Thorns fans feel part of? For that piece I think it’s useful to have a bit of what I think of as the social history of Portland soccer supporters culture. We talked to fans who connected their fandom all the way back to the 1970’s iteration of the Timbers, and to almost every other major local soccer team and event since. Most Portland soccer fans know that many of the ‘original’ Timbers from the 70’s NASL team were Brits who stuck around and became integral to the local coaching scene. But what had never struck me before undertaking this project was how often this meant coaching girls as well as boys at a time when women’s soccer had almost no traction in the UK (women’s soccer was formally banned in England from 1921 to 1971!). For soccer to be viable in Portland, women’s soccer had to be viable in Portland.

The most visible influence of the original Timbers on women’s soccer in Portland was Clive Charles – the legendary UP coach who was one of those Brits who probably surprised themselves with how much he liked the women’s game. He laid the foundation for UP teams in the 2000’s that consistently led the NCAA in attendance for women’s soccer, and that helped make watching women’s soccer a fun and legitimate way to be a sports fan in Portland.

Around that same time in the mid-aughts, there was an eclectic and merry band of Portlanders who started building a supporters culture around another iterations of the Timbers and who started calling themselves the Timbers Army. While a reasonable amount of ink has been spilled around the Timbers Army phenomenon, and while Thorns fans and the Rose City Riveters deserve their own independent credit, I also think a full social history of the Timbers Army would make for a great academic study in organic community organizing (maybe someday!). Even the brief version I undertook for this project was fascinating. And the critical piece that I think is most relevant to the Thorns is various ways the Timbers Army decided to emphasize inclusion. The idea “if you want to be Timbers Army, then you already are” is so well-known to Portland fans that we may take it for granted – but the idea of a comprehensive and highly organized fan group that puts a primary philosophical emphasis on inclusion (which, admittedly, doesn’t always manifest perfectly) is very rare in world soccer.

To some of the fans I talked to, the seminal moment of inclusion for the Timbers Army was the “football fans against homophobia” tifo display in 2013. While being visibly against homophobia shouldn’t be a radical gesture in the 21st century, in the historically and hegemonically masculine world of most professional sports it is still rare. As one fan explained in an interview “when that rainbow flag and football fans against homophobia display went up, there were people that were like: I don’t come to soccer for politics. And I was like, this isn’t politics this is human rights, and don’t let the fucking door hit you on the way out.” Thorns fans and the Rose City Riveters seem to have taken this ethos to another level: whether in the form of rainbow flags, tifo, or simple visibility the Thorns have always celebrated a diversity of gender and sexual identities.

The most obvious thing this does for Thorns fandom is create a space where fans of all sexual identities feel free to enjoy soccer.  As one fan explained “I love the fan culture, the opportunity to see world class soccer for $13, the inclusive and welcoming atmosphere in the north end. Even at Timbers games my boyfriend and I hear homophobic remarks, get called fags, etc. NOT at Thorns games.” That matters – the LGBTQA fanbase is a vibrant source of support for the Thorns (in our survey sample about 32% identified as LGBTQA, while about 68% identified as heterosexual), and a fanbase that is not well-served by many other professional sports cultures. But it also matters in a less obvious way: the ethos of including fans irrespective of sexual identity who don’t always feel comfortable at other professional sports events allows Thorns games to be a rich mix of traditional and non-traditional sports fans. There may always be a large market for hegemonically masculine and hyper-commercialized professional sports (which in the soccer world many women’s soccer fans refer to as “BroSo”), but there is also clearly a market for fans turned off by that version of the games we love.

(photo from 2016 home opener / Oregonian)

Obviously most fans aren’t going to Thorns games actively thinking about an ethos of inclusion and the wonders of counter-hegemonic sport cultures. We mostly go thinking that Thorns games are a fun place to watch great athletes play good soccer. But those pieces may dovetail more efficiently than it first seems. And here, for me, is where the stadium comes into play. Many casual observers attribute the Thorns success to sharing ownership and facilities with the Timbers. This does matter – we heard many fans appreciate how much more professional and legitimate the Thorns operation seems when compared to many of the other NWSL teams. And fans also just like going to Civic Stadium / Providence Park. It’s a chance to go out in a nice part of town and enjoy a game in a stadium (re) designed for soccer.

The more subtle importance of the stadium, however, is what I’ve come to think of as the stadium’s social geography. Providence Park is not so big to be overwhelming, but not so small as to end up cramming different types of fans into one space. Intentionally watching Thorns games from different parts of the stadium made it clear to me that each draws a slightly different crowd. The north end and the Rose City Riveters sections are for fans who want to sing, stand, and feel some agency in their fandom – or who enjoy being with those that do. The west side and the Key Bank Club are for the fans who are willing to pay a little extra for their comforts – nicer seats, easier access to food and bathrooms, an easier view of the game. The east side is a mix of serious fans who want to be able to focus on the game, and (most often in the 200 level) soccer families who come in on promotional deals and often spend much of the game socializing. The spatial lay-out goes a long way to allowing these disparate groups to peacefully co-exist. I was actually somewhat surprised by how many of the fans we talked to who don’t sit with the Riveters have mixed feelings about the more hardcore fans –we heard more than a few muted complaints about language, noise, and goal-celebration smoke. In equal and opposite measure, we heard from more than a few hardcore fans annoyed at “screaming Alex Morgan fan girls” and the expectation that women’s soccer should be sanitized and family-friendly. One of the beauties of Providence Park during a Thorns game is that those different contingents can mostly do their own thing in a way that would be much more difficult in a stadium where disparate types of fans are packed in a single grandstand (see, for example, Seattle’s Memorial Stadium).

So in the end, what strikes me most about Thorns fandom is it’s hybridity and complexity – the mix of the traditional and the progressive, the professional and the personal. One of the articulations I found most powerful was from a survey response asking what people enjoy and appreciate about being a Thorns fan: “My daughter came out a few months before the 1st season. While our relationship was good there was stress. I bought season tickets for us both as something we could do together. My most enjoyable times have been in the front row behind the goal, chanting with my daughter- beer in hand.” Perhaps I appreciate this quote so much because of my own status as a middle-aged dad, but I also think it distills much of what is great about Thorns fandom. The sentiment depends upon the existence of a viable supporters culture and professional environment: the team needs to be good enough to cheer and the setting has to make that enjoyable. It’s also rooted in traditional sports stories: a father bonding with his child through sports, the emotional release of singing for one’s team, and beer as a social lubricant. But it is also founded on dynamics that have historically been marginalized in popular spectator sports: soothing generational tensions around sexuality, gender, and diversity. This combination of good soccer in a special place, the emotional power and pride in spectator sports, and the opening for new and creative ways of being a sports fan that reinforce personal values all seems to me to make Thorns fandom an extraordinary thing indeed.

-  Andrew Guest [drewguest (at) outlook.com; @sportsandideas]

(photo By Randy L. Rasmussen | From The Oregonian/OregonLive)

[sportsandideas]

A Mental Game: Us versus Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom  -  [a rescue job from 2010 on the occasion of a Timbers v Sounders game]

[Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site: pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. So I’m thinking I’ve been inserting a few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really to lose. Since the Timbers are playing the Sounders today in a rivalry game, I was reminded of this oldy but goody...]

A Mental Game: Us versus Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom

Andrew Guest offers some psychological perspectives on fan allegiance and rivalry, looking at Seattle vs. Portland with an eye on social identity theory.

