Jig is up - give World Cup the boot
Michael Duffy
September 2, 2006
MY HEART sank at speculation this week that Sydney might host the 2010 World Cup finals in the sport formerly known as soccer. Despite the recent media-encouraged palpitations, it is not a game Australia has taken to its collective heart.
It's not as if we haven't had plenty of opportunity. Large-scale immigration from Europe for decades after World War II provided the rest of the nation with lots of exposure to the sport. SBS has been devoting millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to promoting and broadcasting it for years. Yet as a spectator sport, it remains a minority interest.
Lots of parents force their children to play football for reasons of social engineering: they want to make their boys more like girls and their girls more like boys. Whether it achieves either of these noble aims is doubtful, but what's not in doubt is the speed with which most people abandon the sport the moment they don't have to play it.
I don't think we should worry about this. If anything, it's a tribute to the national temperament. This was brought home by watching Australia's games and the semifinals in the recent World Cup.
You rose from your bed in the early hours to spend an hour and a half watching the ball move from one player to another several hundred times without passing through the white posts at either end of the field more than once or twice. It was like golf without the excitement.
Meanwhile, enormous crowds of people shrieked and moaned as if in the grip of some drug-induced ecstasy. The outcomes were usually random and yet, weirdly, everyone accepted this after a bit of ritual huffing and puffing.
Australia is not the only country with little interest in football; Americans are also supremely indifferent. A paper by Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago, provides reasons for this dislike of football, which I suspect will strike a chord with many Australians.
Sanderson starts by recalling watching the World Cup final between Italy and France with 20 French economics students "who were, in the end, more depressed about the outcome of that title game than they were about their own economy". Sanderson, who specialises in sports economics, found the whole thing puzzling. "Throughout the entire two-plus-hour ordeal, I kept asking myself: why would anyone waste good time or money watching this sport?"
He was struck by the lack of scoring and the "ubiquitous flops that would make an NBA [National Basketball Association] player jealous or incredulous" and the way players cannot touch the ball with their hands and arms but are allowed to risk brain damage by heading it. He wondered why these drawbacks are obvious to several hundred million Americans but not to 6 billion others. He came up with an ingenious hypothesis.
"In our society and our sports," Sanderson believes, "most Americans like to see some relationship between effort and reward. In labour and product markets, we appreciate competitive market forces and incentives that reward ability, hard work and ingenuity.
"The same is true for the sports we participate in and follow as spectators. While we can appreciate the grace, artistry or skill associated with, say, figure skating or soccer, we like it best when someone keeps score. And we like the scoring to have some measure of justice or rationality to it."
He points out that in American football and basketball, domination of the game is usually rewarded by points, lots of them. Over the course of a game, these mount up to a concluding score that indicates clearly the extent of one team's superiority over the other.
In football, "over 90 minutes there are hundreds of changes of possession with no change on the scoreboard. A team can dominate the game, control the ball beautifully, pass with tremendous elan, out-play the other team, and still not score." When they do score, it can be from a penalty kick-off at the end.
"Settling a tie in basketball after 40 or 48 minutes of action by letting the five players on each team shoot one free throw, or picking the Masters champion by seeing how many consecutive three-metre putts Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson could make, would leave us quite dissatisfied."
Turning again to economic behaviour, he suggests the random nature of football outcomes is consistent with European feelings about equality, risk-taking and economic outcomes. He says those Americans who support the game "are uncomfortable with competitions that produce winners and losers, and soccer appeals to their egalitarian, risk-averse streak. The same crowd usually also can be counted on to oppose globalisation."
Sanderson also argues that men have evolved to have considerable strength in their upper torsos. They often use this in combat, and sport was developed as a way to channel physical aggression into less harmful behaviour. For football to prevent men from using their arms and hands is simply perverse, making it the sports equivalent of Irish dancing.
The spectator sports favoured by most Australians suggest we see things pretty much as the Americans do. This is not a football nation, and the state premiers should think again about their support for holding the World Cup.
