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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Offside is on target...., November 8, 2001
This review is from: Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. (Paperback)
"Offside"'s authors have come up with a book that works both as a work of sports history, and socio-cultural criticism. Markovits and Hellerman paint a clear picture of American social behavior as it relates to the teams we follow, detailing the development of U.S. sports culture, and its expansion into the dominant role it currently holds in society. Clear without being dumb-downed, intellectual without being too "academic" (i.e. wordy, jargony, overly theory-based, etc.), "Offside" is a serious, enveloping work. The main meat of the book lies in its center section, which goes into a historical account of the birth and development of the "big three & 1/2" sports in America (baseball, football, basketball and hockey). The authors show how each sport had a "window of opportunity" to expand within the backdrop of America's cultural and financial explosion from apx. the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression. Here, the book exposes something probably unknown today: that soccer had the opportunity to take part in this development in the 1920s, but due to politicing and in-fighting, was not able to keep a single, solid, professional league together, choosing to split instead into smaller, weaker, more insignifcant groups that could not sustain themselves long enough to gain a fan base and a presence in the American sports scene. Meanwhile, the "big sports" ended up a societal "necessity" in the 1930s: spectator-sports and movies boomed, giving people the best bang for their diminished bucks. The later sections of the book explain how soccer may have been granted a new "window" due to (1) the World Cup in the U.S. in the past decade; (2) the establishment of the MSL, with the most capitol of any American soccer league yet; and (3) the dominance of the U.S. Women's team, thus giving a female form to the historically male world sport-space. There are new challenges a fledgling sports league faces that didn't exist at the beginning of the last century, some more obvious than others--I'll leave it to the authors and their grand piece of work to explain the rest.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For the couch potato with the active mind, July 13, 2002
This review is from: Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. (Paperback)
If you're puzzled about why the country that dominates every other aspect of popular culture -- from fast food through Hollywood movies to rock 'n' roll -- lags behind the rest of the globe when it comes to the world's most popular mass sport, this is the book to read. Andy Markovits dispenses in short order with all the cliches you've heard the sports pundits offer up by way of "explanation" for why soccer has not (yet) caught on in the U.S.: It's NOT because Americans are impatient with low-scoring games, or because kicking a ball down a field lacks strategy or skill, or because there's something about soccer that's incompatible with the American "character." The real explanation has to do with the history of mass sports -- how marketers in both Europe and America took games played by gentlemen on college campuses or in local amateur clubs and turned them into popular, professional competition for paying (and, since television, watching) fans. It's not the "soccer moms" and Little League dads who determine whether a sport takes off: it's the franchises who organize consumption for the couch potatoes. Markovits shows how the market for mass sports was already carved up among baseball, American football, and basketball when soccer tried to take root here. He doesn't downplay the growth areas that do exist for soccer in the U.S. -- in women's competition (where the U.S. leads), in colleges, and among new immigrants. But he's realistic about what it would take (such as a US team making it to the finals in a World Cup match) for soccer to break into America's already crowded "sports space." One of the great things about this book is the author's enthuasiasm for ALL manner of sports. Andy Markovits is a big-time soccer fan, but he also loves to watch NFL and Big Ten football, NBA and NCAA basketball, the Yankees and the World Series. Because he understands what's exciting and graceful about all these games, he's able to dismiss all the anti-American and anti-European prejudices that dominate discussions about comparing sports. In this book, you'll not only learn about the history of soccer; you'll also learns some things that Ken Burns didn't get around to telling you about baseball, or about why we can "blame Harvard" for writing the rules that made American football differ from its English cousins (rugby and "Association football" or soccer).
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Why Is There No Soccer in the US, June 22, 2001
This review is from: Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. (Paperback)
Review of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism by Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman, Princeton University Press, 2001. This remarkable book asks the question "why is there no soccer in the United States." Immediately you respond, "OF COURSE THERE IS!!! My kids play it all the time!!" Markovits and Hellerman would respond, however, that, yes, soccer is played in the US but it is not felt, dreamt, and lived. Fathers and mothers are not drawing on their own wealth of experience in teaching their kids how to play soccer, as they do with other sports; "pick-up games" only infrequently involve soccer; it is simply not part of the texture of daily life, as is checking the box scores of your favorite baseball team. In this book, the authors explain why the US is so different in its "sports space," as the authors call it, from almost all other countries - where soccer, generally known as football, is dominant. More broadly, Offside also offers one of the most interesting attempts to understand the spread of sports internationally. Not only do the authors' question the argument about the globalization of everything but they assert that we need to understand a given country's history and even more so its sports history to grasp how its sports space is configured. Thus, in attempting to explain "why there is no soccer in the US," they discuss the role that powerful organizations have played in cementing baseball, basketball, and football (and to a lesser extent, hockey) into the US sports space during the key 1870-1930 industrialization period and how difficult it has been for other endeavors to gain a strong foothold. Markovits and Hellerman's integration of media, political, and economic factors into this analysis and their complex comparative design (comparisons of sports, countries, time periods) provide us with an excellent model to follow and engage in our further studies of the internationalization (or not!) of sports. In short, this is an excellent, comprehensive account of how and why the "world's game" has not become a part of the American way of life. Drawing on many sources of evidence, ranging historically and cross-nationally, the authors have masterfully told an innovative and original story about US sports.
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