MARCH 29, 2010

Why, with intense and organic feelings of affiliation to our teams, does it so rarely seem to matter that the teams themselves are obviously artificial constructions?   Why, in the midst of a fan revolt against an ownership group that is foreign and detached, do Manchester United fans not seem too bothered that most of their players are also ‘foreign’ (beyond Mancunians Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, United’s 18 on Saturday included 15 non-English players)?  Why, amidst the admirable growth of genuine American supporters groups, do MLS teams not seem to put much emphasis on employing local players with roots in their communities?  I’d like to suggest that the emotional intensity of fan affiliation, and the fact that it persists and even grows amidst the globalization and commercialization of the game, is less about our teams and more about our minds.

I’ve been intrigued by the noble irrationality of fan allegiance for years, with recent events in my small corner of the soccer world further piquing my curiosity—as a current Portlander who grew up in Seattle, the MLS-fed intensification of a lingering fan rivalry has been most curious to watch.  The recent tenuous claim of ‘hooliganism’ when a Portland fan was apparently choked with his Timbers scarf by Seattle fans after a pre-season ‘friendly’ was only one marker in an ongoing Pacific Northwest rivalry.

(photo from https://timbersarmy.org/2009-space-needle-display)

Any American reader of soccer blogs that mention the Sounders or the Timbers is certainly familiar with the phenomenon—comment threads will inevitably end up with angry references to ‘S**ttle’ and ‘Portscum,’ often including exaggerated claims as to the differences between the cities.  Likewise, at games themselves chants, songs, and signs regularly transition into personal attacks that are often demonstrably irrational.  I was particularly struck at a US Open Cup match in Portland last year where a large double posted sign on parade in front of the sold-out crowd had a stark black and white illustration of a large rifle captioned with “KELLER—DO THE COBAIN.”

Really?  Suggesting Kasey Keller should commit suicide because he had at that point played 12 games for the Sounders (about one tenth as many games as he has played for the United States—of which, despite occasional efforts to declare its own people’s republic, Portland is still a part)?  What’s more, Kasey Keller has more connections to the city of Portland than any single player on the field for the Timbers that day.  Keller was an all-American at the University of Portland, and is widely credited as the key player that allowed Clive Charles to make UP a legitimate soccer power—something the city’s soccer fans often note with pride.  Keller even played 10 games for a previous incarnation of the Timbers in 1989.  In contrast, the Timbers starting eleven that day had exactly zero players with any childhood or college roots in Portland—and at least one player on the roster who had not even heard of Portland Oregon until signing a contract.

(photo from http://www.mikefiechtner.com/blog/2013/11/4/seattle-sounders-vs-portland-timbers)

Of course the vast majority fans, even in Portland and Seattle, don’t choke people with scarves or promote suicide—there are crazy people everywhere.  And the edginess and intensity of passionate fan allegiance is often a crucial element of what makes a great match so much fun for everyone involved.  But that doesn’t make our emotional allegiance to professional teams, which are mostly artificial ‘clubs’ oriented to making money for rich people, any more rational.

What does explain the engaging irrationality of the sports fan?

A few weeks ago I wrote about sports psychology, and the fact that in my experience it has proven less useful for enhancing performance than explaining how the game works.  So this week I’m returning to that theme and suggesting that while many factors contribute to our emotional connections to sports teams, one of the best explanations comes from social psychology. 

The basic idea, drawing off social identity theory, is that for various evolutionary reasons one of our most fundamental psychological instincts is to identify and divide the world into two groups: us and them.  Us is good; them is bad.  In our ancestral past this instinct may have been oriented by clans, but now it is up for grabs—we are constantly, unconsciously, affiliating with cities, countries, schools, political parties, genders, ethnicities, musicians, companies, teams, and whatever else becomes salient in our daily lives.  What’s fascinating about this basic ‘us versus them’ instinct is how quickly, and irrationally, it activates.  For a Portlander at a Timbers-Sounders game Kasey Keller should rationally be one of us.  But instinctively he is one of them.

There are a couple fun examples of the automaticity of ‘us versus them’ thinking that might be familiar to anyone who has ever taken Psychology 101.  The classic is Muzafer Sherif’s 1954 “Robbers Cave Experiment.”  Sherif was a social psychologist at the University of Oklahoma who was interested in group behavior, and devised a classic experiment elegant for its simplicity.  He basically just took a group of normal boys to summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park.  The trick was that the boys were randomly assigned to two separate groups and isolated from each other—adopting group names “The Rattlers” and “The Eagles” (no relation, I presume, to theScreaming Eagles “standing up for DC” United).  After an initial period of bonding, the boys learned of the other group, and the researchers began arranging for competitions on a ball field.  There was almost immediate animosity; name calling, efforts to self-segregate, raids of group camps, and, in fine supporters group tradition, the exchange of derogatory songs.  The researchers added a final phase where they created situations in which the groups had to work together, and suddenly everyone started to get along again.  It was a simple study making a profound point: there was no difference between the two groups of boys until they became groups.  Any of the “Rattlers” could just as easily have been “Eagles” in exactly the same way as, I suspect, many Manchester United supporters could just as easily have been for Arsenal or Liverpool with a few small twists of fate.

Another favorite example comes from several decades ago when an Iowa school teacher named Jane Elliot created a brilliant demonstration of the power of us versus them as a way to address racial discrimination with her elementary school students in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.  One morning she simply told the students that they were going to do a little demonstration where they would be divided up for a few days by the color of their eyes.  First the blue eyed kids got the privileges, while the brown eyed kids put on colored scarves marking their out-group status (and the next day it was reversed).  By recess time that same morning the kids were brawling on the playground because us started mocking them for having brown eyes.  In Jane Elliot’s words: “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.”  Substitute “sports fans” for “children,” along with “ninety” for “fifty,” and the quote still works quite well.

Further, in the classroom situation, not only did simple and substantively meaningless group distinctions based on eye color create anger, the kids let their group membership shape their performance on school work—on a flash card task the same kids either excelled or flailed depending on whether their group was assigned superiority for the day.  Our ‘us versus them’ instinct can make kids seem stupid, and I suspect it can also allow ostensibly intelligent and educated soccer fans to end up choking people with scarves.

A laboratory for groupness

It turns out that soccer and supporters groups are nearly perfect laboratories for stimulating ‘us versus them’ instincts.  According to Judith Harris’s accessible, if controversial, summary of the scholarly research, some of the key ingredients for making group membership psychologically significant include:

Socially defined membership that necessitates more of an internal than external commitment, along with shared experiences and an emphasis on commonalities within the group (according to the Timbers Army web-site, to be a member “If you like your sports passionate instead of passive – if you’re proud of the Rose City — if you appreciate the Beautiful Game – YOU are Timbers Army. No membership, no initiation, no rules, no fuss. Just wander into the North End of PGE Park and join the fun!”)

Competition and an emphasis on points of contrast from other groups (when the European Football Weekends site waded into explaining the Sounders-Timbers rivalry across the pond, the comments were inundated with defensive comparisons from both sides: a relatively tame example from an anonymous Sounders fan, “you may wonder why Timbers fans are commenting on an article about the Sounders. They are a funny lot whose entire supporter culture revolves around jealousy of and irrevocable obsession with the Sounders. They rarely know the names of their own players, but they will mark their calendars months in advance for a match against us. If you spend time in person with a Timbers fan, you will hear more talk about the Sounders than their own team.”).

