Soccer is the world's favorite pastime, a passion for billions around
the globe. In the United States, however, the sport is a distant
also-ran behind football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Why is
America an exception? And why, despite America's leading role in popular
culture, does most of the world ignore American sports in return?
Offside is the first book to explain these peculiarities, taking us on
a thoughtful and engaging tour of America's sports culture and
connecting it with other fundamental American exceptionalisms. In so
doing, it offers a comparative analysis of sports cultures in the
industrial societies of North America and Europe.
The authors argue that when sports culture developed in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nativism and nationalism were
shaping a distinctly American self-image that clashed with the
non-American sport of soccer. Baseball and football crowded out the
game. Then poor leadership, among other factors, prevented soccer from
competing with basketball and hockey as they grew. By the 1920s, the
United States was contentedly isolated from what was fast becoming an
international obsession.
The book compares soccer's American history to that of the major sports
that did catch on. It covers recent developments, including the hoopla
surrounding the 1994 soccer World Cup in America, the creation of yet
another professional soccer league, and American women's global
preeminence in the sport. It concludes by considering the impact of
soccer's growing popularity as a recreation, and what the future of
sports culture in the country might say about U.S. exceptionalism in
general.
