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The other American

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there no soccer in the
United States?
a
Andrei S. Markovits
a
Boston University
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The Other 'American Exceptionalism': Why
is there no Soccer in the United States?
Andrei S. Markovits
Once again, the world's most important media event which absorbed the
uninterrupted attention of most of the world's male population for the
entire month of June 1986, barely left the realm of esoterica in the United
States.1 Although the quadrennial World Cup was hosted by America's
southern neighbour, Mexico, this event failed to capture the imagination
of the American public. Interest in the United States was strikingly
minute in comparison with that exhibited in virtually every country
in the world, including those politically and economically most similar
to the United States - the liberal capitalist democracies of Western
Europe - as well as those quite different - members of the Communist
bloc or that loose conglomerate known as the "Third World'.2 Even
though American television coverage of the World Cup 1986 was more
extensive than ever before, this major global event remained outside
the mainstream of American sports life, let alone public life in general.3
Why does the United States remain so aloof from the world's most
popular sport? Why, in a sports-crazed society, has soccer played such
a marginal role? What are the origins and manifestations of this other
'American exceptionalism'? This article purports to shed some light on
these interesting - perhaps even important - questions.
Sombart Revisited and America's Soccer 'Exceptionalism':

Some comparative clarifications
Like virtually all European observers of the 'New World' before and after
him, Werner Sombart was both fascinated by and ambivalent towards it.
The ambivalence reflected the invariable combination of both negative
and positive generalizations based on the 'uniqueness' of the United
States as a European extension with certain puzzling peculiarities.4 To
Sombart, the most puzzling of these 'Americanisms' was the absence
of a large, well-organized, mass-based working-class movement headed
by a political party. Among the realistic aims of this party would be the
improvement of conditions for its members and voters, who hailed from
the working class and thus represented the majority of the population in
all industrial societies, including the United States. To achieve its aim,
the party would first attain and then exercise state power through the
WHY IS THERE NO SOCCER IN THE UNITED STATES? 231
channels of parliamentary democracy. Given Sombart's concern, his

question 'Why is there no socialism in the United States?' is rather
misleading. Socialism did not exist in the Europe of his time either,
thus making the United States quite unexceptional to any country in the
old world.5 A far more appropriate - though infinitely less elegant - title
for Sombart's book would have been 'why is there no large, organized,
working-class movement led by a social democratic party in the United
States?' One could think of few more corroborating compliments to the
validity and originality of the study's central observation, though, than
its continued relevance as one of the most intellectually exciting bodies
of literature in American history and social science.6
The parallels to soccer are striking. Just as Sombart noted the absence
of what he called 'socialism', so, too, we can observe a basic absence
of soccer, as the dominant participant and spectator team sport, in
the United States throughout the twentieth century. This is not to say
that soccer - like Sombart's socialism - has been completely absent
from the American experience. Both appeared in the States virtually
simultaneously with their respective 'inventions' in Europe, and both
continue to flourish in various guises. Socialist parties and movements
have always existed in twentieth-century America, just as the game of
soccer has been played virtually without interruption in this vast country
since its introduction in the nineteenth century.7 Socialism's fortunes
have ebbed and flowed in the larger context of American politics and
intellectual life without ever coming close to attaining a dominant, let
alone hegemonic, position as in Europe. Comparatively, soccer has
never posed any serious challenge to America's own 'big three' sports:
baseball, football and basketball (a somewhat distant third). One can
safely predict that neither of these two 'un-American' phenomena will
disappear in the future, thus lending further testimony to America's
pluralism in intellectual thought, politics and sports. It is equally safe
to predict, however, that neither will assume a place of national
prominence in the United States. Their already traditional role in
America as tolerated, perhaps even appreciated, eccentricities will thus
continue.81 am not arguing that there is a direct relationship between
the absence of soccer and socialism in the United States compared with
other industrial democracies. Rather, I will try to show that some of the
same American peculiarities which led to an American 'exceptionalism'
regarding socialism also account for the subordinate place of soccer
among American sports.
That soccer is relatively insignificant to Americans is apparent in that
what the rest of the world, virtually without exception, calls 'football',
Americans know only as 'soccer'. The pre-eminence of the term 'football'
is evidenced by the fact that in most non-English speaking countries
where the sport has pride of place, either the term 'football' itself is used,
modified to conform to the spelling, orthography and pronunciation of
the local language, or a literal translation thereof, such as the German
Fussball or the Hungarian labdarugas. It is only in countries such as the
232 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF SPORT
United States, where the term 'football' describes another sport or where
Association Football is of secondary importance, that the term 'soccer' is
used. Among these countries have been America's cousins, most notably
Australia and Canada, but also New Zealand and the complicated case
of South Africa, all - like the United States - English-speaking, former
British colonies dominated by white immigrants. Does this refute the case
for 'American exceptionalism' with regard to soccer, thus confining the
validity of the concept only to socialism?9
I think not, for the following two reasons. First, soccer's subordinate
position in the sports topography of the United States, as well as of
these other English-speaking countries, should not detract from the
uniqueness of the American situation, in which soccer's potential for

eminence as a mass sport was pre-empted by the creation of three
indigenous team sports. Baseball, football and basketball have continued
to enjoy unrivalled popularity as mass sports among the American
public since their respective introduction.10 Ice hockey developed as
Canada's national sport. Having successfully exported it south of the
border, Canada provided the United States with yet another, though
regionally confined, popular team sport, and gave many countries of
the globe's northern hemisphere one of their favourite winter activities.
The rest of Canada's popular sport 'space' is dominated by America's
'big three', with baseball and basketball exact replicas of the American
games, and Canadian football showing only very minor modifications
from its American cousin. Interestingly, Canada is among the handful
of countries where the two most parochial and idiosyncratic factors
responsible for America's 'soccer exceptionalism' - football and baseball
-have attained a respectable presence outside the United States. Cricket
occupies a major portion of New Zealand's, Australia's and South
Africa's sport 'space', as it does in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the
West Indies. The remainder of the sport 'space' in these countries is filled
by field hockey (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), rugby (New Zealand and
South Africa) and Australian Rules football (Australia). Common to all
of these countries then is the presence of cricket as the national sport,
the marginal existence of soccer, and the existence of a second, rather
obscure and somewhat modified British team sport. In contrast to the
United States, none of these countries have developed three virtually
new team sports which take up almost all the existing sport 'space' of their
society, as the 'big three' have in the United States. Curiously, these 'big
three', with the notable exception of basketball, n have remained almost
completely confined to their native home, despite America's pre-eminent
position as a global leader in the politics, economic affairs and popular
culture of the twentieth century.
This brings me to the second reason why America's soccer 'exception-
alism' differs from the ones briefly mentioned in the preceding lines. By
virtue of the Unites States' military, political, economic and cultural
hegemony throughout much of the twentieth century - often referred
to with some justification as 'the American century' - almost all of
America's actions (or inactions) attain meaning beyond their actual

reality. The concept of 'Americanism' has few, if any, parallels in the
twentieth century, thus denoting the uniquely nodal position of the
United States in the modern world. Its hegemony extends beyond the
immediate orbit of the liberal democracies of industrial capitalism and
is equally significant to the countries of the Second and Third Worlds.12
Crudely put, the United States matters more in the world's affairs than
do Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Important issues within these
countries remain unnoticed by the rest of the world or at best become
esoteric items gaining the attention of a few specialists. Newsworthy
issues in the United States, however, are of both national, as well
as international, importance. Thus, the editors and sport writers of

Sovietski Sport have probably never wondered why New Zealanders
or South Africans seem unmoved by soccer. Along with the rest of
the world's soccer fans, however, they have certainly asked themselves
why soccer plays such a marginal role in the United States.13 Soccer
'exceptionalism', like the absence of socialism, in the United States has
received so much attention largely because of America's predominant
global position. Whereas the 'socialism' debate has generated much
impressive scholarship, the question of soccer 'exceptionalism' has
remained confined to the oral tradition of stadium debates and bar
discussions all over the world. Clearly the two 'exceptionalisms' and
their consequences for the quality of human existence in the United
States cannot be construed as equally significant. Soccer, though like
all major sports a multi-billion dollar business, remains a game, whereas
socialism would, at the very least, certainly diminish, if not alleviate,
the misery of the American poor by its creation and maintenance of a
well-functioning welfare state. Thus, Sombartian 'exceptionalism' has
made the United States, far and away the richest country in the world,
the only major industrial democracy without, among other things, a
compulsory, state-involved, comprehensive national health insurance
for its sick. Nothing of comparable importance accompanies soccer
'exceptionalism', though it isolates the United States from a leisure
activity and collective involvement which has captured the rest of the
world's undivided attention since the beginning of this century. It is to
the common origins of both 'exceptionalisms' that I now turn.
America - The First New Nation

The most important common denominator for both 'exceptionalisms'
and the single most pervasive underlying variable for an understanding
of American politics and society is the quintessentially bourgeois nature
of the country's objective development and subjective self-legitimation
from its very inception to the present. This 'natural', hence all the
more comprehensive, bourgeoisification of American politics and
society created certain structures and an accompanying atmosphere
which definitely distinguished this country from all others in the
'old world' and from the latter's mere colonial extensions overseas
(as opposed to 'new world' which, as a concept, remained tellingly
reserved almost exclusively for the United States).14 Central to this
burgeoning 'Americanism' was the free individual who was to attain
his fulfilment by being an independent, rational actor in a free market
unfettered by any oppressive collectivities, be they the state or social
classes, organized religion or the army. In short, bourgeois America
created a new identity which prided itself on being explicitly different
from that anywhere in aristocratic Europe. Only by separating church
from state could this new society develop a politically unchallenged
secularism which in turn could be viewed as being among the most
religious in the advanced industrial world.15 Moreover, only by

establishing an unprofessional military under strict civilian control -
in addition to the continued presence of the 'frontier', yet another
major ingredient of 'American exceptionalism' - could the United
States develop into one of the most heavily armed societies among
advanced industrial countries.16 By establishing a broad concept of
equality which, however, was to remain permanently subservient to
the individual's freedom by merely providing him with equal access to
an abundance of opportunities, this new country created an ingenious
system of popular participation which was at once mediated yet also
comprehensive. Above all, it created a framework for the development
of powerful myths of unbound freedom and limitless opportunities,
which became one of the most attractive ideologies of the modern
world. Indeed, as Leon Samson has persuasively argued, Americanism
carried a veneer laden with terms rather similar to those used by socialism
and other movements of the left, thanks to the above-mentioned myths.
Thus socialism was 'crowded out' from the consciousness and praxis of
this bourgeois America (Americanism = Socialism so to speak.)17 The
primacy of a bourgeois order is further substantiated by other well-known
components of 'American exceptionalism': the existence of the franchise
for white males; the persistence of two 'non-ideological', 'pragmatic' and
self-defined middle-class parties who, aided by a highly centrist electoral
system, have successfully 'crowded out' any newcomers; and the crucial
role of an integrating nationalism exemplified by the 'melting pot'.
America's soccer 'exceptionalism' is also rooted in this bourgeois order.
Modern sports are inextricably tied to the development of mass
democracies. Sport in its organized form of regulated leisure and,
subsequently, of commodified culture, goes hand in hand with such
major components of 'modernization' as urbanization, industrialization,
education and the constantly expanding participation of a steadily
growing number of citizens in the public life of politics, production
and consumption. The creation and - perhaps more importantly -
dissemination of modern sports are thus part and parcel of a bourgeois
mode of life. While most modern sports were actually 'invented' by
members of society's 'higher stations' either of aristocratic or, more
often, quasi-aristocratic bent, they soon became the purview of the
bourgeoisie and the 'masses', if they were to gain any significance