Proximity (it is no coincidence that many supporters groups mark themselves explicitly by the section of the stadium where they sit—the “The 107 Independent Supporters’ Trust is the machinery behind the Timbers Army” and is named after the stadium section where they sit during games, while the Sounders group Emerald City Supporters have their numerical sections (121-123) and their street (“Brougham Faithful”) featured on their logo.)

Group goals and/or a common enemy (at the Sounders-Timbers match at least one Vancouver Whitecaps correction: San Jose Earthquakes supporter came to Portland bearing a sign with the message “The enemy of my enemy is my friend!”).

Explicit markers of group identity (scarves are virtually ubiquitous across the soccer world because they are such an efficient marker of group identity—one of the Sounders’ marketing coups was to provide ‘free’ scarves to season ticket holders, automatically cementing a social identity while also bearing an eerie resemblance to the scarves Jane Elliot used to mark the “inferior” group in her classroom).

Implicit norms and expectations (some Sounders supporters groups, such as Gorilla FC, distinguish themselves by trying to explicitly avoid the stereotypes of “ultra” groups: “One more belief of Gorilla FC, besides the love of the party, is that this group will share the same spirit as the fans of FC ST. PAULI!! WE ARE ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-FACIST, ANTI-SEXIST, AND ANTI-HOMOPHOBIC, BUT PRO-PARTY!! It seems bizarre to have to post that, however we want to establish that our friends are dedicated to building a love of the Sounders free from ignorance. A thinking ethic! We also will be active in supporting various community organizations. Gorilla FC is more than just a supporters club!!”)

As that last example makes clear, creating a sense of ‘groupness’ is not necessarily a bad thing—however artficial, the social identities of sports fans have just as much potential to influence pro-social as anti-social norms.  In fact, the Timbers’ 107ist Supporters Trust includes not just tifo and game travel but also charitable works among its ‘basic purposes.’  Likewise, when social marketing campaigns such as ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ work it is likely due largely to re-framing social identities—remaking the group identity to include ‘soccer fans fight [rather than endorse] racism.’

But what team rivalries and fan allegiances all over the world illustrate most of all is that the ‘us versus them’ instinct plays fast and easy on our minds.  As much as FIFA folks like to spin platitudes about the game bringing people together, it can just as easily tear people apart.  As much as the World Cup presents opportunities to display national identities, our local allegiances and teams (so often composed entirely of outsiders) display how contrived all our social identities can be.  And, at the same time, how meaningful.

[sportsandideas]

On the Oddities of Olympic Soccer

As an American soccer fan it has long been a point of frustration when more casual American sports fans assume the Olympics must be the pinnacle of the soccer world. No, has long been my gut reaction, that would be the World Cup. But as Americans have become more World Cup savvy, I’ve had fewer chances to be that kind of snooty. And, humbly, I’ve realized that while I know that the Olympics and soccer have an odd relationship I’ve never exactly understood why. So here’s a somewhat shallow dive (with references to the deeper stuff) into two oddities of Olympic soccer: why the Olympics are full internationals for women but a hybrid U-23 competition for men; and why Great Britain doesn’t send teams (though on NBC they have tons of British announcers).

Why full internationals for women and a hybrid U-23 for men?

Despite the World Cup snobbery of many serious soccer fans, the first “official multi-national competitive soccer event” was part of the Olympic Games (as explained in a very interesting 2007 article in the Journal of Olympic History available here) . The first “modern” Olympics in Greece in 1896 had a small tournament with men’s teams from Denmark, Greece and Turkey. The World Cup didn’t start until 1930.

After 1896, men’s soccer was a demonstration sport in both 1900 and 1904 -- with the St Louis 1904 version just involving local men’s teams and one from Ontario. In London in 1908 things got a bit more real with representation from Denmark, England, Sweden, Holland, and France -- though each country could send 2-4 teams (France ‘A’ lost to Denmark 17-1!). The key there seems to have been that the English FA got to be in charge at a time when governance of the sport was still contested (FIFA had only been founded in 1904). In 1920 in Antwerp Egypt became the first non-European country to participate, and then in Paris in 1924 the Uruguayans came and won gold - though Great Britain stayed away because of objections to the use of professionals. 

In essence, Olympic soccer was becoming the thing until that pesky issue that has subtly shaped so much of Olympic history reared its head: amateurism. The powers that be, including the English FA, wanted Olympic soccer to only involve amateurs, and that fit the general emphasis on amateurism in Olympic Sport. As David Goldblatt convincingly argues in his social history The Games, ‘amateurism’ was really a canard for class exclusion -- the aristocrats who ran the Olympics really wanted to keep out the riff-raff who might actually need to be paid for their talents. But plenty of national football associations disagreed -- as professional soccer became a big deal in Europe and South America during the first half of the 20th century, most wanted the best players involved regardless of amateur or professional status.

So in the 1920′s FIFA started thinking about organizing its own tournament -- what became the World Cup. Allowing for professionals and allowing for more global representation, the first World Cup was organized in Uruguay in 1930. FIFA then skipped having soccer at the 1932 Olympics, held a second World Cup in Italy in 1934, and men’s Olympic soccer has ever since been an afterthought. The Olympics tried to keep the men’s tournament an “amateur” affair through to 1984 -- by which point Eastern Bloc countries had won 7 gold medals in a row (largely because their version of amateurism was really more like professional training). So in 1984 professionals could play, as long as they had never played in a World Cup. In essence, FIFA was trying to protect it’s World Cup brand, and making rules up as it went -- culminating in the decision to make the men’s tournament an under-23 year old tournament, but with an allowance for three over-age players. Why three? Why not? The whole point was really just to maintain a sheen of amateurism (which was originally about class exclusion) and to protect the World Cup brand.

The history of the women’s Olympic tournament, though much more recent, is also a bit harder to track down. So some of this is a big speculative. I do know that the first appearance of women’s soccer in the Olympics came in 1996 in Atlanta -- five years after the first women’s World Cup in 1991. That 1991 tournament, however, was officially called the “1st FIFA World Championship for Women's Football for the M&M’s Cup” -- FIFA was still trying to protect the “World Cup” brand just for the big men’s tournament. Regardless, it was now clear that women’s soccer was becoming a viable international sport and it was also clear that the Olympics needed more female participants -- the 1996 games were still overwhelmingly male (”At that [Atlanta] Olympic Games there were only 40 events for women and double the amount of men participants as there were women”). 

(above photo from OnlineAthens of the 1996 US Olympic team)

It probably also helped that the games were in Atlanta, and the US was pretty good at women’s soccer. And that by this point in Olympic history the IOC had largely given up a vision of pure amateurism. And that FIFA didn’t care too much about protecting the women’s World Cup as a brand. So full national teams were allowed to participate. And it was a hit -- the gold medal game in 1996 between the US and China drew 76,481 fans, which at that time was likely the most ever for a women’s international. At the same time, George Vecsey in the NYTimes  noted with disdain that women’s soccer received essentially no TV coverage by NBC. In a clear historical pattern with women’s sports, despite obvious popular interest the media still wasn’t on board. But over time that pendulum, at least for the Olympics, has swung -- the ratings for the relatively mediocre performance of the this 2016 US Women’s National Team Olympic games have been excellent (3.6 million vs Colombia -- more than any men’s game in Copa America, and about five times the audience for the Arsenal v Liverpool Premier League opener).

