Eurosentrisk Fotball Alternativer

[jjkoggan]

It's been a tough week for Europeans who hate America's growing influence in world soccer. First, ESPN acquired the rights to show some English Premier League games -- in England. Then, the U.S. men's national team outthought and outmuscled the world's top-ranked team, Spain, 2-0 in the semifinals of the Confederations Cup in South Africa.

Consider that during the '02 World Cup, the Web site of England's The Guardian newspaper live-blogged the second-round U.S.-Mexico game as if were being called by American commentators. "Two soccer points to no score!" Well, now the ugly American of sports broadcasting, Disney-owned ESPN, controls the rights to show your vaunted Premier League in your homeland.

U.S. youth teams have done well internationally. The senior men's team reached the World Cup quarterfinals in '02. And yet Europeans cling to the old notion that America is a soccer backwater, that because Americans like other sports more, because our domestic league is second-tier, it doesn't deserve to do well. Success, when it happens and when it's noticed, is attributed to the other team's B-team lineup or indifference or bad luck. Praise is grudging

The Wall Street Journal recently polled 18,000 people in Europe, Russia and the U.S. about attitudes toward American culture and political influence. Among Europeans, 32 percent of respondents said America's cultural influence on the world was negative, compared to 26 percent who said it was positive. America's political influence was viewed as overwhelmingly negative.

"You get this constant mocking, not so much because of the soccer but because of everything else," says Romanian-born U.S. soccer fan Andrei Markovits, a University of Michigan professor who studies the cultural relationship between Europe and the U.S. "But it bleeds into the soccer. It comes out as this anger, this derision. It's constant and relentless." It's also unique to the U.S., Markovits points out. "They're not arrogant toward South Korea -- or Mexico, for that matter," he says.

The simple explanation for European snobbery is that soccer has been the one thing the rest of the world has done better than the U.S. Do we have to take that too? When the Americans do well, that's threatening, and responding with snark to that threat is a natural defense. As my friend Franklin Foer, author of How Soccer Explains the World, has pointed out, nothing will make the old soccer world more angry and insecure than when the U.S. wins the World Cup -- and the vast majority of Americans shrug their shoulders.