[America has] had, after all, a century of the most extraordinary and compelling sporting stories to savor and reflect upon. [And] America possesses a literary culture that has, like no other, risen to the challenge of expressing them — a dual heritage I found condensed in Red Smith’s homage to the “Shot Heard Round the World”…

– David Goldblatt, from the foreword to the American edition of The Ball Is Round

Ask a baseball fan about the numbers 714 and 60. It’s unlikely that the respondent will simply state that they represent the third-most total home runs hit in a career, or just the eighth-most home runs hit in a single season. He or she will describe them as records, despite that they were surpassed thirty-five and nearly fifty years ago respectively. Credit that to the legend of the man who hit them. The numbers are important, but only as pointers to a story. What’s the response to 61? Ambivalence*. 755? Respect for not just skill, but perseverance. 70 and 68, followed soon after by 73 and 762? Perhaps not even recognizable outside the cities in which they were achieved, because many dislike the story behind them. If numbers were central to the value of the sport, that wouldn’t be the case.

Most writers use only baseball to argue that soccer needs statistics to graft itself onto American sporting culture, because baseball is easily the most numbers-heavy of American sports. ESPN The Magazine’s Chris Sprow gets credit for bringing American football and basketball into his argument by consulting Football Outsiders‘s Aaron Schatz and TrueHoop‘s Henry Abbott.

The problem with the gridiron game in particular, though, is that Schatz’s mission is exactly that which Sprow suggests soccer undertake — and Schatz’s new statistics, while useful, still aren’t commonplace in American football discussion. For non-kicking plays from scrimmage, six players out of twenty-two on an American football field can accumulate meaningful individual first-order statistics. Most observers judge the other sixteen qualitatively and collectively. For example, does a cornerback accumulate no interceptions and few tackles because of a lack of skill? Or does the receiver lined up against him lack skill himself? Or is his skill such that opposing coaches refuse to throw the ball near him? Or does the opposing team just pass the ball very rarely in its offensive scheme? Postgame, media and coaches alike will usually grade out his team’s collective defense (or even specifically passing defense) and call individual plays and players out for discussion. The grading system may not be one-to-ten, but soccer fans can certainly recognize this mode of assessment.

In his seminal work Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, Andrei Markovits argues that American sporting preferences were set in the 1920s and 1930s as cultural markers. For the native-born population, baseball and American football were the two clear centerpieces — American-created games that quickly spread nationwide. Immigrant communities, though, pursued three different tracks. Baseball meant Americanization and assimilation. Basketball, particularly in its Northeastern home, offered some ethnic solidarity and identification, but within the context of a game invented in America — a context that offered an entry point to others as well. But soccer pointed explicitly and completely backwards, to the homeland and the past. The story soccer offered, as much as they enjoyed the game, was a story which, overall, that generation of immigrants wanted to leave behind and that their children did leave behind, and that native-born Americans couldn’t access at all. The terms in which the games were discussed — numbers or subjective assessments — didn’t matter. The story behind each sport did, and the story soccer offered was rejected as foreign by one group and eventually abandoned by the other.

In the 1990s, the wall began to crack. Markovits identifies hockey as the exception proving the rule of early American rejection of foreign sports, but that exception only held in a regional heartland that hugs the Canadian border and barely views that country as foreign (thus allowing hockey to “pass”). Once sporting preferences set, top-level hockey outside this area met little but failure until the 1990s — the NASL and hockey’s first Southern efforts in both the NHL and WHA followed a remarkably similar trajectory. Now in the second try, despite some setbacks, hockey has taken root in such varied settings as Dallas-Fort Worth and the Research Triangle of North Carolina. In Texas, hockey’s route toward acceptance has come alongside spectacular growth in youth participation. The Carolina Hurricanes promoted a unique, rowdy fan culture that sprang up once the team moved to its permanent home arena and exploded during the team’s first long playoff run in 2002. Both paths should seem awfully familiar to soccer fans.

In neither place did hockey change its mode of discussion (which is itself not statistically heavy) — what grew was the story behind it, whether that involved ten-year-olds in Dallas aspiring to be like Mike or North Carolinians smoking a whole pig in the parking lot before games. And in the end, that’s where the answer lies for soccer as a spectator sport in the U.S. — not in creating numbers and new evaluative structures that, in the end, only mimic the pointers to the lore of traditionally American sports. Soccer needs its own American story — and fan culture can be a central part.

Photo credits: Patrick – msigarmy.com; Tristan1

In the beginning, 11 years ago, a real estate agent from Bolivia named Oscar Zambrana bought 15 tickets for the first D.C. United home game. The only way he knew to root for the home team was the way they do it back home in Santa Cruz.

He went to a pawn shop in Wheaton where the owner, a Uruguayan, offered to exchange drums for a ticket. Deal.

Stadium authorities did not understand this exuberant form of fan love. The second game, drums were barred.

But Kevin Payne, president of D.C. United, did understand. “This is not other sports,” says Payne. “Rather than have a band getting up occasionally to play a rehearsed song, our fans make their own music.” Deny this urge, and the cost to a franchise in passion, atmosphere, noise and ticket sales is incalculable.

In a season when Toronto fans have received much (justifiable) praise for the excitement they’ve brought into MLS in their first season, it’s worth remembering that other MLS fanbases have been in fine form for over a decade.

Steven Wells’s Guardian blog entry this morning on English attitudes toward American soccer provoked a rather visceral reaction from this quarter. Of course, provocation was his goal, calling out traditionalists as xenophobic “little-Englanders” simply afraid that resurgent U.S. soccer could displace Britain from yet another field in which it regarded dominance as its birthright (capitalism, naval warfare, etc.). And he might have a point.

But it takes chutzpah to condemn prejudice in one paragraph and in the next type this:

Public toilets, atheism, publicly funded radio and association football – these are all things of which no society can have too much. Witness the fact that soccer-playing America is massively liberal, loving, caring, socially conscious and nice. While soccer-hating America consists of increasingly isolated gangs of Bush- supporting, bible-bashing, gun-crazed, dungaree wearing, banjo-playing, quasi-fascist chicken-lovers and their twelve fingered, pin-headed, cyclopic, drooling monster children.

Bias and hyperbole aside, he inadvertently touched on a key conflict of English-speaking American soccer fanhood — one that was easily observable during the 2006 World Cup, when U.S. political blogs that otherwise condemn spectator team sports as low culture (and don’t even ask about NASCAR) professed sudden admiration for a European-based game. Soccer has an internationalist cachet in America that no other sport can match; that self-identification was virtually irresistible to the young, urban, well-travelled and politically alienated.

But if soccer support in English-speaking America becomes strongly associated with the cultural elitism of urban left-wing Euro-wannabes, the sport’s commercial horizon is awfully close.

Can MLS succeed as a niche product for this fanbase plus the Hispanic market? At its current scale, perhaps — it’s a well-off demographic. And maybe that’s fine. But if MLS wants to overtake the National Hockey League and join the top ranks of North American sport, it needs to be accessible to the casual fan who’d just as soon go to a baseball or American football game. That won’t happen if you have to buy a whole set of cultural assumptions with your ticket, when you’d rather just have a hot dog and a beer.