So why do we get to see full internationals for women at the Olympics while men’s Olympic soccer is a weird hybrid of youth plus three that means barely anything in the soccer world? In a backhanded way, the simple explanation is the institutional sexism of FIFA and the IOC, with the historical pretension of amateurism (designed mostly for class exclusion) also getting a hat-tip.

Why are the British only at Olympic soccer as announcers for the US network?

Back in the early days of the Olympics, as noted above, the British did participate in Olympic soccer as they wrestled with FIFA and the IOC for control of the game and for a particular definition of amateurism. But they bailed out in 1924 and 1928 because FIFA was willing to allow some compensation for professional players in the Olympics who had to miss time at their regular jobs. As Rookwood and Buckley explain in their 2007 article “As a consequence the British federations departed from FIFA "in fits of principle" (ibid): "When FIFA agreed with the IOC that footballers receiving broken time payments could play in the Olympics, the FA believed this would destroy the basis of amateur sport" (Huggins and Williams, 2006: 116).”

(above photo of the 1908 British Olympic team)

There was no soccer at the 1932 games, but Britain did compete in 1936 and then after World War II from 1948 to 1972 when the idea was to have only amateurs play (though the British team actually only qualified in 1948, 1952, 1956 - after other teams withdrew, and 1960 - then failing to qualify in ‘64, ‘68, and ‘72). In 1974 the FA stopped distinguishing amateurs and professionals and the team disappeared until 2012 -- when having another Olympics in London made having British teams seem imperative. But it wasn’t easy. 

The “home nations” exemption that allows Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England to all compete independently in international soccer (as explained by Slate, basically because each of their independent Football Assocations had such a head start by the time FIFA was started in 1904 that they couldn’t be split up and got an essentially permanent exemption for international soccer) had to be delicately negotiated. “Team Great Britain” basically got FIFA’s word that a combined team for the 2012 Olympics wouldn’t compromise the independence of each FA. Team GB in 2012 on both the men’s and women’s side was basically English, but with a few token players from Wales on the men’s side and from Scotland on the women’s side. 

But mostly by 2012 soccer had come to be too symbolically important to claims of independent national identity in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. On the men’s side losing Team GB from the Olympics wasn’t that big a deal for 2016 -- men’s soccer has plenty of opportunities for its best players to compete. But on the women’s side it was more of a shame -- the English team was quite good in the 2015 World Cup in Canada, and those players hoped for a chance to build on their success. But the FA’s couldn’t come to an agreement -- too much nationhood is at stake (though, as this interesting ESPNW article points out, other sports such as Rugby have been able to work this out).

The best single symbol for all this is David Goldblatt’s observation that up through as late as 1990, the English men’s national team was still mostly supported by fans flying the Union Jack British flag. But in the 90′s and ever since it has only been the English St. George’s Cross. British identity has splintered in tandem with the rise of Olympic women’s soccer. 

(above photo from The Guardian)

Now, this still leaves the question of why NBC, the American network covering the Olympics, still uses a preponderance of British announcers for broadcasts of both men’s and women’s soccer. The thread through this whole discussion, after all, is that the British haven’t really been much involved in Olympic soccer -- particularly on the women’s side. In fact, the British there also have to answer for that pesky 50 year ban up through 1971 on women playing the game at all. On this question, I only have my own conjecture - but given the heavy use of British announcers for a competition in which Americans really have the expertise (the US Women’s National Team has, after all, won 4 of 6 Olympic tournaments, where team GB has only even competed once) the only reasonable explanation is a combination of sexism and eurosnobbery. But eurosnobbery in American soccer is a story for another day...

[sportsandideas]

A Mental Game: Sports Psychology is the Future (and Always Will Be?)             -              [a rescue job from 2010]

[Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site: pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable – the site has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. So I’m inserting a few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really to lose. This one I started thinking about as I prep to teach another semester of a class on the psychology of sport…]

A Mental Game: Sports Psychology is the Future (and Always Will Be?)

Andrew Guest considers the promise and problems of sports psychology in the game.

MARCH 1, 2010

Why, after several failed attempts at European glory, has Landon Donovan with Everton finally performed at a level appropriate to one of the top leagues in the world (barring the occasional ‘horror miss’)?  Is he a different player physically from his depressing stints with Bayer Leverkusen in 2000 and 2005?  Maybe a little bit—but probably not much.  If anything he was likely a bit more spry back in 2000 and 2005.  The most dramatic difference is his confidence, composure, and attitude.  Donovan is not a very different physical player, but he seems very different psychologically.

Even on a game by game basis, what makes the difference for a player between brilliance and uselessness?  What, to continue the hypothetical example, was the difference between Donovan against Manchester United and Donovan against Sporting Lisbon?  If you ask quality players, and make them choose between the percentage of difference that is down to the physical side and the percentage that is down to the psychological side many will tell you the difference is mostly psychological.  As Yogi Berra proclaimed in one of his fabled sports malapropisms “Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.”

But if you ask those same players the percentage of their training time that they spend preparing physically and the percentage of time they spend preparing psychologically, it is usually somewhere in the 90% physical range.  That logical inconsistency has been the basis of many claims that in modern sports and with elite teams players need sports psychology.  Claims that, despite their seeming sensibility, have gone largely unheeded.  As far as I can tell, clubs such as Everton often have sports psychology as part of diverse programs for performance enhancement but they rarely have individual sports psychologists in prominent roles with the first team.

Yet for several decades smart people have maintained that sports psychology is the future, that any good team, club, or program will eventually employ full time sports psychologists.  But with a few exceptions (perhaps most notably, British sports psychologist Bill Beswick who has had prominent roles with the likes of Manchester United and the English National Team) sports psychology still operates at the margins of the modern game.  Most top level teams (including MLS teams and American college athletic departments) now have full-time fitness trainers or strength and conditioning coaches, but if the psychological side is given any attention at all it is usually on an ad-hoc basis.

So why hasn’t sport psychology really taken off?  My suspicion is that it has to do with an intriguing combination of broader social attitudes towards psychology as a discipline and the culture of modern sports.  And that suspicion is biased by personal experience—years ago, when I finished my liberal arts bachelor’s in psychology (an intellectually great but practically useless degree), I thought I’d give sports psychology a try.  I did a Master’s Degree in ‘Sport Studies’ in combination with some playing, coaching, and teaching, and found myself surprisingly disaffected with the performance enhancement side of sports psychology.  I liked it in concept, never quite bought it practice, and continue to be fascinated by what it can and can’t do.

Sports psychology may also be on my mind at the moment because it received a fair bit of hype around the Vancouver Winter Olympics—garnering some of the credit for various medal counts.  But the prominence of the Olympic examples has also prompted noteworthy push-back: as a Christian Science Monitor article reported, in Scandinavia the fact that the Norwegian team brought four full-time sports psychologists to Vancouver prompted ridicule from columnists: “There are only losers who use sports psychologists. My God, when athletes start to scream for psychologists is when we know that they have already lost.”

And then there was the ongoing satire by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert who, in exchange for helping fundraise for the US Speed Skating team, was named as an “Assistant Sports Psychologist” for the Olympics.  He proceeded to put together a number of typically amusing segments lampooning sports psychology—complete with references to “Freud rage,” Rorschach ink-blot tests, pointless repetitive questions of “how does that make you feel,” and inane advice about the need for speed skaters to get around the rink faster than their opponents—maybe with the benefit of imagining that their skate suit had been stuffed with meat and they are being chased by ravenous dogs.

