The Real Reason America Doesn't Love Soccer

Let's not blame each other. But we can blame George Washington.

By Zubin Jelveh

Getty Images

It's been a fantastic World Cup for us here in the United States. Our team went further than we could have hoped, and our goalie was heroic during our last stand. Germany's pummeling of host Brazil was a searing human drama for anyone who has a pulse. And ratings have surprised everyone, with one forecast predicting that 30 million viewers will tune into the final tonight.

Still, we are stuck with the same question: why don't we love soccer as much as the rest of the world? 

Conservatives argue that soccer doesn't embody our individualistic ideals while liberals point to our relative ignorance about what goes on in the rest of the world. But what if we asked the opposite question? What if this isn't about why we don't like soccer, but why the hell does the rest of the world love it so much? 

Are the citizens of other countries more enlightened? Have they studied our holy trinity of baseball, football and basketball and found them to be lacking? Is a corner kick objectively better than an inbounds pass? A goalie's save more thrilling than a bases loaded strikeout, a goal-line stand, or an in-your-face block?

It doesn't matter. The real reason for soccer's global popularity is fairly obvious and has nothing to do with any choices we've made in the last couple of centuries. It also seems to be missing almost completely from the national debate and also friends I informally polled.

Here it is:

Colonialism, of course.

Modern soccer was codified by the British, caught on in Europe through the 19^th century, and then exported to and appropriated by colonies throughout the globe in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In his 1994 book Games and Empires, sports historian Allen Guttmann writes "in almost every instance, the first to adopt soccer and other modern sports where the cosmopolitan sons of the local elites, many of whom had been educated at English schools in their own country or abroad." 

Soccer wasn't the only sport that was introduced to the colonies. For example, cricket is possibly the most popular sport in India, a former British colony. For the same reason soccer is popular in former European colonies, baseball is a major sport in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. And colonization wasn't an absolute prerequisite for diffusion. Soccer is the number one sport in Thailand, a country which remained independent throughout the colonial period.

But if imperialism played a first-order role in soccer's popularity, then why didn't it catch on in America, a former British colony? 

I investigated this by looking at the popularity of sports between colonizers and their colonies and the date in which a colony gained independence. I downloaded the independence data compiled by Paul Hensel, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas, and the sports popularity data from the web site Most Popular Sports. The popularity data is based on the number of visitors to major sites dedicated to particular sports such as fifa.com and nfl.com as measured by Alexa rankings for each country. For each country there is a ranking of sports by popularity, though the number of listed sports can vary. A limitation with this data is that it only tells us what's popular today and not the period surrounding the colonial turnover. Also, if there are systematic differences in how people in different countries access sports information online then the Alexa rankings may be biased. 

Still, we can get a sense of how sports traditions flowed from imperial powers to their colonies. Overall, 32 of 85 (37.7%) colonizer-colonized pairs in the data shared the same most popular sports. (Of these, the shared sport was soccer 93.8% of the time.) But this average masks a lot of heterogeneity when you break down the data over time. Splitting the sample into four different time periods containing roughly the same number of pairs, you see that of the set of countries that gained independence before 1903, only 14.3% share popular sports with their former imperial power. This goes up to 26.3% for the period between 1903 and 1948, jumps again to 56.5% for 1948 to 1965, and dips a bit to 50.0% for the period after 1965. (The pattern is similar if you look at the overlap between the top 2 or 3 sports in each pair, but the sample size for each period drops since the number of listed sports in each country is not the same.)

Date ranges were constructed to contain roughly the same number of countries -- an average of 21 per period.

This suggests that the reason soccer is not popular in the states has more to do with the fact that our independence came in the 18^th century rather than our failure to appreciate soccer's rightful place at the top of the sports world. Modern sports didn't come of age until the late 19^th century/early 20^th century, so it wasn't part of the colonial program yet. Put simply, the Brits didn't have America as a colony at the right time in order for us to become soccer lovers en masse. 

It's of course not without irony that a country known for its disconnect from world affairs failed to consider the global historical context when trying to answer the question of why America doesn't love soccer.

So, as you watch the final match of the World Cup tonight and find yourself just not fully grasping the beauty of the game, just remember that it's okay. There's nothing inherently better about association football than American football. Soccer is the world's most popular sport for the same reason English has become the lingua franca: its relative simplicity allowing for widespread appreciation and its geographical diffusion. For us baseball lovers, it's just too bad the British didn't invent modern baseball instead of soccer, then instead of having our fake World Series every year, we could be watching the real one every four.