beyond that enjoyed by polo or croquet, for instance. Thus, it was
the two most bourgeois societies of the latter half of the nineteenth
century, Great Britain and the United States, which founded organized,
professional, team sports played and enjoyed by the masses in their own
countries, and - in the case of Britain's 'inventions', especially soccer -
everywhere in the world.18 The dissemination of the respective national
sports correlated positively with the two countries' global position. Great
Britain was still the leading imperial power and as such, the main opinion
leader and cultural 'hegemon' of the time. People all over the world
emulated British ways, especially those related to recreation, relaxation
and sports. The United States, on the other hand, was still by and
large an isolated 'new world' which fascinated the European public,
yet its concrete presence was very marginal. This isolation was in
part self-imposed by America's self-identification as being distinctly
non-European, perhaps even anti-European. Whereas Britain derived
much of its internal legitimacy from being the centre of a huge empire
during the latter half of the nineteenth century, America attained its
legitimacy by being a new, self-contained 'frontier' society, independent
of the mother country - unlike its Australian and Canadian cousins. This
strong ambivalence towards Great Britain, manifesting itself in a clear
affinity fostered by a common language and a disdain for the old colonial
master, whose very presence threatened the 'new world's' identity
formation, greatly influenced the development of public discourse in
the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This
'special relationship', marked by both admiration and rejection, proved
particularly significant in the realm of sports.19 As we will soon see,
both football and baseball developed into American sports par excellence
within the framework of this ambivalent and largely one-sided dialogue
which America conducted with Britain about its ways. Both sports
developed out of largely pre-industrial, 'elite' British team activities.
Through complete bourgeoisification, they became adapted to a new,
commercialized industrial order in a 'new world'. By the time Britain's
own mass sport, soccer, had been successfully exported all over the
world, America's sport 'space' was already occupied by former British
imports now converted into genuine American games. Why was soccer
crowded out in the United States? First, the American bourgeoisie had
successfully established its own national game, baseball, which largely
paralleled the timing of soccer's dissemination as a mass sport in Great
Britain. Secondly, the young elite at the top American universities were
keener on playing - and then altering - what had developed into a
British 'elite' sport - rugby - rather than expressing their anglophilia
by importing soccer which by that time had undergone a 'vulgarization'
similar to baseball's in the United States. In the following section,
I will offer brief descriptions of the developments of soccer, football
and baseball respectively, tracing the 'massification' of each sport.
The Development of Modern Soccer in Britain: From its elite origins

to the world's most popular mass sport
The ancient and geographically diverse precursors to the game of soccer
are well documented.20 In disparate parts of the world such as China,
ancient Rome and Greece, India and the Americas, men would gather
periodically and kick some round object to and away from each other.
Whether it was the skull of a defeated Danish enemy, as some English
legend has it, or the stuffed bladder of a slaughtered animal, people
would somehow devise a 'ball' with which they played.21 These periodic
festivities, centred on a ball-like object, continued throughout Europe's
Middle Ages, occurring virtually everywhere on the Continent as well

as the British Isles. The game of calcio, hailing from Roman times,
was the biggest 'team sport' in Florence around 1500.22 It was widely
played in Italy in subsequent centuries, though - rather tellingly and
in common with the rest of the world - modern soccer in Italy
stems entirely from the introduction of Association Football by the
British in the late nineteenth/early nineteenth century.23 The medieval
'precursor' to modern soccer was a wild, disorganized free-for-all which
often ended in riots, resulting in serious injuries and occasionally even
death for some participants. That authorities more often than not
forbade the playing of football attests to the roughness of these riotlike
games and also to their potential danger in seriously disrupting the
public order. Nevertheless, these uncontrolled, disorganized 'matches'
in which two opposing sides would try to control the 'ball' by kicking,
holding, running or throwing it, became regular occurrences on or
around certain festivals. Best known in England were the football
games on Shrove Tuesday where crowds would gather annually to
celebrate their last day of freedom before the strict and dour days
of Lent. The contests in Ashbourne and Derby became legendary.
In Derby, the match between the parishes of St. Peter and All Saints
became such an intense tradition that the term a 'derby' developed to
connote the institutionalized contest between two long-standing, usually
local, rivals.24 Through the export of modern Association Football,
this English term, along with many others, became commonplace in
the contemporary vernacular of some continental languages, such as
German, Hungarian and Romanian. These mass happenings had, in
fact, little to do with what was to become modern Association Football or
soccer. As James Walvin has pointed out, this pre-modern form of mass
entertainment virtually disappeared from the lives of the common people
during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution only to re-emerge
during the 1880s with a fervour and enthusiasm which 25 years later
was to conquer the entire world with the exception of the United
States.25 In the intervening period, the upper stratum of the English
bourgeoisie, aided by several far-reaching structural changes particular
to a new industrial age, turned this wild, disorganized and dangerous
medieval festival into the most popular modern team sport on earth.
From its very beginning, modern soccer became inextricably linked to

the most fundamental aspects of 'modernization': discipline exacted by
regulated industrial life; the strict separation of leisure and work; the
necessity of organized and regularized recreation for the masses; cheap
and efficient public transport by train (intercity) and bus (intracity);
prompt and widely available mass communication via the press (intro-
duction of the sport pages in newspapers), to be followed by telegrams
(crucial for the development of nationwide betting), radio, and then
television; and - perhaps most importantly - the development and rapid
expansion of modern education.
Though Wellington probably never said that Waterloo was won on the
playing fields of Eton, the fact that generations of middle-class Britons

cherished this belief conveys the centrality of the so-called public schools
to the dissemination of bourgeois culture in nineteenth-century Britain.26
These public schools, 'ideal training grounds for merchants as well as
aristocrats', formed the cradle for soccer and rugby, the forerunner
to American football. Starting in the 1830s, English intellectuals and
educators became concerned with a complete education befitting the
new industrial order. The goal was to produce not only the most efficient
- but also the most well-rounded and thus fulfilled - lawyers, doctors,
civil servants and scholars. Be they the ideas of 'godliness and good
learning' as articulated by Charles Kingsley or similar concepts put forth
at various times by thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer
and John Henry Newman, the idea could best be summarized by that
ubiquitous Latin phrase mens sana in corpore sarto.27 Organized sports
had suddenly attained a central role in the proper education of Great
Britain's young, male, bourgeois elite. Best described in the famous
book Tom Brown's Schooldays published by Thomas Hughes in 1857,
it was in this atmosphere that modern soccer emerged.
Football was played at all prestigious public schools, at both the old
guard of Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Winchester, Westminster
and Shrewsbury, and the new foundations of Cheltenham (1841),
Marlborough (1843) and Wellington (1856).28 Until the middle of
the 1840s, each school basically played its own version of football,
an intramural game with almost completely fluid rules. The respective
school's particular terrain dictated the kind of football played on the
premises. In schools such as Eton, Charterhouse and Westminster,
which had only narrow 'pitches' at their disposal, space restrictions
favoured the so-called 'dribbling game' in which the use of hands
was completely eliminated. Harrovian football, not confined by space
limitations but handicapped by drainage difficulties, also placed a
premium on dribbling the ball, although catching it in the air or
after only one bounce on the ground, was still permitted. Conditions
at Winchester encouraged 'accurate kicking and dashing play' with the
use of the hands also severely restricted. Rugby, followed by schools
such as Cheltenham and Marlborough, was the main school at which
the so-called 'running game' developed.29 The centrality of this sport
to the students' overall educational experience at Rugby in the 1830s is

well described in Chapter Five of Tom Brown's Schooldays. This running
game split from the kicking and dribbling game in 1863 and developed
into Rugby Football, the forerunner to both American and Australian
Rules Football. The kicking and dribbling game became Association
Football (soccer).30
With the gradual extension of the national railway system by the
mid-to-late 1840s, the traditionally intramural game developed into an
inter-schools contest in which matches among the various public schools
began to occur with some regularity. With the continued involvement
of public school alumni in the game beyond their adolescence, football
attained greater respectability and prestige. In addition to continued

play at Oxbridge and the prestigious public schools throughout the
1850s, the first clubs emerged at this time, all having been founded by
ex-public-school and/or Oxbridge men on a purely amateur basis largely
in the south of England. Still, the game remained disorganized, sporadic
and unregulated throughout the 1850s. A set of comprehensive rules had
become a necessity by the early 1860s though, since the game of football
had developed into a serious sport which reached beyond the confines of
England's public schools.
In 1862 J.C. Thring, assistant master of Uppingham and one of two
Shrewsbury graduates to form the first football team at Cambridge in
1846, issued a set of rules known as 'The Simplest Game'.31 Streamlining
all the rules into ten points, Thring's step - although initially intended
only for use at Uppingham - represented a major development in
making football an easily transferable, ubiquitously applicable game. A
lively reaction and revision process followed during which the 14 points
of the Cambridge University Rules of 1863 originated. On Monday,
26 October 1863 the Football Association (FA) was founded at the
Freemason's Tavern on Great Queen Street in London and proceeded
to decree football's 13 Haws'?2 These 'laws' - in notable contrast to
the earlier 'rules' - govern the world's most popular sport to this day
virtually unchanged. Rule 9 ('No player shall run with the ball') and Rule
10 ('Neither tripping or hacking shall be allowed, and no player shall use
his hands to hold or push his adversary') especially dismayed the still
numerous supporters of the running game. The cleavage between these
two increasingly different versions of football became so pronounced
during the 1860s that by 1871 the supporters of the running game
formed their own association. Entitled the Rugby Union, it completely
finalized rugby's secession from Association Football and initiated the
establishment of the running game as an independent sport sui generis.
In the same year the FA, which to this day is the sole organizing body
of English soccer, began organizing its first comprehensive tournament
including all English clubs and culminating in a final match for the FA
Cup between the last two teams remaining in the tournament. Held in
London every year since 1872, the Cup Final still represents the high
point of the English soccer season and draws much attention on the
Continent as well, owing to the tremendous respect accorded there to

the oldest soccer tournament in the motherland of this sport. Until 1882,
the Cup Final was invariably played between two strictly amateur clubs
from England's south. Moreover, most of the players were 'gentlemen'
who had attended one of the public schools, Oxbridge, or both. This
was to change for good in 1882 when a semi-professional team from
England's north, Blackburn Rovers, played the Old Etonians for the
Cup.33 Won by the southern gentlemen for the last time, the Cup moved
northward in 1883 (won by another Blackburn team, the Olympic), and
was regained only once by a London club during the next 32 years. This
hegemony of the North and the Midlands in English football signalled the
demise of the exclusive 'gentlemen's era' in soccer and the concomitant

arrival of the game's professionalization and commercialization - in
short, democratization.
'Among the Blackburn players were three weavers, a spinner, a dental
assistant, a plumber, a cotton operative and an iron foundry worker.'34
Throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s, soccer rapidly developed
into a working-class sport. Churches in particular, seeing soccer as an
ideal vehicle to combat urban problems, spawned clubs all over the
country. Followed by schools, neighbourhood associations and factories,
the game soon developed into Great Britain's most ubiquitous sport,
having by that time also proliferated into the non-English parts of the
British Isles. Lastly, some teams developed as de facto 'winter branches'
of already existing cricket clubs, thereby extending the sport season for
their members to a year-round involvement. This rapid proliferation
of soccer in little more than a decade was intimately related to the
nature of the game itself. Priding itself as 'the simplest game', soccer's
rules were indeed few, clear and easily communicable to players and
spectators alike. In terms of equipment, all that was needed was a ball
and a relatively flat surface. Everything else - goal posts, nets, lines
demarcating the field and special areas on it, boots and uniforms -
was (and in certain ways still is) not absolutely essential for a soccer
match. Perhaps the most important 'democratizing' factor was the early
awareness that average physical attributes sufficed not only to be an
adequate soccer player but also a star. Just as the player(s).with the best
physical attributes could not control the flow and outcome of the game,
nor could the most intelligent, wily or wealthy. Indeed, it soon became
evident that successful soccer always had to be a team effort in which
no one individual could ever exert sufficient control to decide a game
completely by himself. With the development of the passing game in the
1880s, soccer's collectivist identity became irreversibly established.35
By the mid-1880s, many factors contributed to the rapid rise of
professionalism and the concomitant disappearance of amateurism in
British soccer: regular newspaper coverage of the games; increased
intercity matches among clubs; expanded and modernized football
grounds, surrounded by viewing areas for a growing number of fans
who paid admission fees; and the newly introduced work-free Saturday
afternoons. This shift from amateurism to professionalism entailed a

sociological change in the class background of soccer players as well as
fans. As to the former, a poor working-class youth from some Midland
industrial slum would clearly seize every opportunity to make a better
living by being paid for what essentially still remained his hobby. As
to the latter, a parallel 'downward' shift in class composition occurred
during the 1880s, which led to a crowding out of the English gentlemen
by the working class from both the playing and viewing dimensions of
the soccer world. Walvin claims that during this time quite a few English
soccer fans and players with bourgeois backgrounds snubbed soccer as
an increasingly professional and 'vulgar' sport to pursue their ambitions
as amateur sportsmen in other games, such as rugby.36