One of the “real” sports psychologists working with the US Olympic team claimed the satire was legitimating: “It is an indication that the field has made it when Stephen Colbert is able to mock it.”  But I’m not so sure.  Certainly much of Colbert’s mockery comes with a degree of respect, but as any good psychologist will tell you it is also true that most jokes are funny because they convey a degree of truth.

Reactions to the aforementioned Bill Beswick’s work with the English National Team may be illustrative here.  Originally a basketball coach, Beswick began working with Steve McClaren at Derby, moved along to Manchester United, Middlesbrough, and eventually became McClaren’s assistant with England.  But as he himself noted “The players recoiled in horror at the idea of working with a shrink” (though, in fairness, he also noted that they quickly warmed to the endeavor, and that the continental players were always more interested than the Brits at taking “every possible advantage to get the most out of their game”).

Comments on a post about Beswick’s role with England, however, highlight the challenges to integrating sports psychology with the game.  One noted “England players have been performing as though they have a shrink on their backs.  Duh – They HAVE!  Doesn’t seem to work, just like it didn’t work at Boro.  Not really rocket science is it?  Dump the shrink and let the players be free to play!”  Another dismissed the need for a specialist: “The best Sports Psychologist that ever was involved in Football was Bill Shankly.”

In the meantime, after McClaren’s ouster as manager of England, Beswick continues to be a sought-after consultant—even making a visit to FC Dallas last year that drew similar reactions in the MLS blogosphere: one commenter noted “One thing comes to mind; the scene in ‘The Natural’ where the psychologist is talking to the team and Redford rolls his eyes and leaves. This is what losers do.”  Another claimed “Sports psychologists are in general a bunch of shysters. And isn’t part of being a head coach getting the players to be mentally tough?  This is so Mickey Mouse.”

Of course these comments are not entirely representative—Beswick has been successful because he offers something worthwhile, and many players value sports psychology (FC Dallas and sometimes US forward Jeff Cunningham responded to Beswick’s visit by repeating the claim that “Sports are 10 percent physical and 90 percent mental”).  But the criticisms do seem to me to offer a few reasons why sports psychology may not quite fit with the culture of the game:

The primary techniques of sports psychology are not magic: The types of things sports psychologists actually do with players are fairly commonsensical: goal setting, visualization, relaxation, self-talk, etc..  Some of these techniques work better than others, and it is worth being guided through systematic practices that have been validated by research.  But sometimes it just seems like common sense.  On one team I was associated with, for example, one of the best players had a serious problem with anger management—he’d get distracted by the referees, by opponents, by his teammates.  So after talking with the team’s sports psychology consultant, they devised a system where the player would wear a rubber band on his wrist and snap it whenever he found himself losing his temper as a reminder to focus on what mattered.  It helped.  But, as the commenter above noted: “Not really rocket science is it?”

(above photo from the US Army ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program)

Players vary dramatically in their attitudes towards sports psychology: For sports psychology to do any good the players have to buy in.  Some do.  But many don’t.  Unlike fitness training—which not everyone likes, but most everyone agrees is necessary—mental training is easy to write off as “mumbo jumbo.”  And, as the above comments suggest, it is also easy to write off as a sign of weakness—antithetical to the toughness required of elite athletes.

Sports psychology may not make sense as its own specialty: Idealizing an individualized “toughness” in sports also means that players often feel unable to admit they might need help with the types of psychological challenges many of us face at various points in our lives—an issue tragically illustrated by the recent suicide of Robert Enke.  Soccer players have no special immunity to psychological distress.  So while there is a special (and fairly rigorous) process for becoming a ‘certified sports psychologist’ (along with some uncertified hucksters willing to promise miracles), some psychological issues are probably best dealt with by general mental health clinicians (clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.).  But these services are very different from the types of performance enhancement work that would be most analogous to fitness training.

Some of the best intuitive sports psychologists are coaches: Any good coach knows well that a significant part of their work is down to creating the right psychological environment for their players to thrive.  Managers win and lose their jobs based on what they get out of the talent given to them—with an emphasis on the fact that at the highest levels of the game the talent is already there.  A David Moyes or a Bruce Arena doesn’t change much about Landon Donovan’s physical abilities, but each manager does contribute much to creating an atmosphere where Donovan’s abilities work.

The idea that great managers have an intuitive grasp of sports psychology was reinforced for me by a recent analysis of Fabio Capello’s relative success with England.  Written by a “leading sports psychologist” the article argues that Capello has focused on “four key areas of mental toughness,” and while the specifics are a bit axiomatic (“Belonging,” “Feeling in control,” “Feeling valued,” and “Safety”) they also offer a decent analytic breakdown of what matters to high level performance.  In my reading, the article suggests that the value of sports psychology is not in its application with individual players but in its usefulness for framing how the game works.

As such, for me the best uses for sports psychology are in contexts such as coach training programs—where bodies of accumulated knowledge can provide coaches the chance to think through what matters for performance in a sophisticated and systematic way.  Where, ultimately, you can take it or leave it.  And so that is what I’ve tried to do with my own training in the field; to use sports psychology primarily as a tool kit that is available when needed (and which may also lead me to write some future posts about the ‘mental game’ with an emphasis on interpreting specific phenomena that psychology as a social science can help explain).

So could a sports psychologist have made a difference for Donovan during his earlier European forays?  Could a sports psychologist make a difference for the next young prodigy that comes on the scene?  Maybe.  But I suspect we’ll never really know.

[sportsandideas]

Where Women’s Soccer is King (a rescue job from 2009)

[Back in 2009 and 2010, mostly in anticipation of the World Cup in South Africa, I did a lot of blogging for a great soccer web-site: pitchinvasion.net. For most of a year I wrote a weekly 2000-3000 word something using a broad soccer and social science lens, and while that level of extracurricular activity wasn’t sustainable it was probably the most fun I’ve had writing. Turns out, like many great blogs without a corporate media sponsor, the whole thing wasn’t sustainable -- the site has now been dormant for a few years, and largely hijacked by gambling bots. When I first started this Tumblr I did a few posts linking back to pitchinvasion.net, but the site is now in such bad shape that I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. So I’m thinking I’ll start inserting a few posts here in hopes they are worth saving and with nothing really to lose. As a first effort, and mostly just because I’ve recently been working on an academic project about women’s soccer fandom, I’m going to rescue a 2009 consideration of why -- at the time -- my little University of Portland drew more fans for women’s soccer than any other program in the country. Though times have changed some on that one...]

Where Women’s Soccer is King

Perhaps the best experience watching America soccer is found in an unlikely place by Andrew Guest.

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Perhaps my most powerful experience of soccer fandom, amidst years of following MLS, the English Premier League, and the World Cup, came in a college basketball arena at the University of Portland (UP) in the early winter of 2005.  Along with a thousand locals, I watched a projected ESPN feed from Texas of a national championship game where my little University team (~3500 students) was playing the giants of UCLA (~38000 students).  It had been a dramatic season including national team regulars, local heroes, legendary coaches, and community passion; a playoff game against Notre Dame had sold out in a matter of minutes in a frenzy of community interest, and the local news was packed with attention to each stage of the tournament.

