Before our impressions from the World Cup fade, there are a variety of reflections on the experience that go well beyond the sports excitement that proved so obvious and contagious even in the United States. The U.S. is rightly proud of a well-hosted world event and of an inexperienced team that survived into the second round. What else does the World Cup indicate about America's relation to the world? When Roberto Baggio's penalty kick sailed high of the goal, it ignited an explosion of emotions literally around the world. Just as the Super Bowl has become the high holiday of American secular culture, fans of soccer in Italy and all of Europe, in Brazil and all of Latin America, on every continent, watched, wagered, and cared about this final in the world's number one sport. The global televison audience for the World Cup matches that of the Olympics as the largest in history, some one billion people, as much as one of every four humans on the face of the earth. This World Cup for the first time has broken through a kind of insularity in the United States. Our sports media and our public hate to admit it, but this is the championship in the world's most popular sport and we don't dominate it! Perhaps the simplest lesson for us from this year's World Cup is the sense that the United States is not above the world but is part of it, is one among the many. Clearly, the U.S. is the world's best in basketball and baseball, and of course football but that doesn't count for much since almost no one else plays it. The U.S. is strong in golf, tennis, summer Olympic sports, and many others. But, to anyone who travels abroad and pays attention, soccer is the world's sport. These points came home to me in presenting the results of a study I completed a few years ago comparing the Super Bowl to the World Cup. Presentations of this study to foreign audiences have met with great interest and discussion. What is it in America that makes our football so popular and the world's "futbol" of so little interest? Europeans and Latin Americans get excited by that question even when they know so little of this Super Bowl which they hear is such a major event in the States. In contrast, Americans before this year have generally not shown much interest in the comparison between Super Bowl and World Cup. Do we not have a realistic sense of comparing ourselves to others? Are world matters which we do not dominate therefore by definition unimportant? The power of soccer was brought home to me twenty years ago when I had the opportunity to attend a soccer match in Rio de Janiero in the huge and beautiful Maracana Stadium. It holds nearly 200,000 people, twice the size of our largest stadiums. When the competition heats up on the field, one can see and feel the excitement as the banners wave in the stands, the songs and chants and cheers get louder, and the massive emotional power becomes obvious around Soccer Madness, as one sociological study of Brazilian soccer fondly named it. It is what the Chargers at their best can do to Jack Murphy Stadium but with more than three times as many people. Then to come home and here Americans like Ted Leitner dismiss soccer as "boring" reveals an insularity, a narrowness of experience, that is disappointing in a country as large and powerful in the world as the United States. Yes, there is little scoring but world soccer fans find basketball boring, despite the Michael Jordans and Hakeen Olajuwons, because there is too much scoring. The tension of Brazil and Italy's scoreless tie would have been broken if the score had been 5 to 1 in the second half in the way that Super Bowls often deteriorate one-sidedly.
But the issue of soccer itself is less significant than issues of self-image and global awareness, or lack of awareness, that the recent World Cup call to mind. It has been said that American media look at the world "through the wrong end of the telescope." I have found other travelers who agree with my impression that I never really feel like I understand the United States except when I am outside it. Only then am I reminded that the latest Washington insider controversy which dominates American news coverage registers only the tiniest blip on the world media screen. Only then am I reminded that countries and capitals by the dozens are also struggling with politics, resources, and the future with as much concern for their future and that of the world as many Americans are. By being such a large population and land mass, isolated by oceans on each side, the United States can more easily sense itself as separate, as a kind of culturally autonomous hothouse. This is especially dangerous for a country as militarily powerful and economically intertwined with others as we are.
Sports are often an interesting barometer of other elements in a society. I was discouraged but not surprised to find the United States the most "nationalistic" in Olympic coverage of several dozen countries studied in 1984. Some 73% of U.S. sports coverage of the 1984 Winter Olympics was about United States athletes and teams. Only 27% concerned other athletes from around the world, even though the United States did not dominate the competitions or the medal victories. Other national presses gave higher proportions of coverage to world athletes and less to their own. Similarly in the 1984 Summer Olympics, even Korea (76%) and China (70%) were not as self-preoccupied as the American press (77%). Almost all other national press coverage, from countries on six continents, gave the majority of Olympic coverage to foreign athletes and teams. Is it healthy to be so self-centered as a nation?
If we compare some elements of the world's number one media spectacle, the World Cup, with America's number one media spectacle, the Super Bowl, interesting similarities and differences emerge. Both the World Cup and Super Bowl are called "football" and involve large teams moving a ball down the field to score. Both culminate months of elimination play and employ extensive training and preparation and elaborate strategy. Both employ sophisticated technology to hold the center of media attention and involve huge amounts of money as well as vast emotional and social involvement of fans. And each is immensely popular in its own sphere--either the world or the U.S.--and virtually insignificant in the other sphere. But they differ, particularly in the structure of the two games. Contrasted with North American football, soccer features continuous action, low technology field gear, low scores, no fixed line of scrimmage, less player position specialization, no ball "handling" except by goalies, and less direct "violence" of bodies intentionally crashing into each other. There is an exaggerated masculinity and paramilitarism to our football (which I hasten to add I enjoy myself) that gives it a tone of conventional warfare against the looser guerrilla warfare of soccer. What do these structural-cultural differences say about "America versus the world?" I'm not sure and I hesitate to speculate, but the question seems more interesting than whether the absence of commercial break time prevents soccer from making it here or whether rule changes are needed to liven up soccer for us. I think again the lesson has something to do with appreciating that the United States is not necessarily the best at everything and that not everyone really wants, underneath it all, to be just like us. Certainly world soccer fans, aware of our rate of violent crime, had more reason to fear coming here than we had to fear their coming, however many incidents of soccer fan violence may have bloodied the sport's image. No better example exists of the "globalization" of human events than sports today. And, as the memories of the extremely successful World Cup fade into history, it may serve the American public to ponder lessons we might learn from the experience. Maybe the U.S. will become a more genuine soccer power at the world-class level, but more importantly and quite apart from that question, maybe, just maybe, we will understand ourselves better because of the World Cup.