With the establishment of the English Football League in 1888,
followed by a second division in 1892, the present structure of English
professional soccer was established in its essential contours. This format
of league play shaped the game of soccer in every country where
it became the central sport. The need to maximize profits on the
increasingly expensive investments which these professional clubs began
to represent, was met neither by 'friendly' matches on an irregular basis
nor by the potentially single involvement in the FA Cup tournament.
Therefore the Football League developed. Its twelve original members
*- all from England's north and the Midlands - would compete for the
League championship by playing a continuous round-robin tournament
in which each team would play every other team twice, once 'at home'
and once 'away'. By the early 1890s, English football - as the world has
come to know it - was fully established in Great Britain. It was poised to
conquer the world, a hitherto unparalleled feat in sports history.
Soccer enjoyed a 'national' (class-transcendent) appeal in Britain by
the late nineteenth century in spite of its professionalized 'vulgarization'
during the 1880s and 1890s. This fact, together with the ubiquity
and prominence of British presence throughout the world during this
period, helps to explain the exportability of soccer. It is telling that
the sport was introduced to many countries by an eclectic group of
people: visiting English sailors (France, Spain, Brazil); British embassy
personnel (Sweden); British workers engaged in local projects (Russia,
Rumania, Poland, Uruguay); local schoolboys bringing the game back
with them following the completion of their education in England
(Holland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Portugal); and members of local English
clubs which expanded their sport activities from cricket and riding to
soccer (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, Argentina). Aided by
a proliferation of coaches and other officials imported from England
and Scotland, and by frequent 'missionary' visits from English clubs
who would tour the respective country playing exhibition matches
against its newly founded teams, soccer quickly became the most
dominant team sport on the European continent and in Latin America
by the eve of the First World War.37 Developments in the United
States, conversely, proved a good deal less fortuitous for soccer.
In America, soccer remained closely associated with immigrants,

a stigma which proved fatal to its potential of becoming a popular
team sport in the new world. The game's various precursors were
played in the colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with
documentation of a game as early as 1609 in Virginia.38 As in England,
football was played on the streets and in open squares, often leading to
riot-like disturbances which, in turn, led the authorities to forbid the
game on a number of occasions. Again similar to England, the game did
not attain any social respectability until the first half of the nineteenth
century, when the nation's top colleges - led by Harvard, Yale, Princeton
and Columbia - started playing various versions of football on an
intramural basis. Outlawed periodically by university administrators

because of its raucous nature and accompanying roughness both on
and off the field, the game did not become organized until the 1860s.
Early in this decade, students and alumni from a number of elite
Boston secondary schools united to form the Oneida Football Club
which remained undefeated - and even unscored against - between
1862 and 1865, lending the 'Boston Game' exceptional prominence
in America's still small, diverse football world.39 Allowing the use of
hands and feet, the Boston Game soon became the most popular sport
across the Charles River in Cambridge, home of Harvard University.
Retrospectively, this synthesis may have proved an early harbinger for
soccer's failure to become a major popular sport at American colleges,
and subsequently in American society as a whole.
By the end of the decade, the game had achieved sufficient inter-
collegiate uniformity to allow for the playing of the first college football
game in American history, which was held on Saturday, 6 November
1869 in New Brunswick between Rutgers and Princeton. This event can
be classified both as the first football as well as the first soccer game
in modern American history, since the game was played according to
rules which were somewhere between those of Association and Rugby
Football.40 Columbia joined the original two in 1870 and by 1872 the
group included Rutgers, Princeton, Yale and Stevens. These universities
played an Association-type kicking game. Even though local differences
in rules persisted, all participants agreed that the ball could.not be picked
up with the hands, caught, thrown or carried. Soccer in its rudimentary
form seemed to have assumed an important foothold among leading
American colleges. It failed to do so, however, at the country's oldest
and most prestigious institution of higher learning: Harvard persistently
opposed the kicking game, clinging tenaciously to its Boston Game
which it had perfected in the interim.41 When the other universities
uniformly adopted Association rules in 1873, they desisted from calling
themselves a league because of Harvard's absence. Indeed, Harvard's
unique prestige ultimately reversed the kicking game's apparent victory
among American college students of the early 1870s and led to the
running game's complete and ultimate triumph by 1877. In search of
an opponent, Harvard turned north of the border to McGill University
which played rugby at the time. The two universities agreed to play two
matches in 1874, the first according to the rules of Harvard's Boston
Game, the second following McGill's rugby rules. As expected, Harvard
won the first encounter easily and was poised to lose the rematch to
McGill. Surprisingly, the Harvard team played McGill to a goalless
draw.42 More important than this unexpected and respectable result for
soccer's future, was the Harvard team's unanimous enthusiasm for the
game of rugby which the players henceforth embraced wholeheartedly.
The Boston Game, having been a hybrid between rugby and soccer and
thus still including more kicking and foot-involved ball contact than
rugby, was dismissed as sleepy and boring. In its stead, the running
game developed in its then purest form as Harvard's unchallenged team

sport.43 Barely a year later, in 1875, Yale's well-established rivalry with
Harvard proved stronger than its membership in a loose association
with Columbia, Princeton and a few other institutions then playing
the kicking game. In that year the first 'Game' between Yale and
Harvard was played, with Harvard winning easily in a game Yale
had never played until then. That year Yale still fulfilled its 'soccer
obligations' to Columbia and Wesleyan, but by 1876 Yale had dropped
soccer and replaced it with rugby. The other universities followed, with
Princeton succumbing last in 1877. Rugby's triumph over soccer at
American colleges was so thorough that soccer did not reappear on
American campuses on an intercollegiate level until 1902. By that time
American Football - rugby's successor in the new world - had gained an
unshakable prominence in American college life.44 Stigmatized as slow,
boring and devoid of action because of the relative paucity of goals
compared with any of the 'big three' American sports, soccer has, since
its re-introduction as a varsity sport, languished in the giant shadows cast
on it by football and later basketball. At American universities, as in
American society, soccer has remained largely the domain of foreigners
and recent immigrants, both as players and spectators. Let us now look
at the developments of football and baseball respectively, so that we
may better understand what occupied the American 'sport space' upon
soccer's arrival on these shores and how this 'preoccupation' led to the
crowding out of the world's most popular sport. Having just discussed
the origins of American football in the context of soccer's failure in the
United States, we now examine football before turning to baseball.
'Crowding out from above': The case of American football

What Harvard had started by sticking to the running game, Yale
completed by offering football its charismatic founding father and
most influential modernizer. Indeed, Parke Davis, 'the Plutarch of
early college football', explicitly equated Walter Camp of Yale with
George Washington by stating that 'what Washington was to his
country, Camp was to American football - the friend, the founder,
and the father'.45 Attaining legendary fame as a player and reformer
during the game's most formative years, Camp 'was said to have been the
model for the fictional character "Frank Merriwell of Yale" ', America's
first and greatest sports hero on whom a whole generation of American
boys was weaned after 1896.46
Camp's major and lasting contribution was to transform football from a
quasi-aristocratic English game to a quintessentially bourgeois American
activity of the twentieth century. Astute observers of American sports
and culture such as David Riesman and Michael Oriard have drawn
explicit parallels between Walter Camp and Frederick Winslow Taylor.47
Simultaneously, though presumably independently of each other, both
were engaged in the modernization, regularization and systematization
of their respective fields - football and factory production - which were

undergoing far-reaching changes of bourgeoisification (and American-
ization) at the turn of the century. Walter Camp could be described
as the leading figure in the 'Taylorization' of a sport which, following
the successful conclusion of this process, clearly emerged as American
football.
Under Camp's leadership, rugby's ad hoc and free-for-all scramble
for the ball, the unpredictable English 'scrum', became the clearly
delineated American 'scrimmage', in which the offensive and defensive
teams confronted each other. Confusion and ambiguity still continued,
however, with both sides vying for the ball simultaneously at the
beginning of each play, often tying up the ball and thereby impeding
the commencement of the game. Therefore further clarification was
added by awarding what was to become the 'center snap' to the offensive
team. Undisputed possession of the ball was thus established. Camp and
his reformers 'Taylorized' the field by drawing clear lines on it, making
a team's progress, movement and location perfectly measurable at any
time of the game. The gridiron - in and of itself a Taylorist concept - set
the stage for football's subsequent and lasting domination by statistics
(yards per carry; total passing yardage; total running yardage; etc.).
In order to regulate and encourage movement on the gridiron, and to
counter the 'block game' in which each team would keep the ball for
'its' half of the game, Camp introduced a rule requiring a team to make
fivi- yards in three downs, extended to ten yards in four downs in 1912.48
Camp reduced the number of players per team from 15 to 11 and each
player was assigned a specific position in which he was expected to excel
and specialize. He devised the arrangement which became standard -
seven linemen, a quarterback, two halfbacks, and a fullback. As part of
his 'scientization' of football in which game plans, strategy, and tactics
assumed an increasingly central role, Camp also introduced a rule which
permitted tackling as low as the knees. This manoeuvre to bring a man
down was more efficient, though also more brutal, than the earlier
method of wrestling an opponent to the ground. The dangerous 'wedge'
appeared, perfected by Harvard to become the more devastating 'flying
wedge', only to be countered by Camp's Yale teams with the 'shoving
wedge'. Play became violent, routinely resulting in major injuries and
frequent deaths. Finally President Theodore Roosevelt, having seen the

photo of a mangled Swarthmore player in the newspaper following a
particularly savage encounter between Swarthmore and Pennsylvania
in 1905, personally demanded that the game be reformed to eliminate
such obvious brutality. Only thereafter did Camp and others institute
changes which eliminated overt and wilful maiming without, however,
compromising the roughness of the game which was deemed essential
by virtually every educator and opinion leader in the country. President
Roosevelt's involvement led to the establishment of the Intercollegiate
Athletic Association in December 1905, headed by Captain Palmer
Pierce of West Point. It was renamed the National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) in 1910.49 With Walter Camp in charge of the