As the championship game began the tension was palpable, only to be broken by a glorious slice of the beautiful game—92 seconds in a passing sequence created space on the opposite side of the field for a free runner to receive and finish with verve.  The crowd exploded and, as if to reward our joy, the goals kept coming.  After 90 minutes it was 4-0 Portland.  The players on the screen were pictures of ecstasy.  The basketball arena was a sea of moist eyes.  The weeks that followed included front page newspaper articles, a downtown parade, a commemorative book written by a local journalist, and the communal feeling sports fans remember for the rest of their lives.  It was, in its own way for our corner of the Pacific Northwest, England in July of 1966, Barcelona winning the European Cup, Didier Deschamps lifting the Jules Rimet trophy in Paris. On a local level it was that rare moment when soccer in the United States means something.

And, to make it even more rare, the players were all women.

Women’s Soccer Rules

Here’s an audacious claim: The University of Portland is the only place in the world boasting high-level teams for men and women where the single most popular sport is women’s soccer.  Although I’d be pleased if someone could prove that claim false, the NCAA Division I Portland Pilots are unquestionably a rare breed.  The women’s team has been the national attendance leader in college soccer for either men’s or women’s teams for three straight years (2006, 2007, and 2008).  They significantly outdraw both a reasonably successful men’s soccer team and an improving men’s basketball team.  The Pilot women are a Portland soccer phenomenon that generates attention and loyalty of the type that WPS teams, women’s national teams, and other high-level women’s teams around the world both crave and deserve.  So what makes the Pilots outliers?  And what lessons might they offer about promoting women’s soccer, and soccer in the US more generally?

Before addressing those questions I want to acknowledge that my claims of audacious success for women’s soccer at UP are relative.  The average women’s soccer crowd is still only pushing 4,000 fans (in a stadium that seats around 4,800).  Revenue from the program is still relatively small—though I do not know the exact figures, people I talked to suggested that at best the women’s soccer program comes close to breaking even.  But the institution has continued to invest in women’s soccer because it is widely considered a positive contributor to the broader community.  The program’s devoted following includes many people outside of the university and the local soccer world.  Given the limited global attention to women’s soccer as a spectator sport, I’d argue that relative success is still worth considering as a means towards understanding how Americans come to take soccer seriously.

Background of the program

I’ve worked at the University of Portland for five years.  I’ve attended many games of both the men’s and women’s teams—but I’ve had no actual connection to the programs other than having an occasional player as a student in class.  For present purposes I consider myself a sort-of recreational ethnographer who has been collecting amateur observations throughout the years, and recently decided to make a few slightly more formal inquiries.  So last week I sat down with some of the fans and promoters of the UP women’s team, and put out a query to the “Pilot Nation” discussion board for opinions from the hardcore fans about what makes the Pilot women outliers in the American soccer world.  Although the general consensus was that the relative success of women’s soccer at Portland is “unquantifiable,” as a social scientist I think with the right interpretive lens everything can be at least effectively organized (if not fully quantified)—and, as with most cultural phenomena, that starts with some history.

No matter who you talk to, the Pilots’ success starts with the series of odd circumstances that made former West Ham and Cardiff City defender Clive Charles the “director of soccer” at the University of Portland (a story partially told, with some inaccuracies, in a history of several West Ham players titled East End Heroes, Stateside Kings and in another book by the same author titled The Black Hammers—relevant parts of which have been excerpted by Pilot faithful).  Charles came to Portland to play for the NASL version of the Timbers, and after a few other vagabond soccer travels had come back to town to work with youth soccer programs—initially focusing on a local high school team.

Charismatic and cocksure, when he interviewed for the job as men’s soccer coach at the University of Portland he claimed he could take the team to the “final four” of the national championships within three years.  The interviewers simply laughed.  UP was a small and quiet regional Catholic University with modest ambitions and limited athletic success.  Competing for national championships was not on the radar.  But Clive (he is still largely known around town by first name only), had a certain type of genius and some fortuitous recruits—after his hiring the men’s team made the “final four” in his second year.

The most famous of the early recruits was Kasey Keller, who in 1988 was a long-haired golden boy in at North Thurston High School in nearby Lacey Washington.  As Keller went on to an outstanding four years at UP and then to establish himself as one of the most successful American professionals, other aspiring American starlets followed—including Steve Cherundolo, Conor Casey, Heath Pearce, Kelly Gray, Luis Robles, and Nate Jaqua.  The success of the men’s program also helped inspire the construction of Merlo Field.  A simple but accommodating 4,800 capacity soccer specific stadium, opened in 1990, that on its best days creates an electric atmosphere for the game.  It’s the closest thing American soccer has to the intimate community grounds at the lower-levels of the European game.

In 1989, in a move that seems to have initially been more pragmatic than visionary, Clive added on duties as head coach of the women’s program so that he could earn some extra income and have broader control of soccer programs.  The next year a star female player from one of Clive’s youth club teams, Tiffeny Milbrett, enrolled at UP specifically to play for Clive and the women’s team quickly became a national player.  In 1995 both the men’s and women’s team made the final four, and for a number of years both programs drew a good bit of attention in the American soccer world with the men generally maintaining a slight edge in prestige.  The women were important, but not yet kings.

Villa Drum Squad

Somewhere along the way another thing happened at Portland that is essential to a truly great soccer experience: the team developed a creative DIY supporters group.  The legend here goes that an advisor to one of the University’s all-male dormitories had fallen in love with soccer.  He also had a particular affinity for the samba rhythms of the south American game.  So a group of students was organized into the “Villa drum squad” (named for the dormitory—Villa Maria Hall), and a true supporters culture was born—the Villa drum squad made drum beats, supporter songs, megaphones, creativity, quirky rituals, and devotion a regular part of the Portland soccer experience (a few years ago ESPN’s Graham Hays featured the Villa drum squad in more depth with one of his chronicles of American college soccer).  Every year a new crop of students were socialized into a Pilot version of European ultras, offering what all great supporters groups offer their clubs: undying support, local character, and guaranteed atmosphere.  Initially the drum squad, like Clive, was focused primarily on the men’s games, but around 2,000 the momentum began to swing towards the women.  To the credit of the Villa drum squad, an all-male group, they made the transition by tacitly acknowledging that good soccer is good soccer—regardless of gender.

Winning was a big part of this transition.  While Clive’s teams were almost always national contenders, neither the men nor the women won a national championship until the 2002 women’s team went on a run for which I am obliged to rely on the cliché “storybook.”  In August of 2000, before coaching the US men’s Olympic team to a fourth place finish in Sydney, Clive was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  Though he continued coaching, his health deteriorated.  With a 2002 squad led by Canadian international Christine Sinclair, the women’s team had a good, but not great, regular season culminating in a low seed to the national tournament.  After a bit of luck, including beating top-ranked Stanford in PK’s in the quarterfinals, the Pilots advanced to play league rival Santa Clara in the final.  The game went to overtime, at which point the regular UP goalkeeper suffered a concussion from a boot to the face.  She left the game seeing double—replaced by a freshman who had played 10 minutes all season. While the Pilot faithful expected the worst, Clive seemed to have no doubt.  A few minutes later Sinclair finished a golden goal, and the New York Times memorialized the experience as a perverse tribute to women’s progress in sports: “Playing with pain is equal opportunity.”  It was the first ever NCAA national championship by a University of Portland team (though the women’s cross-country team had won a 1984 NAIA national championship).  Clive Charles died nine months later, just before the start of the next season.

The emotion of it all was the stuff that sports legends are made of, and the tragedy of Clive dying too young was affecting.  But, interestingly, attendance at women’s games those years was still relatively modest—they went from an average of around 1,700 in 2002 to an average of around 1,900 in 2003.  The community seemed uncertain as to whether Clive’s former lieutenants Garrett Smith and Bill Irwin (also a former player for Cardiff City) could grow the program.  The 2003 season was also good but not great, and fans might have continued to simply hold steady if not for a funny thing: Merlo Field got lights.

