American Soccer News

Not this again. We thought we had addressed these “soccer is un-American” myths last year. Apparently, like so many other unwanted rights of spring (slugs, weeds and pondscum, to name a few), the “soccer is un-American” talk simply resurfaces by its own accord each year.

This season, they have taken the form of one man, Stephen H. Webb, who appears to have the full backing of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, among other groups (more on that later). Webb’s “arguments” are so outlandish (the title is “Soccer is ruining America”), we originally thought they were a joke. Maybe they are. It certainly reads like satire. How else to describe something that starts with the sentence “Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it.”?

Unfortunately, Webb appears to be dead serious. The article first appeared on a site called First Things, which is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an organization that bills itself as “an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”

Which actually sounds like a satire as well. Except it isn’t. Just read some of the articles. Webb’s last post before the soccer piece was titled “The terrible, traumatic and intolerable name of Jesus Christ.”

We are not minimizing these (or indeed any) beliefs, except to point out that people who take them as seriously as Webb does are generally not known for their satirical wit. Webb’s Wikipedia page describes him as a “theologian and philosopher of religion.” He teaches religion and philosophy at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., which proudly proclaims itself “one of the few remaining liberal arts colleges for men.” If somebody is capable of making a statement such as “it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America” with a straight face and meaning it, we suspect it would be an individual like Webb. Unless, of course, his entire persona is a satire as well. Stranger things have happened.

Yet the editorial is being taken seriously, even by those who aren’t taking it seriously. The Spectator, while saying that “doubtless much of it is meant in jest,” still insists Webb’s piece is emblematic of conservative Americans’ “weird obsession with soccer and its supposed cancerous impact on the moral well-being of the United States.” Manchester Evening News even ran a reaction, where they went to great lengths to defend the U.K. version of the sport and point out how it, being called “football” is different from what we refer to as soccer in this country. A soccer blogger, Unprofessional Foul, also took Webb seriously and went as far as to print a lengthy rebuttal.

We aren’t going there for two reasons:
1. Just in case Webb is joking and the whole thing is a satire meant to raise the ire of soccer fans who take themselves too seriously, in which case we would look like idiots for falling into the trap.
2. Webb’s “arguments,” when you get down to them, are just a rehashing of the very same stuff soccer haters have always used to villify the un-American-ness of the sport. Each of these (it’s not played with your hands, it’s foreign, it’s for girls, etc.) were dealt with in great detail in last year’s defense of soccer column. Read them there.

On the other hand, maybe we should just re-print the same piece every spring. Next year.