American Football Rules Committee, the last substantial rule changes
were undertaken yielding a game by the eve of the First World War which
has basically remained intact on both the collegiate and the professional
levels to this day. One of the most important reforms was the forward
pass which established the 'aerial attack' as yet another weapon in a
team's offensive strategy. This reform fostered the honing of finesse and
precision at the expense of sheer physical force, thus further contributing
to what had already become a highly 'Taylorized' sport.
Baseball had become the sport of the lower classes, 'enjoying', in
Michael Oriard's words, the social prestige of acting or gambling.
Football developed into the most popular sport among America's middle
class by the turn of the century when soccer made its triumphant
conquest of the European continent and Latin America.50 Initially
dominant only in the elite institutions of the East Coast, football rapidly
spread westward, establishing itself at places such as the University of
Chicago (coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg); Oberlin,
Michigan and Notre Dame in the Midwest, Stanford and the University
of California at Berkeley on the West Coast. The 1920s witnessed the
proliferation of college football in the South and the Southwest, with
both regions producing major powers by the 1930s.
That football remained the virtual prerogative of collegiate America,
underscored the middle-class nature of football's first four decades.'
Football games on Saturday afternoons in the fall, especially around
Thanksgiving, became essential ingredients of American bourgeois
culture. College football attained such a dominant position in American
middle-class culture that it succeeded in crowding out the professional
game, as well as soccer, until the founding of the National Football
League in 1920, and arguably well into the post-second World War
era. Professionalism did not however remain excluded from the world
of American football. One aspect of the mens sana in corpore sano
ideology of the American bourgeoisie was the perception of football as
a bastion of amateurism, though in fact professionalization of the college
game had clearly set in by the turn of the century. Gate receipts provided
welcome revenue even to the wealthiest universities such as Yale, where
in 1903 'income from football equaled the combined budgets of the
law, divinity, and medical schools'.51 Yale was the first university to
professionalize its coaching staff, and its rivals, initially protesting
against this vulgar betrayal of amateur ideals, proceeded to hire their
own professional coaches. Staying competitive was critical for winning,
which had graduated from being everything to being the only thing.
The explicitly professional football game originated in the cultural
peripheries of America's steel and coal regions, such as Pittsburgh and
the surrounding areas of Allegheny County. Spreading later to the
industrial regions of Ohio, professional clubs were established in towns
such as Akron and Canton (the location of the Professional Football Hall
of Fame). Most teams were owned by wealthy businessmen who liked
the game, wanted to provide some entertainment to the local population

(which often included a disproportionately large number of their own
employees) and make some money in the process. Initially, most players
were local working-class members with an occasional college graduate
hired as the special star, as was the case with the legendary William
Walter (Pudge) Heffelfinger, Amos Alonzo Stagg's teammate at Yale.
With the gradual growth of the professional game and its departure
from America's hinterlands into the country's cultural centres though,
college graduates began to furnish the majority of the players. A
situation developed where American universities served as professional
football's farm system, a function which they still perform. American
higher education - an essential institution of American bourgeois life
- continues its deep involvement with football true to its legacy as the
cradle and inventor of this quintessentially American sport.52
All those involved in football (players, fans, coaches and team owners)
came to view the game not only as profoundly American but also
as fundamentally modern, contrasting it favourably with that other
American sport - baseball. This led to the erroneous but still powerful
myth which continues to glorify baseball as a rural game. Baseball, having
developed into America's 'pastime' populated by the country's masses,
apparently lacked the vigour and drive of modernity associated with
football's 'scientific' aura. Rather than cultivating the leisurely image
of a 'pastime', football prided itself on replicating the tough, strategic,
determined and ultimately victorious side of American life. Football
prominently featured all the values central to bourgeois capitalism in
the United States: British elite origins to provide the necessary historical
legitimacy coupled with American 'robust manliness' to distinguish it
clearly from its 'soft', disorganized, Victorian predecessor;53 individual
effort combined with intricate teamwork; hierarchical control in tandem
with corporate co-operation; and equality of opportunity and access
accompanied by the survival of the fittest.54
Just like American capitalism, football was made bearable by the 'rules
of the game'. In notable contrast to both soccer and rugby, American
football - like baseball - developed a mass of intricate rules which served
as a lingua franca for the sport in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society
dominated by bourgeois values of individualism rather than the noblesse
oblige collectivism of the British aristocratized sports world. Whereas a

common culture among players - and between players and spectators -
permitted British sports to develop with a minimal system of policing,
a similar self-regulating approach was impossible in a country with a
constant influx of new immigrants, who had had the importance of being
number one impressed upon them on arrival. In addition to providing
a'common ground of understanding, rules also helped systematize and
quantify American sports. The performance of a team, as well as of the
individual, could be more 'objectively' measured than in the murky,
collectivist British team sports. One could thus tie remuneration,
advancement or demotion to a player's 'numbers', analogous to the
reward system in a Taylorized form of industrial production. The

existence of written - as opposed to culturally internalized - rules also
fostered an atmosphere in which a premium was attached to devising
'trick plays', designed to mislead the opponent by staying just within the
rules or indeed by violating them outright in the hope that the policing
authorities would not notice. 'Trick plays', basically unknown to soccer,
rugby and cricket, became woven into the fabric of American football
and baseball. Lastly, as in politics, clearly stated, written and universal
rules had an equalizing effect on American football by enhancing its
attraction to otherwise disparate social groups. Rules thereby enhanced
participation and contributed to the popularization - if perhaps less to
the democratization - of this sport. It is now time to turn to America's
earliest popular sport which helped 'crowd out soccer from below'.
Crowding out from below: The case of baseball

Purportedly, Jacques Barzun once said, 'Whoever wants to know the
heart and mind of America had better learn baseball'. Until the 1950s,
baseball was far and away America's most popular sport. From the very
beginning of its development, baseball's successful proliferation among
America's masses depended on its identity as 'American'. Football never
denied its British origins and indeed proudly pointed to William Webb
Ellis' alleged run at Rugby in 1823 as the inception of the game. In
contrast, baseball went to great length to deny any relationship to the
British game of rounders, all the while stressing the truly 'Americanness'
of the game's every facet. In this context, the still widely held myth of
Abner Doubleday having originated the game in Cooperstown, New
York, in 1839 was created. To the enthusiastic cries of 'No rounders!',
a group of 300 prominent baseball enthusiasts, including Mark Twain
and Chauncey M. Depew, gathered at Delmonico's in New York City
in 1889 to hear the fourth president of the National League, Abraham
G. Mills, declare that 'patriotism and research' had established beyond
any doubt the American origin of baseball.55 The creation of the Abner
Doubleday myth was to squelch forever the British claim that baseball
was a descendant of rounders. Baseball's 'devotees found it increasingly
difficult to swallow the idea that their favourite pastime was of foreign
origin. Pride and patriotism required that the game be native, unsullied
by English ancestry'.56 Intense American nativism, apparent already
during baseball's 'take-off period' in the 1850s, ensured baseball's
eventual success as 'the American National Game'. Ties to rounders
were consciously denied and baseball was systematically defined as 'anti-
cricket': faster, more action-packed, tougher, requiring more ingenuity
and individual initiative. In short, baseball was better suited to and more
accurately reflected life in the 'New World'.
The following analysis will focus on the evolution of baseball as a game
and as a national institution in a curious temporal parallel to soccer's
development in England. Baseball's tempestuous era-reflecting central
conflicts in American society of the late nineteenth century - came to a

more or less accepted conclusion by 1903, at the exact time of soccer's
conquest of the world. Having developed into America's mass sport and
national pastime between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the
century, baseball had successfully ensconced itself in America's 'sport
space'. Thus little room remained for soccer to develop on the popular
level, as it did first in Great Britain, then on the European Continent
and in Latin America, and eventually in the rest of the world.
Baseball's precursors stretch back to America's colonial period when
an array of games with names such as 'town-ball' and 'round-ball' were
played on village greens primarily in New England and New York.
Completely regional in character - as attested to by such names as the
'Massachusetts Game', 'New England Game' and 'New York Game'
- virtually all of baseball's forerunners hailed from the British game
of rounders in which a batter would 'round' the bases - or 'goals' -
after having 'struck' the ball which was thrown to him by a 'bowler'
belonging to the opposite team. In an interesting and lasting parallel
to soccer, baseball success was in part based on the fact that virtually
no equipment or special physical attributes were necessary to enjoy or
excel at the game. Like soccer, baseball thus enjoyed 'democratic access'
in that the game was accessible to all and no exotic equipment or locale
was required.57 Any elongated bat-like object, be it a broomstick, paddle
or rifle, served adequately for hitting the ball. Any vaguely round object
- regardless of exact size and consistency - could serve as a ball. Versions
of this game - involving hitting and throwing a ball and running 'the
bases' - proliferated in the northeast of the United States in the 1830s
and 1840s.
Like football (as yet undifferentiated into Association and Rugby),
the initial and all-important codification of baseball occurred in the
quasi-aristocratic milieu of educated gentlemen. In 1845 a group of 40
bourgeois male New Yorkers (professional men, merchants, white-collar
workers and several 'gentlemen') joined together in forming the New
York Knickerbockers, the world's first organized baseball team.58 Under
the leadership of Alexander Cartwright, the Knickerbockers created the
first written rules of baseball. Despite constant changes since, these rules
have provided the main contours of the game to this day: the four-base
diamond; 90-foot base paths; three out, all out; batting in rotation;
throwing out runners or touching them; nine-man teams with each
player covering a definite position; and the location of the pitcher's box
in relation to the diamond as a whole to mention but the most important
ones.59 Cartwright and his reformers also specified the weight of the ball
as well as the circumference of the bat in order to provide uniformity
for competition. The Knickerbockers played their first game at Elysian
Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey against the New York Base Ball Club
on 19 June 1846 - the same year that J.C. Thring, one of soccer's major
codifiers, organized the first football team at Cambridge. The baseball
game lasted only four innings, 'because by that time the New York Club
had scored the 21 'aces' [runs] necessary to win under the rules'. Also
an elaborate social affair, the ensuing dinner assumed almost equal
importance to the contest on the field. This tradition continued until the
end of the next decade as other teams joined the Knickerbockers in New
York (notably the Gothams, Eagles and Empires) as well as in Brooklyn
(The Excelsiors, Putnams, Eckfords and Atlantics) and competed in a
series of regular games held on an inter- as well as intra-city basis. In 1858
a team of Manhattan all-stars first played their Brooklyn counterparts
and thereby inaugurated a rivalry which was to last exactly 100 years.
Throughout the 1850s, baseball caught the fancy of people in all
walks of life leading to a proliferation of clubs organized largely along
occupational lines. Policemen, barkeepers, schoolteachers, doctors,
lawyers and even clergymen had their own teams. This rapid 'downward'
dissemination led to baseball's development first as 'New York's game',
then the 'Northeast's game' and ultimately 'America's game' following
the conclusion of the Civil War. Since baseball was most popular and
its rules most codified in New York, what was known as the 'New
York game' became nationally accepted by 1860. As with football in
England at that time, the increased facility and expansion of railway
travel fostered intercity contests. Moreover, the growing availability of
newspapers, in which the first regular sports pages appeared, also helped
the game's popularity during a critical formative period.
A fundamental transformation of the game accompanied this geo-
graphic and social expansion. Though still dominated by amateurs,
competition became keener. Winning, which had been accorded only
incidental status during baseball's 'gentlemen era', developed into the
game's raison d'etre. Gone was the view which allowed each batter
to 'have his hit'. The central aspect of modern baseball developed,
which dictated a fundamentally and structurally antagonistic relationship
between the pitcher and the batter. The pitcher was no longer to 'serve'
the batter a 'hittable' ball, but in fact do just the opposite. By trying
to make it as difficult as possible for the batter to hit the ball, pitchers
developed fastballs, curves, sliders and various breaking pitches to
confuse, mislead and basically trick the batter whose repeated failure
to 'strike' the ball would lead to his forfeiting his role as a batter. To keep
pitchers from throwing balls out of the batters' reach, the system of 'balls'
was invented whereby the batter was allowed to advance to first base in
case the pitcher exceeded his permitted allotment of throwing 'faulty'
balls. Baseball's anti-English, anti-cricket self-identification increased
with the game's gradual distancing from its amateur roots. This nativist
strain was also evident in certain rule changes such as the elimination
of making an 'out' by catching a batter's hit on one bounce, which
was associated with the more serene, slower and gentlemanly cricket.
'Surely, what an Englishman can do, an American is as capable of
improving upon', boasted a sporting paper60 and thus this 'archaic'
rule was relegated to baseball's 'muffins', as amateurs became known
in the days of the game's increased professionalization. Gate receipts
developed into an important source of revenue for the clubs, leading

