Socialist Soccer?

Marc Thiessen thinks so:

The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.

Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.)

Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.

Soccer is collectivist. At this year’s World Cup, the French national team actually went on strike in the middle of the tournament on the eve of an elimination match. (Yes, capitalist sports have experienced labor disputes, but can you imagine a Major League Baseball team going on strike in the middle of the World Series?)

At the youth level, soccer teams don’t even keep score and everyone gets a participation trophy. Can you say, “From each according to his ability…”? (The fact that they do keep score later on is the only thing that prevents soccer from being a Communist sport.)

Capitalist sports are exciting—people often hit each other, sometimes even score. Soccer fans are excited by an egalitarian 0-0 tie. When soccer powerhouses Brazil and Portugal met recently at the World Cup, they played for 90 minutes—and combined got just eight shots on net (and zero goals). Contrast this with the most exciting sports moment last week, which came not at the World Cup, but at Wimbledon, when American John Isner won in a fifth-set victory that went 70-68. Yes, even tennis is more exciting than soccer. Like an overcast day in East Berlin, soccer is … boring.

And finally, have you seen the World Cup trophy? It looks like an Emmy Award (and everyone knows that Hollywood is socialist).

There are many more reasons soccer and socialism go hand in hand. You can read some of them here. Perhaps in the age of President Obama, soccer will finally catch on in America. But I suspect that socializing Americans’ taste in sports may be a tougher task than socializing our healthcare system.

Oh, if only. As Alex Massie puts it, “in their generous welfare provisions for the weak and the useless, the NFL, MLB and the NBA come vastly closer to Thiessen's definition of “socialism” than anything in the soccer universe.” As long as you do not actually call it by the S-word, America has always been rather good at it, with her big municipal government, her pioneering of Keynesianism in practice, her strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, her very high levels of co-operative membership, her housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, and her small farmers who own their own land. Once the universal public healthcare option has come to be, everyone will say that it is as American as apple pie. Which it is.

The worst thing that ever happened to football was the abolition of the maximum wage. Football is now, like any other branch of the fashion industry, an example of what homosexual men think that heterosexual women will like. Each England player’s new strip is bespoke – measured for, and then run up by, a Savile Row tailor. Each new member of the squad now goes through this, as a sort of initiation. What a touching act of solidarity in the current economic climate.

I sometimes wonder why the really big clubs still bother with football. They are so rich that they could name a “squad” of simple beneficiaries of some sort of trust fund. The fashion, the glamour, the gossip, the drugs, the drink, the sex, the lot could then just carry on as before, with no need for training sessions or what have you. Who would be able to tell the difference?

The pricing of the working classes out of football, its legendarily bad treatment of its staff, and its use as a sort of circus of performing chavs as there might be performing seals or the performing monkeys like which they are now even trussed up, cannot be tolerated for ever. Or, indeed, for very much longer at all. Mutualisation, perhaps with a heavy dose of municipal involvement where grounds are concerned, is the last hope. If there is any hope. There may very well be none.