In 2004, despite some community concerns that night games would cause noise and congestion, the UP soccer teams fulfilled one of Clive’s dreams: to turn mundane afternoon games into festive nighttime occasions.  Though both the men’s and women’s teams had some of the main event games, the women’s program maintained its status as a national power while the men suffered from the increased opportunities for its best players to leave early for sustainable professional careers (players such as Conor Casey and Steve Cherundolo only played two years at UP—just long enough to ensure they were physically ready for Europe).  Friday nights watching the Pilots quickly became a grand occasion for women’s soccer.

As Portland Sports Information Director Jason Brough (an athletic department staffer responsible for media to do with all the University teams) told me, no matter how hard they try to explain the energy of those games to people from other places, the atmosphere UP can create for women’s soccer is something you have to experience to believe.  With 4,000-5,000 fans tightly packed and directly on top of the field, a raucous and creative student section, a stylish version of soccer emphasizing possession and dynamic movement off the ball, and elite international players also known in the community as good students and good people (including, over the course of recent years, Sinclair, Stephanie Cox (née Lopez), Megan Rapinoe, Angie Woznuk, and Sophie Schmidt), the atmosphere is addictive.  As one particularly articulate former player explains:

Where men can pursue professional soccer careers and make big money the vast majority of women are playing out the pinnacle of their careers on Merlo. They exude this when they play, they enjoy the moments, celebrate every goal, step on to the field every time as if it was the national championship final, they appreciate and recognize the phenomenal fans at Merlo.

After another magical run to that 2005 national championship, Portland soccer fans were hooked—attendance jumped to an average near 4,000 and the women’s team has been the top draw in American college soccer every year since (in recent years the men’s attendance leader has been UC Santa Barbara—but they’ve averaged several hundred fewer fans than the Pilot women).

I should note here that I do not use the above addiction metaphors loosely; the majesty of a truly great match combined with an energy of an enamored crowd is, anywhere in the world, something like a high.  Whether at Old Trafford, Azteca, the Bombonera, the Camp Nou, or Merlo Field, the actual rush is that rare and fleeting moment when all the good things about soccer coalesce: the elegance of the game, the intensity of competition, the pride of affiliation, the aesthetics of athletic excellence, the subtlety of sophisticated tactics, the transcendent feeling of taking part in something larger than one’s self.  That moment, in my experience, happens only rarely—once or twice a season in a good year.  In fact, there are plenty of UP women’s games that offer only the average entertainment and mediocre crowds.  But the highs are frequent enough to keep people coming back for more, to show up during the slog of a mid-season mismatch or the agony of losing to a lesser opponent through sheer bad luck.

The UP women’s soccer fans I asked said something similar about their experiences, emphasizing the ephemeral feelings that serve as the highlights of their fandom.  As one explained:

The closest thing I can relate this ‘feeling’ to is the spirit that surrounded the Grateful Dead in the late ’60’s and ‘70’s (when I grew up). The Grateful Dead were certainly not the most successful rock band in that era, nor did they get the most press, and they certainly weren’t the most talented group of musicians. However, they commanded a fierce and loyal following primarily because of what they stood for – family, community and watching out for others. I think that same phenomena surrounds UP’s women’s soccer team.

A list of ingredients

In my mind what makes the Pilot women an American soccer success story, and really what makes soccer work anywhere, is something like what happens on the food channel when chefs put together a great meal: they work with a set of ingredients that matter more in how they go together than in their particular individual contributions.  Here, in an approximate order of importance, are the “ingredients” that I think matter:

Winning: Being successful on the field matters.  One of the most basic academic theories of sports fandom depends upon what is called the BIRG effect (Basking In Reflected Glory).  People like to identify with winners.  The fact that the Pilot women are very good and have won the only two national championships in UP history matters.  But winning alone is not enough.  Far and away the most dominant women’s soccer program in the United States in the University of North Carolina—and though they’ve had some very good years for attendance, during their most recent run to yet another national championship they only averaged 1,600 fans a game (with free admission—though UP tickets are not overwhelmingly expensive, they do go for an average of $12 a pop and the program has sold over 1,000 season tickets a year for recent seasons).

The soccer appropriate stadium: One of the most obvious lessons of the early years of MLS was that making soccer work in the US requires stadiums that allow for a great soccer atmosphere.  That will never happen on a regular basis at gigantic American football stadiums, and it will be rare at multi-purpose stadiums where running tracks or baseball configurations separate fans from the action.  Merlo Field at UP has no luxury amenities and it will not win any awards for contemporary design.  But it does do a great job of placing reasonably sized rows of fans on top of the game on three sides of the pitch, with the fourth side appropriately lined by large pine trees that create a Pacific Northwest sense of outdoor intimacy.  The capacity of 4,800 is too small for a few big games and certain playoff contests, but for most games it seats just enough people to balance a sense of community with a sense of exclusivity.

The creative DIY supporters culture: As noted above, the Pilots have the undying support of an energetic and creative supporters group.  The Villa drum squad is a smaller and more contained version of that other excellent supporters group in town: the Timbers Army.  At their best DIY groups draw on authentic local character to creatively and artistically tribute their teams.  At other college sports events, including many basketball games at UP, the support tends to be less about creativity and more about aggression—when Gonzaga basketball comes to town fans on both sides often slip into the type of base and crude contempt that makes me worry about human nature.  But for Pilot soccer support is an art: the songs, rhythms, body paint, chants, and even the heckling is often enough a form of aesthetic expression rather than raw xenophobia.  At times with both the Villa drum squad and the Timbers Army it is not entirely clear how much attention they are actually paying to the soccer.  But their devotion and energy makes the experience exponentially better for those of us that are.

Savvy marketing: For soccer in the US to succeed it needs organic DIY supporters culture, but as Benjamin Kumming observed in his insightful comparison of the Timbers and the Sounders, soccer success also requires some intentional and inorganic promotion.  Just as the Sounders (at a much larger scale) used savvy marketing to capitalize on a vibrant local soccer culture, the University of Portland has intentionally built on the success of the Pilot women by devoting resources and personnel to women’s soccer.  There is a recognition at UP that women’s soccer alone will not be enough to enhance the broad profile of the University, but several years ago the powers-that-be did make an intentional decision to make both women’s soccer and men’s basketball as their feature programs.  That has translated into efforts such as a gigantic billboard placed at a prominent highway interchange during the 2007 season picturing the established players from the Pilots in uniform with the tag-line: “REAL FUTBOL”—a friendly jibe at the other primary sports obsession during the Fall in the Pacific Northwest: American college football.

The market niche: The Pilot women fill a nice niche as the most prominent women’s team in a town that likes to consider itself a progressive (and thus generally in favor of women’s sports) soccer town.  Of course, the Pilots have to split some of that soccer crowd with the Portland Timbers.  But for the most part the Timbers crowd and the Pilot women’s crowd seem complimentary rather than competitive.  The Timbers draw proportionally more young urban professionals and hardcore soccer fans, while the Pilot women draw proportionally more UP students (obviously), families, and soccer fans interested in local human interest stories (this distinction is facilitated by the simple fact that the Timbers sell beer; lots of beer).  Though it is hard to say for sure, I’d speculate that the Timbers and the Pilot women split the lesbian crowd that women’s sports promoters sometimes target, and each has other idiosyncratic demographics: one Pilot fan and UP alum reports, for example, that the Pilot women have a following among the town’s homeless population: “many of our street friends follow the women’s soccer team closely, and they notice and pick out students wandering around downtown wearing Pilots gear. One really lovely older gentleman who suffers from intense schizophrenia once wrote the entire history of the program on a napkin for me.”