to baseball's 'enclosure movement'. Fences provided a clear separation
between 'ball parks' and the outside world. They also helped separate
spectators from players, providing a more orderly spatial arrangement
for a rather unruly crowd. Last, but certainly not least, these 'enclosures'
eventually led to the institutionalization of the 'home run', one of
baseball's most exciting events.
With victory assuming paramount importance, professionalism rapidly
displaced amateurism during the post-Civil War era. While every team
had its share of 'rounders' (baseball's equivalent to football's 'ringers')
who 'revolved' from one team to the next following the most lucrative
offer with reckless abandon of any team loyalty or moral constraints,
in 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings appeared as the first official
all-professional team in baseball, indeed in any modern sport. Two
years later, the first professional league, the National Association of
Professional Base Ball Players, was established. Lasting only four years
and representing 10 teams, this league was dominated by the Red
Stockings who had moved from Cincinnati to Boston. Best described
as the most unregulated capitalist phase of baseball, the charis-
matic entrepreneur, best represented by Albert Goodwill Spalding,
the pitching star of the Boston Red Stockings, characterized this
early era. Spalding, typical of entrepreneurs in America's burgeoning
bourgeois society, was a missionary, modernizer and moneymaker all
rolled into one. By further standardizing the game's equipment (balls,
bats, uniforms) Spalding continued to develop the modern game of
baseball while simultaneously helping his sporting goods business to
become a flourishing enterprise. His missionary zeal to spread baseball
- and also the wares of his company - extended beyond the confines
of the United States. Having returned from a triumphant baseball
tour of Canada, Spalding 'conceived the idea in 1873 of taking a
baseball team over to England to demonstrate what the Americans
had cooked up out of rounders crossed with cricket'.61 His conviction
that the superior American game would inevitably catch on with the
English during a number of exhibition matches played in 1874 proved
utterly illusory. Baseball did not excite the British, who found it dull
and hardly a worthy departure from the children's game of rounders.
Conveying the unbound optimism of that special breed of American

entrepreneur, Spalding remained undeterred by his failed mission of
1874 and embarked on a second, even more ambitious, journey in
1888/89 to bring baseball to the rest of the world. He took an all-star
team called 'All Americans' to Hawaii, Australia, Egypt, Italy, France
and England. The results were even more embarrassing for baseball
than during the first trip. Apart from in Australia where the game
met with a polite but unenthusiastic reception, baseball was greeted
with a mixture of indifference, derision and even hostility on the team's
other stops. Italian and French spectators found the game dull and
uninspiring. The British still dismissed it as the American version of
rounders, though some particularly benevolent critics conceded that

baseball was faster and more scientific.62 Not until the mid-1920s did
baseball's prophets once again embark on a proselytizing mission which -
with the exception of attaining positive results in Japan - failed abysmally
once again. Three explanations seem plausible for baseball's failure to
capture the imagination of sports fans outside the United States and its
immediate geographic orbit. First, its 'Americanness' not only rendered
it incomprehensible outside its cultural context, but also lent it a real
- albeit unjustified - aura of immaturity and vulgarity, particularly in
British eyes. Second, the 1888/89 trip occurred at a time when these
countries were still insufficiently bourgeoisified to embrace a sport on a
mass level. This had already happened with baseball in the United States
and soccer in Great Britain, but these other countries were not yet ready
for it. Third, the 1920s expedition failed because soccer was already well
ensconced as the premier mass sport in the world, and 'crowded out'
any serious competition. The one notable exception, where the baseball
mission actually proved rather successful, was Japan.
Returning to baseball's unregulated capitalist phase of the early 1870s,
this was an era of open gambling and drinking among both spectators
and players before, during and after games. Players, as well as umpires,
accepted bribes to 'fix' games in full view of the public. The generally
anarchic atmosphere was heightened by the common practice of 'raiding'
players. A club had been 'raided' if some of its top players, whom
it had barely signed a few weeks before, disappeared from its roster
only to show up in a rival team's uniform the next day. By the mid
1870s everyone involved saw that baseball was in dire need of some
sort of streamlining. Begun in 1876, this process lasted until 1903
when the present organizational form of major league baseball was
established.
Led by Spalding, baseball's 'domestication' began with the founding
of the National League in 1876, the world's oldest still functioning
professional sports league, predating the English Football League by
twelve years. The National League was limited to eight clubs. Each
was guaranteed 'territorial rights' by being the sole representative
of a city which had at least 75,000 inhabitants. In addition to this
important monopolistic market position, clubs agreed to refrain from
'raiding' each other's players by introducing the so-called 'reserve

clause'. This cartel-like agreement, which lasted nearly a century,
gave each club complete, quasi-feudal control over its players by
giving it a continuing option to rehire them each year and thus
prevent them from selling their labour to the highest bidder in the
free market.63 Players thus became a team's property, a serf-like
arrangement common to other professional sports with mass appeal,
such as soccer.
With baseball having become America's most popular form of enter-
tainment by the early 1880s, other entrepreneurs saw the sport as
an excellent venue to make money. Therefore the rival American
Association developed in 1882, its eight teams charging lower admissions

than their counterparts in the National League and playing on Sundays.64
Periodic trade wars, benefiting fans and players, ensued between the
two rival leagues. The result was the eventual demise of the American
Association in 1891 and the absorption of four of its teams by the
National League, thereafter comprised of twelve clubs.
In addition to trade wars, another occasional occurrence in the
baseball of the late nineteenth century further strengthens our analogy
with feudalism. Just as there were numerous, destructive, peasant
revolts which brought about few tangible gains for the peasants
in the Middle Ages, so baseball players conducted periodic costly
'wars' against the owners, leading only to minor attainments for
the players' cause. Efforts to unionize were invariably defeated and
the owner-imposed 'reserve clause' successfully stymied the players'
attempts to use their market power to gain better conditions and,
more importantly, to enhance their control over their own existence
in baseball.
After a trade war at the turn of the century, the National League,
weakened by internal strife and the jettisoning of four of its clubs,
entered into a peace agreement with the newly formed American
League forming the pinnacle of what became henceforth the cartel of
'Organized Baseball'. The peace agreement between the two leagues
led to the establishment of the World Series65 and an arrangement in
which the 16 major league teams (eight in each league) represented ten
cities. This format lasted for 50 years until the Boston Braves of the
National League transferred to Milwaukee, thereby sparking a period
of relocation and the establishment of new franchises which continued
until the 1970s. Following another organizational restructuring in the
wake of the 1919 'Black Sox' World Series scandal, 'Organized Baseball'
was led by a single commissioner beginning in 1920. The game entered
its golden era which not even the Second World War could interrupt.
With the gradual proliferation of radio broadcasting during the 1920s,
the establishment of the 'Yankee dynasty' and the introduction of
night games in 1935, baseball achieved an unchallenged hegemony
in American sports. Not until professional football's meteoric rise
in the 1960s was that hegemony challenged. Baseball's overwhelming
popularity with the American masses proved sufficient to crowd out

soccer from below in the United States.
Conclusion
This article has argued that the particular nature of America's de-
velopment as 'the first new nation' contributed considerably to the
crowding out of soccer as one of this country's major spectator
sports. Specifically, it is our contention that some of the most salient
social and historical constellations which led to the absence of a large
working-class party in the United States, making it the world's only
advanced industrial country to suffer from this considerable deficit in

the conduct of its politics, also helped to exclude the United States
from the world's most popular mass sport. It was above all America's
early and comprehensive bourgeoisification - as myth and reality -
which created both 'exceptionalisms', the legacies of which remain to
this day.
Just as the literature on why there is no socialism in America mainly
focuses on the period between the Civil War and the First World War,
so too does much of this article's empirical material concentrate on the
pre-1914 era. As such, any serious concern with either - or both - of
the two 'exceptionalisms' demands by necessity a historical approach
since it was at a certain era of American development that the
overall stage was set. The general contours of this stage have by
and large remained intact. Thus, a thorough historical exploration
of topics such as the two American 'exceptionalisms' not only helps
us understand their origins but also their continued presence in our
world.
This, of course, is not to say that an understanding of the pre-First
World War situation remains sufficient as an explanation for the
failure of socialism and/or soccer in contemporary America. Surely
one would have to spend some time analysing the phenomena of
Stalinism and McCarthyism - to mention perhaps the most obvious
cases - for a proper analysis of the continued absence of a large,
mass-based, left-leaning party in the United States of the 1980s.
Similarly, soccer's marginal existence as a major spectator sport in
contemporary America probably has more to do with its inability to
land a long-term television contract with one of the major networks
than with it being crowded out by baseball from below and football
from above before the turn of the century. Yet, the very fact
that none of the networks has ever been willing to extend such
a contract harks back to an era when public tastes in mass sports
were formed all over the world and bestowed with a remarkable
endurance. In that, even the United States cannot claim to be an
exception.
Boston University
NOTES
I should like to thank Michael Oriard for his generosity in letting me see his work in
progress and sharing his extensive knowledge with me. Special thanks once again to
Karen Donfried for her excellent and cheerful assistance in researching this paper. A
shortened version of this paper appeared in Praxis International, Vol.8, No.2, July 1988,
pp.125-50.
1. I should like to draw the reader's attention in this context to Paul Hoch's very useful
term of 'sexual apartheid' denoting the fact that sports often transcend the most rigid
lines of demarcation (be they class, status, ethnicity or religion) among men only to
exclude women almost completely. It is interesting to note that this phenomenon of
'sexual apartheid' is virtually ubiquitous all over the world. See Paul Hoch, Rip off
the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite (New York, 1972),
pp.147-66.
2. While it is very difficult to obtain reliable data on how many people watched the World
Cups of 1978,1982 and 1986 respectively, there can be little doubt that these events
have hitherto attracted more television viewers than anything else in human history.
More than 2 billion people watched the World Cup final in 1978 with the figures being
3 billion and 3.S billion for the same event in 1982 and 1986 respectively. Over 5 billion
people watched the entire tournament in 1982 and 8 billion followed it four years later.
(All these figures were obtained from the Secretariat of the Fe'de'ration Internationale
de Football Association (FIFA) in Zurich.) In substantiating her point that soccer is
far and away the world's most popular spectator sport, Janet Lever in her excellent
study on soccer in Brazil states the following about the final game of the 1978 World
Cup: 'In other words, nearly half the world's people shared a single event. [Emphasis
in the original]... To put this figure in perspective, the combined audience for two
weeks of Olympic events was one billion people in 1976.' See Janet Lever, Soccer
Madness (Chicago, 1983), p.20.
3. Here are some figures to place the margjnality of this event on American television in
some perspective. The Nielsen ratings for the three World Cup finals thus far televised
by one of the major American networks are:
Year of final Network Rating Share
1966 NBC 4.5% 21%
1982 ABC 6.6% 22%
1986 NBC 4.1% 13%
If one looks at the NBC data for the six games of the 1986 tournament which the
network televised in addition to the final, the figures become even more revealing.
The opening game with all the usual eyecatching and colourful ceremonies attained
a 2.5 per cent rating and a 9 per cent share. The rest broke down as follows:
Date Rating Share
June 1 (Sunday afternoon) 1.6% 5%
June 21 (Saturday afternoon) 3.4% 11%
It should be added that cui one ot these games included at least one of international
soccer's major powerhouses such as Italy Brazil, Argentina, France, Spain, Germany
or Britain. I also looked at the twelve games televised by the sports channel ESPN.
As expected, the numbers were far inferior to NBC's. Thus, only once - on 3 June -
did the rating percentage exceed 1 with the share never attaining 2 per cent.
To put all of this into perspective, I obtained the television figures for recent
major events in American sports: Superbowl 1986; World Series 1985, NCAA
basketball final 1986 and NBA championship series 1986. They are as follows:
Event Network Rating Share

