These weeks every time I watch a World Cup football game, I thank the brilliance of the Creator who has seen fit to make soccer unpopular in the United States. The greed of television advertisers and the people they fund have ruined professional mass market spectator sports here. Thank God it has yet to ruin this athletic competition for us and the rest of the world to the same degree.
Out of greed for the biggest market possible, the lazy summer afternoon game of baseball has been pushed into the darkness of night play, as unnatural a mix as Carville and Matalin. When I was a kid few forbidden treats were more exciting than sneaking a transistor radio into school to get the latest report on the early innings of the World Series. Runs to the unmonitored space of the bathroom were often more frequent than runs scored. Kids no longer have the same joy as I had in my youth. Now the games drag on past the time that anyone wants to be awake. Night lights hurt hitting. They may be the single biggest reason that no one has hit .400 since Ted Williams batted .406 in 1942. Night games also ruin the economy. Whatever the revenue gained by commercial television during the post-midnight Red Sox-Yankee series of 2005, it pails in comparison to the loss of economic productivity up and down the east coast. Day games might distract workers as well, but the physical effect is not as long-lasting as night after night of sleep-deprivation. Then there are the repeated interruptions in all commercially televised sports so that the networks can find time for endless advertising spots. These breaks disrupt the flow of the game, undermining momentum, acting as a third team on the field. The effect is particularly devastating for a fast-paced game like American football. Increasing the market does increase revenues, but what has all that money yielded? More steroids, greedy players, and greedier owners.
When, as in the Olympics, the sport is simply too big, universal, and the time zones too distant for the US television-advertising industry to call the shots and schedule the events for its revenue convenience, it solves the problem in a different way. The entertainment-industrial complex simply destroys the reason why sport is often the only thing worth watching on tv - - its spontaneous, unscripted, unpredictable, and unknowable character. By refusing to broadcast events in real time since that would undermine the evening audience for the nightly re-runs, NBC destroyed its unique appeal. To compensate at the last go-round NBC transformed the Olympics from a spontaneous event of athletic skill into one big pseudo reality soap opera, filled with phony up close and personal interviews and sob stories. There are two problems with this approach to sportscasting. First, athletes are individuals with exceptional physical abilities that rarely translate into any other attributes worth the attention of a profile. Second, even if they have non-physical qualities worthy of note, television is the last medium to convey them. It creates the simulacrum of intimacy without the reality. The multiple layers of the medium hide much more than they reveal. Politicians from Robert Redford's The Candidate down to the latest scripted blow-dried family values hypocrite know that well, even if the public is still regularly hoodwinked.
The contrast to soccer matches is telling. To be sure endorsements, commercialism strewn across the football pitches, sports-hero mongering, and all the other distractions mar European football as well, but there is a huge difference. The structure of radio and television broadcasting is different in the United States from anywhere else in the world. Everywhere else the electronic media are under far greater public control. The United States is probably the only country in the world without a government-run media outlet. To be sure various forms of private competition exist in most of those markets, but the government public broadcasting authorities have been the pioneers and, historically, the most powerful. They have set the tone and the standards for private companies to follow. Because of a commitment to public funding, commercial dominance is checked. This has a far-reaching affect on social and cultural values in general, that is worthy of much thought and research, but its affect on athletic events is our immediate concern. Since the rest of the world imposes much more limits on television advertising than does the US, world football is allowed something unheard of in American sporting events, 50 minutes of uninterrupted play. At times the only reason I watched the games was to enjoy the luxury of little or no commercial interruption (and fund-raising on PBS outlets is just as obnoxious as advertising) on television. To imagine that there can be any sphere of human existence relatively free of lucre-loving hucksterism is to imagine a form of paradise. Of course the advertising signs are showcased all over the stadia and the announcer hypes one form of foot-wear or another, but the bottom-line is that there is no bottom-line incessantly bottoming out the flow of play.
Contrary to all the learned and ingenious explanations for this form of US exceptionalism, the reason why soccer can never become popular in the United States is that the businesses who through tv and radio advertising would ultimately fund it, would never tolerate a popular event of mass appeal that limits their ability to sell their products. The sport has become too powerful in a relatively commercial-light world for US commercial interests to change the rules to suit its marketing needs.