The role model thing: Through an odd amalgam of marketing, the 1999 Women’s World Cup, and the demographics of US soccer, when Americans think of elite women’s soccer players they think of role models.  There are interesting problems with this association—as evidenced by the recent blogosphere discussion of whether women’s soccer can succeed if it is considered as much a social cause as a business endeavor.  While I’ll leave that discussion (for now) to others, in my informal surveying of Pilots fans there is no question that the character of the Portland players and their ability to serve as approachable and real role models comes up regularly as an essential part of the team’s success.  The Pilot women’s players have a reputation on campus as serious students with high ambitions, and do much community work on their own initiative.  As just a single example of how much this means to the fans, one Pilot Nation contributor (whose avatar consists of a picture of Megan Rapinoe wearing a fan’s homemade Pilot purple shirt stating boldly: “Megan is my IDOL” – no last names necessary):

With all the pressures and worries facing girls today, and the need for self-esteem, the girls I know thrive on the attention they get back from the Pilots. I’ve never seen anything like it from any other team, anywhere. Autographs, souvenirs, having a star player recognize them or chat online with them or even coach them — all these factors build an emotional bond that goes beyond data or won-loss record. It’s not just a beautiful game, it’s a beautiful place to be the dad of a daughter.

Being taken seriously by males: For better or worse, most hardcore sports fans are still males.  This often creates a dilemma for promoters of women’s soccer: the classic example is the popularity of the 1999 US Women’s World Cup winners whose breakthrough popularity among men and the male dominated sports media may have been partially driven by the happenstance that many of the players fit with conventional cultural norms of physical attractiveness.  But if women’s soccer is to be taken seriously it must be about much more than looks; FIFA President Sepp Blatter was roundly and justly criticized when he claimed that the women’s game would really benefit from “tighter uniforms.”  Though fans of the Pilot women may notice the physical attractiveness of the players, I have been generally impressed with how little that issue seems to come up among adult fans.  Likewise, among youth fans there are often as many boy youth players at Pilot women’s games as girl youth players—it was a U-10 boys team that recently won an auction to get to train with the Pilot women, and the pictures I saw of 9 year old boys ecstatic to be warming-up with their (female) soccer heroes seemed to me a striking tribute to gender progress.  Honestly, I have yet to figure out how the Pilot women are able to get a nearly unquestioning respect as athletes rather than as objects when too many other female athletes do not—but they do.

Playing attractive (and comprehensible) soccer: The Pilot coaches, from Clive to present, have put a priority on playing an attacking, dynamic, possession oriented version of the beautiful game—a women’s soccer version of Arsene Wenger’s “Champagne football.”  The women’s version, however, has an added benefit for the casual American fan—it takes place at a slower pace.  Many Pilot fans told me that the more controlled pace is a benefit to both youth players and fans without a deep history in the game.  In those cases the pace of the women’s game, its more tactical and less physical dimensions, allows for a satisfying comprehension.  It also means that lesser teams cannot get by on sheer hustle and effort, making for many goal-fests with 5-0 score lines.  For better or worse, to the casual fan lots of goals means lots of fun.

The lessons?

There are some other factors that go into the relative success of the Pilot women, and one might easily draw the conclusion that the peculiarities of the situation at Portland is not replicable.  But I would suggest that while the women’s soccer story at UP is indeed unique, all good stories still have a moral.  For me, the moral here is that the success of women’s soccer depends on striking that delicate balance between allowing space for that which is globally compelling about the beautiful game to co-evolve with the local strengths of people, institutions, and communities.  I suspect that a league such as the WPS will never succeed by depending on catchy branding, fashion forward thinking, or short-term business models alone; those things matter, but only as part of historical narratives, competitive highs, community connections, and long-term character.  The kinds of things that, at their core, have no gender.

Still, after all this analysis, I feel obliged to admit what now seems like a dirty secret: in many ways I personally continue to enjoy watching men’s soccer more than women’s soccer.  Having enough of an experienced eye to appreciate a faster pace and more even contests, when the Pilot women jump out to a 3-0 lead after 20 minutes against an inferior opponent I find many of the games anti-climatic.  But there is no question at Merlo Field which games have the better energy and atmosphere, which team creates the more compelling stories, nor which team is more likely to moisten my eyes: at Portland women’s soccer is king.

[sportsandideas]

“The Throwback Special” and Schools of (Sports) Thought

“There has perhaps never been a more memorable play in football — or even all of American sports — than the one that ended the career of the Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann...” says writer Chris Bachelder in a NYTimes opinionator essay from 2015. This may or may not be true. But the novel that Bachelder wrote building off that play is certainly one of the most memorable reads of my early 40′s. The book is full of great writing, and poignant insights about the contemporary middle aged American male. I recommend it to anyone curious about that particular species, but most particularly to the species itself -- all of us who grew up with Monday Night Football and now, 20-30 years later, feel conflicted about that along with so many choices in our lives.

The book seems to have first been serialized in the Paris Review, so it’s an artsy take on sports. Of course, it’s not really about sports. But it is kind-of artsy; here’s the Niv Bavarsky illustration accompanying the NYTimes piece:

And here’s one of many Jason Novak illustrations that accompany the Paris Review version:

While reading the book I’ve been working on a research project about the social psychology of sports fandom. Though the book is mostly about the waywardness of middle age, it uses American male attitudes towards sports as a lens to the different varieties of that waywardness. So, with the varieties of sports fandom on my mind, one section of the book struck me as particularly insightful. The set up is that a group of middle age men have convened at a hotel for their annual ritual of recreating the play, the throwback special, that resulted in Lawrence Taylor of the New York Giants breaking Washington quarterback Joe Theismann’s leg in a horrific fashion that had more to do with the brutal potential of football than either of the men themselves (2015 also saw the publication of an interesting oral history of the play in the Washingtonian). It’s never clear exactly why the men feel compelled to annually recreate the play. But a major part of the ritual, and of the book, is the draft lottery -- where each of the men must pick which of the players on the field that day they will portray. The first pick is Taylor. The book (here excerpted from The Paris Review) then goes into an extended analysis of what might happen next:

I love this. The “schools of thoughts” seem to me a rich typology of ways sports intersects with life. There is the withdrawn, insecure moralist; the type that won’t be on the team that failed. There are those who crave a perverse sort of attention; the men “who danced willingly at weddings and office parties, found a kind of tragic nobility in ruinous failure.” There is the quiet masochist; the type who identifies with, but does not broadcast, failure. There are attention hounds; those who just want a central role. And the ambivalent; those who crave “the familiar comfort of anonymity and insignificance” but “overcompensate for this shameful desire.” The bores, who “make an unexciting pick in preparation for next year’s selection.” And at least one man who qualifies as an aesthete; “For these men, the play was not the thing” - instead the point was to aesthetically “approach perfection.”

These types don’t describe all sports fans, but they do persuasively illustrate how our psychology intersects with and projects onto the ways we engage with our sports, games, and lives.

(One last illustration - this time from the Washingtonian oral history...)