Superbowl 1986 NBC 48.3% 70%
World Series 1985 ABC 25.3% 39% (averaged over 7 games)
NCAA basketball final 1986 CBS 20.7% 31%
NBA championship series '86 CBS 14.1% 31.1% (averaged over 6 games)
The Nielsen system's two figures stand for the percentage of all TV house-
holds in the United States in the case of the 'rating', and for the households
that have their television sets switched on at the time of the measurement in
the case of the 'share'. It is estimated that 99 per cent of all households in
the United States have televisions, which translates into 86 million households.
In order to corroborate my hypothesis that soccer - at least as a spectacle -
continues to remain confined to immigrant subcultures in the United States,
I obtained data from the Spanish International Network (SIN) regarding its
viewership of the World Cup. While the data are not comparable with those
listed above since SIN's programs are not measured by the Nielsen company,
it nevertheless seems clear that among the 4.3 million households receiving SIN
World Cup '86 was a popular event. The opening game attained a 55 per cent
rating with the final reaching 65.6 per cent. SIN constructed a six-game aggregate
composite to measure its viewership of the World Cup which yielded some interesting
results: the highest rating composite - 77.9 per cent - was reached by male viewers
between the ages of 18 and 34 with the lowest figure for adults over 18 being
the 47.2 per cent attained by women between 25 and 54. The overall composite
for all male viewers over 18 was 67 per cent with the corresponding figure
for women being 45.7 per cent. 'Sexual apartheid' still seems to exist among
America's SIN viewers, though the excluded group seems to have participated in
surprisingly large numbers, at least as far as this event from Mexico was concerned.
4. On how the United States has from its beginning as an independent country exerted
a special, though very ambivalent, attraction on European - in this case particularly
German - intellectuals, see Andrei S. Markovits, 'On Anti-Americanism in West
Germany' in New German Critique, No.34 (Winter 1985), 3-27. America's
fascination for European intellectuals such as Tocqueville, Martineau, Bryce, Weber,
Heine among many others is very well known and superbly documented.
5. The original title of Sombart's work as published in Tubingen in 1906 by J.C.B. Mohr
(Paul Siebeck) was Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismust The
English translation, Why is there no Socialism in the United States!, was first published
by Macmillan, London, and by the International Arts and Sciences Press of White
Plains, New York, in 1976. Alas, I would argue that the title continues to remain
just as flawed in Europe as it was when Sombart published his work. By dismissing
the Soviet Union's and Eastern Europe's political economy as having little in common
with socialism and by seeing the welfare states of capitalist Western Europe also falling
considerably short of what socialism is supposed to be, I cannot help but conclude that
Sombart's title continues to convey a flawed image not only of the United States but
of all the major industrial countries in the world.
6. The literature dealing with 'American exceptionalism', or at least certain aspects of
it, is vast. Here I will list only those works which I have found particularly important
in my teaching and research over the years. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition
in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution
(New York, 1955); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
(New York, 1947); John M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Failure
of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City, 1974);
Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, 1960); idem, The First New
Nation (Garden City, 1967); idem, Agrarian Socialism (Garden City, 1968); idem,
Revolution and Counterrevolution (Garden City, 1970); the exchange between Sean
Wilentz and Michael Hanagan in International Labor and Working Class History,
No.26; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political
Development: Union, Party, and State 1875-1920 (Ithaca, 1986); and Jerome
Karabel, "The Failure of American Socialism Reconsidered' in The Socialist Register
(1979), 204-27.
7. For the most thorough account of soccer in the United States see Zander Hollander
(ed.), The American Encyclopedia of Soccer (New York, 1980).
8. As to soccer's existence in the United States, the two following quotations seem rather
revealing: 'Although various attempts have been made, soccer has obstinately refused
to take root in the United States. It has for many years been extensively played at a
minor level, particularly in Philadelphia, where there has long been a proliferation
of leagues, and in St. Louis, where it is very popular in schools' (John Arlott (ed.),
The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games (London, 1975), p.381); and 'Soccer
is a sport you play, but you don't watch or follow' [An 11-year old girl on Boston
television in the summer of 1986]. The latter item, especially is highly revealing
about soccer's recent fate in the United States. There is ample evidence that soccer
has in fact increased as a participatory amateur sport since the ignominious demise
of the North American Soccer League's major push to make the game an integral
part of major American professional sports and a lucrative spectacle comparable to
soccer's presence in the rest of the world and that of the 'Big Three' (plus hockey,
perhaps) in the United States. Research has corroborated my hypothesis that soccer
in the United States is an important participatory physical activity, especially for the
very young, while at the same time continuing its marginal existence as a general
cultural phenomenon and as a preoccupation in the male population's involvement
with spectator sports. According to data obtained from the United States Soccer
Federation, 1.2 million American youngsters under the age of 19 played soccer on
a regular basis in 1985; 20 per cent of this group was female. The youth component
of this sport becomes rather evident when one compares these figures with the 120,000
soccer players over 19, a marked drop from the previously mentioned 1.2 million. In
other words, soccer in the United States is predominantly a game for middle-class,
suburban boys and girls who then stop playing it as they grow older, never having
seen the game as more than a pleasant and 'egalitarian' form of recreation. It is
striking, however - and in notable contrast to soccer played virtually everywhere
else in the world - that the percentage of female players over the age of 19 still
remains at 18 in the United States, once again underlining the sport's 'non-sexist'
presence in this country. The game, most popular in California and Texas, continues
to grow nationally at an annual rate of 10 per cent for the under 19 group and at 5 per
cent for those over 19, with parts of the discrepancy due to the unavailability of proper
facilities for the more advanced players. Much of the continued growth in both groups
occurs on account of the increasing level of female participation in soccer.
Some interesting results about soccer's particularly 'American' existence as a
participatory and relatively gender-neutral activity also emerged in my research
on the game's presence on America's college campuses. According to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), out of its more than 900 members in 1985,
549 colleges fielded men's soccer teams with 200 colleges fielding women's. For
basketball, the figures were 757 for men and 764 for women respectively. Of American
institutions of higher learning belonging to the NCAA 507 fielded football teams, an
all-male sport at the varsity level. It is also interesting to look at soccer's growth as a
college sport during the late 1970s and early 1980s: among the c. 750 NCAA members
in 1975/76, 469 schools had football teams and 423 fielded men's soccer teams; by
1980/81 the numbers had shifted in favour of soccer, with 487 colleges playing varsity
football while 510 had men's soccer teams by then. Underlining soccer's status as a
participatory rather than a spectator sport, even on the college, let alone professional,
level (where, of course, it does not exist in the United States), are the following
figures: 36,312,022 people attended college football games at all 4-year colleges (not
just NCAA members) in the United States during 1985; for men's basketball, the
equivalent figure was 30 million for the 1985/86 season; in contrast, while no figures
for soccer are available (in and of itself a telling fact), educated guesses do not estimate
viewers' attendance at college soccer games to be above the 700,000 level during the
1985 season. A European friend of mine once aptly described soccer's predicament in
the United States: 'As long as young American children continue to collect baseball
instead of soccer cards, the game, which the rest of the world calls football, will never
emerge beyond its historically marginal status in the United States.'

9. These countries - with the notable exception of South Africa - all have Sombartian
'socialism' in the form of a large, organized labour party which, in Canada, has
always been a relatively weak third party on the national level, though often
dominant in some of that country's Western provinces. As to Australia and New
Zealand, both countries are governed by their respective labour parties at the time
of writing (summer 1986).
10. It is very interesting that few, if any, countries have like the United States succeeded in
developing three major team sports, all of which attained national significance in their
professional version. Even in the United States, however, it is somewhat erroneous
to speak of the 'Big Three' in terms of popularity as spectator sports. As some of the
following figures illustrate, it is quite clear that basketball is a distant third to football
and baseball in the attention of the American public. Tellingly, soccer completely fails
to appear in one of the surveys and is in a distant fourteenth - and last - place in the
other.
To the question 'What is your favorite sport to watch?' posed to Americans by the
Gallup Sports Audit in July 1985, the answers were as follows:
Football 26%
Baseball 21%
Basketball 10%
Tennis 4%
Golf 3%
Wrestling 3%
Hockey 3%
Boxing 2%
Gymnastics 2%
Auto racing 2%
Ice skating 2%
Touch football 2%
Other 10%
None 10%
By comparison, in the 1981 Audit, football led baseball by more than two to one: 38
per cent to 16 per cent, with basketball cited by 9 per cent. Thus, baseball seems to
be once again gaining on football with perhaps having a decent shot at reconquering
its position as Americans' favourite spectator sport which it lost to football during the
1960s.
Here are some selected national trends of the 'Big Three' between 1937-Gallup's first
Sport Audit - and 1981:
Football Baseball Basketball
1981 38% 16% 9%
1972 36% 21% 8%
1960 21% 34% 9%
1948 17% 39% 10%
1937 26% 36% 11%
As to the 1985 Audit, football has a disproportionate appeal to men, 34 per cent of
whom name it as their favourite, compared with 20 per cent of women, among whom
it is tied in appeal with baseball. It also enjoys somewhat greater popularity among
younger adults, persons who attended college, the more affluent, and southerners
as well as westerners. In the Midwest, football and baseball are statistically tied for
the lead, while in the East baseball holds a modest edge. Among blacks, football,
baseball and basketball have about the same number of partisans, with the latter
far more popular among blacks (20 per cent named it their favourite sport) than with
whites (9 per cent).
N.B.: Gallup Sports Audit does not differentiate between amateur (e.g. college) and
professional sports. It also does not distinguish between television viewing and watching
sports in person.
Source: George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1985 (Wilmington, 1986),
pp.223-5.
Here are the replies to the statement: 'Let's talk sports. Please tell me which of
these sports you follow' (multiple answers allowed) posed by the Harris Survey in
November 1984:
1984 1982
Pro football 59% 59%
Baseball 55% 62%
College football 46% 51%
College basketball 33% 32%
Pro basketball 31% 35%
Boxing 31% 35%
Tennis 28% 36%
Auto racing 25% 26%

