I grew up in Ottawa where I played an awful lot of league soccer. Although I loved the game, I loved all the other team sports I played, too, and I became a fan of baseball, hockey and the like because they were culturally available. They were on TV, in Sports Illustrated and were the currency of social conversation, whereas soccer, existing only on foreign shores at the time, was something you played not watched.
In the 90’s in Ottawa a small, underground fan base began to emerge for the game. It was kind of like Fight Club, in that young men, almost always led by ex-pat Brits, would watch games beamed in by satellite (!) in bars like the Duke of Somerset at insane hours. It had the cachet of a speakeasy and watching a game at 7:00 in the morning and drinking pints of beer with accented lads in Manchester U scarves made you feel authentic in ways that you might not have ordinarily felt.
It was a clarion call for outsiders.
Of course, the European league games are now readily available, and the world is smaller and Ottawa is larger, so being a football fan is no longer quite as punk as it used to be, but you can still detect an attitude of exclusivity in some of the fans. Assuming an unnecessaryily international, almost Epicurean air, they’ll refer to foreign countries with a flourish of accents or in a language they themselves don’t even speak. They’ll position themselves in ways that suggest that they’re above the crass commercialism and blunt aggression of North American sports and are somehow global in their world view, a notion that is actually kind of quaint and parochial in it’s offering.
I live in Toronto now where there’s a much larger and more diverse population, as well as a pro soccer team, and you just don’t see this kind of attitude. Soccer is just another sport and there’s no attempt to make fandom an exclusive cult. Like most people and cities in North America, interest in soccer spikes during the World Cup where everybody becomes madly passionate, informed and excited about the game, and then it recedes back from whence it came.
The other night I was channel surfing and happened to come across a soccer game between the Swedish women’s team and the US women’s team, and although I had no vested interest in the game I found myself riveted in no time. The truth, from this small sample, is that I think I like the women’s game better than the men’s.
First off, although the game might not be as explosive as the mens, it is still played at a really fucking high level. These women are great, and the shape of the game and the strategic manipulations–so much a part of the pleasure in the viewing participation of the pro game in general–are perfectly in tact. The game still looks beautiful and a sophist might make the argument that it even looks better as it unfolds just a fraction of a second slower. However, as soccer is more dependent on lower body strength than upper body strength, it’s a sport where the gap between the female and male game is much narrower than in other ones. It will happen in due course that a high calibre female team will defeat a high calibre men’s team.
But the most striking thing in watching the game was that unlike in men’s soccer, the culture of diving simply did not exist. Perhaps because the women’s game arose in North America instead of some of the Latin and European countries where equal sporting opportunities for women might be harder to find, and the diving and whining is so deeply embedded in the sport, the contemporary women’s game is free from all this. They are flat-out aggressive, and if somebody is tugging on a shirt or otherwise molesting a player, they just fight through it instead of collapsing on the ground in paroxysms of agony.
It’s tough as hell, and what the women appear to have done is bring the North American sensibility of football and hockey to the European game of soccer, making for a sport that is beautiful, fierce and entirely awesome.