Track and field 23% 27%
Horse racing 21% 23%
Bowling 20% 22%
Golf 19% 24%
Hockey 15% 18%
Soccer 11% 15%
Here are the very interesting results to the subsequent question: 'If you had to
choose, which one of these sports would you say is your favorite?'
1984 1982
Pro football 24% 20%
Baseball 21% 23%
College football 9% 11%
College basketball 7% 6%
Auto racing 6% 5%
Boxing 6% 5%
Pro basketball 5% 6%
Bowling 5% 3%
Golf 4% 4%
Horse racing 4% 3%
Tennis 4% 7%
Hockey 3% 2%
Soccer 2% 2%
Track and field 1% 3%
It is interesting that without the help of college football, football's otherwise
commanding lead over baseball has been all but eliminated, placing these two
sports at the professional level virtually neck-and-neck at the top, far ahead of
any other category. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that within the smallest of the
'Big Three', i.e. basketball, the college game exceeds the pro game in popularity by
a small, though significant, margin.
Source: The Harris Survey, Index to International Public Opinion 1984-1985 (New
York, 1986), p.517.
11. It remains somewhat of a mystery to me why basketball became the only successful
American export hailing from the 'big three'. Indeed, its success can be measured
by the fact that, following soccer, it constitutes the world's second most popular
team sport. The Fe'de'ration Internationale de Basketball Amateur, founded in
1932, had 133 members in 1982, with the Federation Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA), established in 1904, numbering 147 member nations (13
nations more, incidentally, than were held together by the multisport International
Olympic Committee - IOC). See Lever, Soccer Madness, pp.27, 33-4. Three of
basketball's essential characteristics could perhaps account - at least in part - for

this sport's successful internationalization in contrast to the American parochialism
of football and baseball. First, just like soccer, basketball is blessed with very simple
rules. This means that the game could easily be transferred to the most diverse
cultures, since it was easily understood and appreciated. Second, basketball only
requires five players which has made it cheaper than baseball, necessitating little
equipment, and a good deal less expensive than football which requires much
equipment. Lastly, unlike baseball, football and soccer, basketball was explicitly
designed as a winter (indoor) sport. As such, it has never had any serious rivals to
pose a major challenge to its proliferation following the massive build-up of indoor
arenas during the post-Second World War period in virtually every country of the First
and Second Worlds.
12. There can be no doubt that Immanuel Wallerstein and other scholars of the so-called
'capitalist world system' school have contributed substantially to our understanding of

the United States as a 'core within the core'. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern
World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy
in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974); and Walter L. Goldfrank (ed.), The
World-System of Capitalism: Past and Present (Beverly Hills, 1979).
13. See: 'A newspaper at the top of its games: Sovietski Sport works hard to keep its
readers informed on the NBA, NHL . . . ' , in The Boston Globe, 20 July 1986.
14. Thus, for example, Antonin Dvorak's famous symphony in E minor, opus 95 known
to music lovers as 'From the New World', wanted to capture and convey something
'typically American', not Canadian or Australian, to its European audiences. The
composer was fascinated by the United States as a multi-ethnic and multicultural
society whose music he experienced as having original elements which could only
enrich that of the 'old world'. See Friedrich C. Heller, 'Antonin Dvorak: 9.
Symphonie 'Aus der neuen Welt' in Playbill of the Salzburger Festspiele 1985 (29
July 1985), n.p.
15. For the best comparative analysis on this issue, demonstrating a more ubiquitous and
serious religious involvement on the part of American population when contrasted
with inhabitants of other advanced capitalist societies, see Walter Dean Burnham's
superb essay: "The 1980 Earthquake: Realignment, Reaction, or What?' in Thomas
Ferguson and Joel Rogers (eds.), The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in
the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York, 1981), pp.98-140. It is especially in
Appendix A of the article, entitled 'Social Stress and Political Response: Religion
and the 1980 Election' (pp.132-40) that Burnham demonstrates how in the United
States religion is 'very important' to a larger percentage of the population than in
countries such as Canada, Italy (still relatively high), the Benelux countries, Australia,
France, the United Kingdom already a good deal lower, followed by West Germany,
the Scandinavian countries and Japan at the bottom. Moreover, in no other advanced
industrial country would it be natural for all politicians - even those to the left of
the country's political centre - to close campaign speeches with 'God bless you' as
is still - or perhaps again - commonplace in the United States among Republicans
and Democrats alike.
16. The data about the United States being an 'armed society' are nothing short of
seriously frightening. According to information obtained from Handgun Control Inc.
in Washington, D.C., there were 102 million firearms in the United States in 1968,
with the quantity increasing to 165 million by 1978 and 240 million by 1985. One in
four US households has some sort of firearm, half of which are loaded. Contrast the
60 million licensed handguns in the United States with the 250,000 licensed pistols and
rifles in the United Kingdom with a population of over 50 million (1981 figures). It is
not surprising that the statistics for accidental firearm deaths are as follows:
Country Year Accidental Firearms Death
USA 1982 1,756
Israel 1982 12
1983 25
Japan 1983 10
1984 12
West Germany 1983 28
1984 29
Poland 1983 43
1984 34
Yugoslavia 1982 43
Australia 1982 48
1983 40
Norway 1983 6
Switzerland 1982 5
1983 10
Source: World Health Organization, World Health Statistics Annual - 1985 (Geneva,
1985).
17. Leon Samson, Towards a United Front (New York, 1933).
18. It is interesting to note that Great Britain and the United States dominated the five
Olympic Games held before the First World War (1896,1900,1904,1908 and 1912).
Among the total of 211 gold medals awarded in this period (with one event having
been voided out of a possible 212), the United States won 82 and Great Britain 36,
bringing their total to 118 which amounted to 55.7 per cent of all the gold medals
obtained by winners in these five Olympics. If one adds the four gold medals won by
Australians, three by South Africans and five by Canadian athletes, the 'Anglo-Saxon'
total of 130 gold medals yields 61.3 per cent of all the gold medals awarded in these
events. The Anglo-American dominance becomes even more pronounced when it is
contrasted with the 81 gold medal winners hailing from other countries among which
none achieved a position of clear superiority. The countries belonging to this group
of 'others' were Greece, Sweden, France, Cuba, Italy, Belgium, Finland, Hungary,
Germany, Switzerland, Netherland and Austria. [See Encyclopedia Americana, No.
20 (1982); pp.723b-723r.] This is yet another clear manifestation of the fact that the
invention, development and practice of organized sports were very much the domain
of the most pronouncedly bourgeois societies at the turn of the century: the United
States and Great Britain.
19. Michael Oriard has superbly captured the essence of this 'special relationship'
between Great Britain and the United States, highlighting the American side of
the dilemma: 'As former colonials, Americans looked to the mother country for
leadership in athletic matters as surely as they imitated British art, literature, and
other cultural expressions in the nineteenth century. But it is equally important to
note our distinctive adaptations of English sporting customs. The historical moment
of America's colonizing, the rejection of monarchy and aristocracy for an egalitarian
ideal, and the consequent differences in American social, political, and educational
institutions had profound implications for the native sports culture.' Michael Oriard,
'In the Land of Merriwell: Fair Play and American Sports Culture', Chapter Two of
the manuscript of a forthcoming book, p.87.
20. The word 'soccer' is an abbreviation of Association Football. More precisely, it
derives from 'association' forming a linguistic parallel to 'rugger' which in turn
became the vernacular for Rugby Football. Brian Glanville, certainly among the
foremost soccer experts in the world and one of the game's best chroniclers, tells this
interesting anecdote in connection with the origins of the word 'soccer': 'Why soccer,
though? [Emphasis in original.] The only plausible theory I have ever come across is
that the credit, or blame, belonged to Charles Wreford-Brown, a famous centre half
for Old Carthusians and the Corinthians. Sitting in his rooms in Oxford University,
so it is said, he was visited by a friend who asked him whether he were going to play
'Rugger' or Rugby football. To this, in a burst of inspiration, Wreford-Brown replied,
'No: I'm playing soccer', the word being a corruption of 'Association' in the sport's
correct name, Association Football.' See Brian Glanville, A Book of Soccer (New
York, 1979), pp.4,5.
21. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, p.14.

22. Ibid.
23. Calcio's only major contemporary legacy is, of course, the fact that the game of soccer
- referred to in most languages by a variant of the English term 'football' - is still
called calcio in Italy.
24. Glanville, A Book of Soccer, p.4; and James Walvin, The People's Game: A Social
History of British Football (London, 1975), p.14.
25. See Chapter one in Walvin's The People's Game entitled 'Pre-Industrial Football',
Chapter three, 'The Rise of the Working-Class Football', and Chapter five 'England's
Most Durable Export'.
26. Oriard, 'In the Land of MerriwelP, p.95.
27. Ibid.,p.9O.
28. See Percy M. Young, The History of British Football (London, 1968), p.62.
29. It is in this context that the name of William Webb Ellis means a lot to American
football fans. According to a number of first-rate sources such as The NFL's Official
Encyclopedia History of Professional Football (New York, 1977), p.10; Young, The
History of British Football, p.63; and David Riesman and Reuel Denney, 'Football
in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion' in the American Quarterly, Vol.3, No.4
(Winter 1951), 311, 312, it was in 1823 that William Webb Ellis, a Rugby student,
picked up the ball in a match at his school, tucked it under his arm and ran with it past
the goalline. Walvin, in an interesting departure, claims this whole thing to be untrue
and maintains that this myth was invented by Rugby fans and alumni in 1895 as a post-
hoc reassertion that the game of rugby had originated at their school. (See Walvin,
The People's Game, p.34.) If Walvin is right, then the origins of American football
- via rugby - are based on an equal myth to that of baseball's supposed invention by
Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. It is interesting that baseball's
Doubleday-Cooperstown myth also arose at the end of the nineteenth century, thus
paralleling football's William Webb Ellis myth with respect to time of creation.
30. On this point, see Walvin, The People's Game, pp.42-3; Young, The History of
British Football, pp.89-92; and Ph. Heineken, Das Fussballspiel. Association (ohne
Aufnahme des Balls): Seine Geschichte, Regeln und Spielweise (Stuttgart, n.d.), p.15.
31. Young, The History of British Football, p.79.
32. Ibid., pp.93, 94. Among the many commonalities between soccer and basketball
- team effort, both centred on collective strategies requiring constant on-the-spot
improvisation as opposed to the execution of clearly defined plans brought in from
the outside of the actual contest a la American football - is most certainly the
fact that both only had 13 rules at their respective founding which to this day
still form the core of each sport's essential existence. It is telling that Dr. James
Naismith, the founder of basketball, used a soccer ball when he invented the new
winter sport in 1892 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Both sports are 'simple games',
making them easily understandable and readily transferable across diverse cultures.
Soccer, however, is even more 'democratic' than basketball. Not in need of hoops
and indoor arenas, soccer, above all, continues to be played by 'normal' people
rather than giant-like athletes who have all but become de rigueur in any kind of
competitive modern basketball. For a nice analysis contrasting basketball and soccer
on the one hand with football and baseball on the other, see Robert W. Keidel, "The
Soccer-Basketball Connection', Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, 17 July
1986.
33. Young, A History of British Football, p.113.
34. Walvin, The People's Game, p.74.
35. See again the comparisons with basketball - and the contrasts to baseball and football
- mentioned in note 32.
36. Walvin provides a good analysis of disillusionment with soccer on the part of English
gentlemen once the game had become appropriated by the working class in the course
of the 1880s.
37. One of soccer's major missionaries until 1939 was the famous Corinthians. Founded
in 1883 by N.L. Jackson with the explicit purpose of creating a first-rate amateur team
which could continue to uphold the elitist gentlemanly values of old yet at the same
time play excellent football, the Corinthians consisted of university graduates among
whom Oxbridge men predominated. They were such excellent footballers that in 1904
they humiliated Bury by a score of 10-3 following the latter's record 6-0 victory
in that year's FA Cup final. Always arriving in top hats and canes to the football
grounds while their opponents typically wore cloth caps, the Corinthians were an
anachronism, representing soccer's gentlemanly era of the 1860s and 1870s in a period
when the game had become the mass sport par excellence in the world. However, the
fact that soccer became so popular all over the world had at least something to do
with these dedicated amateurs. Like missionaries, the Corinthians toured the world,
playing exhibition games ('friendly' matches) against local clubs and all-star teams in a
number of countries on the European continent. They made such an impact in Brazil
that a team in Sao Paolo was christened after them: Corinthians Sao Paolo remains
to this day one of Brazil's leading clubs. The Corinthians also toured the United
States in 1911 routing all six American teams whom they played. This prompted
their president, the old Oxfordian Charles Wreford-Brown - the alleged inventor
of the term 'soccer' as previously mentioned - to state his disappointment regarding
the stagnation he felt soccer had experienced in the United States. The Corinthians
were disbanded in 1939, having outlived their era by nearly half a century, yet having
proved noble and important representatives of the world's most popular mass sport.
On the Corinthians, see Walvin, The People's Game, p.88; and Young, A History of
British Football, pp.128-31. On the Corinthians' visit to the United States in 1911,
see Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, p.35.
39. Ibid.,p.21.
40. Ibid.,p.22.
41. It is unclear to me why Harvard refused so steadfastly to play the kicking game,
sticking tenaciously to the running-style Boston game and then converting to
rugby following the matches with McGill in 1874. One hypothesis might be that
the university's anglophilia and strong preoccupation with imitating Oxford and
Cambridge as closely as possible, led it to identify with rugby as being the 'proper'
sport for students at America's oldest and most prestigious university. There can be
no doubt, however, that it was ultimately Harvard's unique prestige and standing
among America's colleges at the time which swayed the other universities away from
the soccer-style football which they were already playing and made them embrace the
Harvard-dominated running game. Thus, Harvard can be accorded an important role
in the development of America's 'soccer exceptionalism'.
43. It is fascinating how the stigma of soccer as a boring sport has persisted among
Americans. It is equally interesting to observe how Europeans in turn label baseball,
and to a lesser degree even football, as boring. This leads me to the conclusion that
a lack of understanding and appreciation of any sport easily renders it 'boring' in the
eyes of the uninitiated spectator.
45. The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of Professional Football, p. 10. In a brilliant
application of Max Weber's tripartite scheme of domination - charismatic, traditional,
legal-rational - Seymour Martin Lipset shows how the early institutionalization of
George Washington's charisma as this 'first new nation's' Erst president and foremost
military leader helped create a smooth transition to and a legitimate continuation of
the legal-rational form of authority which has regulated much of the public discourse
and behaviour in the United States for over two centuries. See Lipset, The First New
Nation, pp.21-6.
46. The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of Professional Football, p. 10.
47. Riesman and Denny, 'Football in America', pp.318,319; and Oriard, 'In the Land of
Merriweir, p. 112.
48. All of the preceding information is derived from Riesman and Denny, 'Football in
America'; The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of Professional Football; and
Arlott, The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games, pp.321-3. It is helpful for
the argument to furnish yet another detail concerning the origin of the necessary
yardage rule, since it conveys the difference between the myth of a leisurely and
gentlemanly activity on the one hand, and the reality of a fiercely contested bourgeois
game in which winning became all-important on the other. When Camp and his
colleagues devised the American scrimmage out of the British scrum, they assumed
'that the chivalrous Ivy Leaguers would gladly give up the ball when they could
not gain ground during the scrimmage' (The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History
of Professional Football, p.10). This, however, was clearly not the case. Worried
about being outperformed and outwitted by its opponents, each team chose to play
safe by simply maintaining possession of the ball as long as possible, which in effect
meant for one half of the game. Trust in the opponent's honest intentions and the
simple desire just to enjoy playing a good game regardless of winners and losers -
so essential to a quasi-aristocratic, non-competitive, gentlemanly atmosphere - had
all but disappeared in American sports and society, even at the nation's most elite
universities.
49. Surely the involvement of a military man at the highest level of the country's sports
world connoted some affinity between the 'scientization' and strict regulation of
sports on the one hand, and very similar values expressed by the country's military
establishment on the other. The common denominator between sports and the
military was furnished by the fact that both of them were perceived by the elites
as 'modern'.
50. Oriard, 'In the Land of Merriwell', p.107.
51. Ibid., p.114.
52. It is worth mentioning in this context one of early pro football's most significant
legacies to America's sports world. It was in New York City's Madison Square Garden
that a 'World Series' was played indoors between two professional football teams in
1902 and 1903 giving rise to the same - and subsequently much more popular - event
in the game of professional baseball. See The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of
Professional Football, p. 12.
53. In the context of discussing professional football's precursors, The NFL's Official
Encyclopedia History of Professional Football contains a passage which provides an
excellent example of the atmosphere underlying the formation of American sports
(especially football) which - if not explicitly anti-British - was clearly conducive to
separate the new world's sports from those of the old; Pittsburgh's first athletic clubs
were the Allegheny Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Such
clubs emerged after the Civil War, according to researcher Thomas Jable, as an
antidote to Victorianism. American men could through competitive athletics at their
clubs 'countermand the Victorian principles of delicacy and refinement'. Football,
aggressive and sometimes violent, served this need especially well; it represented
a significant triumph of robust manliness over tender and fragile feminity'. Ibid.,
p.ll.
54. The link between American football and capitalism has often been made. For a
relatively recent comparison between 'democratic' and 'capitalist' American football
on the one hand and 'socialist' European soccer on the other, see Congressman Jack
Kemp's following views as expressed in 'The old quarterback doesn't approve of
that other football game' in The Boston Globe, 12 May 1983: 'In debate about a
resolution urging the United States to try to snare the World Cup games, up leaps this
ex-quarterback, a 13-year veteran of pro football, to snipe at soccer. First he thinks
there still may be folks out there who don't understand that what the rest of the world
knows as "football" is not the football he knows and loves . . . "I think it is important
for all those young out there, who some day hope to play real football, where you
throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be
made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist
. . . " . . . "He [Jack Kemp] believes that football is entrepreneurial capitalism, it has
a quarterback, someone who is in charge, while soccer is based more on the European
socialist tradition; no one's in command, it's more of a sharing, cooperative
game.". . . Jack was speaking "extemporaneously", the aide continued, as if that alone
should explain it. "He tells that all the time to Little League footballers when he travels
around the country, and their eyes glaze over".'
55. Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York, 1960), pp.8, 9.
56. Ibid.
57. One of the reasons baseball and soccer developed into 'people's sports' has a lot to do
with the accessibility of both games. Just as stickball, for example - availing itself of
such urban props as fire hydrants or parked cars in lieu of bases - formed an integral
part of inner city dwelling in the United States, so soccer has continued as a street
game in the cities of Europe and Latin America. These environments have created
many a major star for both sports respectively. There is yet another dimension to the
'democratic' component of soccer and baseball. In noticeable contrast to American
football and basketball, neither of the two previous sports necessitates any special
physical abilities such as exceptional height or strength. Indeed, exceptional physical
attributes which are the sine qua non for any successful football or basketball player
could in fact be detrimental to a career in either baseball or soccer. While excellent
athletes, soccer and baseball players look 'normal'. In the not so distant past, when
both games were a good deal less 'athletic' and 'physical' than they are today, one
could observe a number of ageing and paunchy players who maintained their careers
in baseball or soccer, something they could never have done in major league football
or basketball.
58. Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, p.16; and Robert Smith, Illustrated History of
Baseball (New York, 1973), pp.18-22.
59. Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, pp.19, 20.
60. As quoted in ibid., p.65.
61. Smith, Illustrated History of Baseball, p.44. For a detailed biography of Spalding and
his role in baseball, see Peter Levine, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball (New
York, 1985).
62. David Q. Voigt, 'Reflections on Diamonds: American Baseball and American
Culture' in Journal of Sport History, Vol.1, No.l (Spring 1974), 18,19.
63. On organized baseball's 'reserve clause' which ruled the game's capital-labor relations
until the courts struck it down as being unconstitutional in the early 1970s, see Arlott,
The Oxford Companion to Sports, p.59.
64. Ibid.
65. The term 'World Series', as previously mentioned adopted by major league baseball
following football's immodest claims in the same direction in 1902 and 1903, is very
telling of America's 'sport exceptionalism'. On the one hand, few aspects of American
culture seem more peculiar, incomprehensible and irritating to European sports fans
than calling the contest between two domestic teams for what essentially is the United
States championship 'world series' as in baseball, and - following that sport - 'world
championship' in both professional football and basketball. What better reflects
America's self-contained, parochial, yet at the same time self-assured, even smug,
culture than equating itself with the world, at least as far as sports are concerned?
Contrast the three American 'world championships' with soccer's World Cup where
virtually all 144 countries belonging to FIFA play in lengthy elimination tournaments
for the right to participate in the quadrennial final event still comprising 24 teams.
The eventual winner can thus legitimately bear the title of 'world champion' during
its four-year incumbency. World Championships in all team sports other than the
American 'big three' are bestowed upon a country in this world of nation-states,
not upon a club. Thus, world championships, typically, are won by all-star teams
whose members are all citizens of the same state. (It is interesting to note that
in the never-ending quest to make more money, a 'World Cup' for clubs rather
than countries was introduced in soccer during the late 1960s, pitting the European
club champion against its Latin American counterpart on a yearly basis. Tellingly,
this tournament has never really captured the imagination of soccer fans on either
continent, remaining an incomparably less important event than the 'real', i.e. 'inter-
national', World Cup.)
And yet, precisely because baseball, football and basketball are America's games,
the arrogance of calling the winner of the American championship 'world champion'
enjoys not only a certain logical consistency but is also supported by empirical reality.
For there can be no doubt that the respective American champions in football,
baseball and basketball are indeed the world's best in their sport by virtue of being
almost the only ones! No other country plays American football, thus making the
American superbowl champion the automatic champion of the world. In baseball,
the winner of America's 'world series' surely represents that sport's best team
in the world, though this champion's uncontested position may be a bit more
precarious than football's since baseball is, after all, being played in a number of
Caribbean countries, Mexico and Japan. What would happen if Tokyo's Yomiuri
Giants successfully challenged the US 'world champion' baseball team, beating it
decisively in a series of games? Would this then expand baseball's world to include
Japan? Would it eventually lead to the 'nationalization' of the sport, pitting American
all-stars fielding only US citizens as players against the Japanese national team?
As for basketball's 'world champion', the claim can again be justified. Though
basketball is the second most popular team sport in the world, the professional game
- with some minor exceptions such as the leagues in Italy and Spain - is exclusive to
the United States, thus arguably making the NBA champion the best in the world.
But the potential dilemmas delineated for baseball hold a fortiori for basketball. What
would happen if Dynamo Moscow, Real Madrid or Partisan Belgrade beat the NBA
champion some day? The fact that this hypothesis is not completely without precedent
is best demonstrated by the bursting of hockey's previously exclusive North American
world, following the first USSR-Canada series in 1972 in which the Canadians barely
prevailed after their smug and self-contained predictions that they would demolish
and humiliate the Soviets. Ever since that series, no Stanley Cup winner can continue
to enjoy its 'world championship' without a somewhat frightened glance across the
Atlantic.

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Sombart Revisited and America's Soccer 'Exceptionalism':

channels of parliamentary democracy. Given Sombart's concern, his

uniqueness of the American situation, in which soccer's potential for

America's actions (or inactions) attain meaning beyond their actual

as international, importance. Thus, the editors and sport writers of

America - The First New Nation

religious in the advanced industrial world.15 Moreover, only by

bourgeoisie and the 'masses', if they were to gain any significance

The Development of Modern Soccer in Britain: From its elite origins

Middle Ages, occurring virtually everywhere on the Continent as well

From its very beginning, modern soccer became inextricably linked to

playing fields of Eton, the fact that generations of middle-class Britons

to the students' overall educational experience at Rugby in the 1830s is

attained greater respectability and prestige. In addition to continued

Continent as well, owing to the tremendous respect accorded there to

demise of the exclusive 'gentlemen's era' in soccer and the concomitant

afternoons. This shift from amateurism to professionalism entailed a

as amateur sportsmen in other games, such as rugby.36

In America, soccer remained closely associated with immigrants,

intramural basis. Outlawed periodically by university administrators

game developed in its then purest form as Harvard's unchallenged team

'Crowding out from above': The case of American football

of their respective fields - football and factory production - which were

frequent deaths. Finally President Theodore Roosevelt, having seen the

Association (NCAA) in 1910.49 With Walter Camp in charge of the

the game, wanted to provide some entertainment to the local population

oblige collectivism of the British aristocratized sports world. Whereas a

reward system in a Taylorized form of industrial production. The

Crowding out from below: The case of baseball

conflicts in American society of the late nineteenth century - came to a

developed into an important source of revenue for the clubs, leading

Conveying the unbound optimism of that special breed of American

rounders, though some particularly benevolent critics conceded that

'raiding' each other's players by introducing the so-called 'reserve

Association developed in 1882, its eight teams charging lower admissions

popularity with the American masses proved sufficient to crowd out

advanced industrial country to suffer from this considerable deficit in

Event Network Rating Share

emerge beyond its historically marginal status in the United States.'

Auto racing 25% 26%

basketball's essential characteristics could perhaps account - at least in part - for

'capitalist world system' school have contributed substantially to our understanding of

21. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, p.14.

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