Common Heritage, Uncommon Fate : Soccer and Football Share Similar Roots, but World Cup Notwithstanding, World’s Most Popular Game Will Never Catch American Version in This Country
The country that gave us Joe Montana, Michael Jordan and Nolan Ryan will be overrun by anonymous soccer players next summer in a monthlong test of America’s notorious indifference to the international pastime.
In the end, most Americans will remain unmoved. Soccer isn’t their game. But the World Cup is like an elephant in the front yard, so big that everyone notices.
And it is the 1994 World Cup tournament, soccer’s quadrennial jubilee, that is heading for Pasadena and eight other U.S. cities to showcase the best of the athletes who play ball with their feet.
There are two matters to consider:
--Can a World Cup in America, bringing in teams from 24 countries, be as successful as the soccer community envisions?
--Can it be as influential? That is, will it lead to big things here afterward, creating widespread American interest and demands for a national soccer league?
Today’s projections:
1: The World Cup will be recognized as one of the biggest sports events in American history, perhaps the biggest. Profits will be in the millions, viewers in the billions. Even in this country, there will be sports fans who tune in to see what the kicking and hooliganism are all about.
“We have nearly 3.6 million tickets to sell, and we’ll sell them all,” Alan Rothenberg, chairman of World Cup USA, said the other day at his Los Angeles office.
2: After the World Cup, Americans will remain largely unimpressed with soccer, rejecting it as they did once before.
Soccer was the national pastime of both England and the United States at the same time in the early years of the 19th Century, before baseball took over here.
But because U.S. sportsmen didn’t like it, they converted soccer into the game the world knows now as American football, and they did it the American way: with revolutionary changes in the soccer rule book, more than 700 so far.
Thus, life in America after the World Cup seems likely to trouble such soccer realists as Clive Toye, a New York promoter.
“The problem has always been: What happens when the circus leaves town?” Toye told a group of Eastern writers.
It’s an old problem.
The soccer circus first left America well over a century ago, in the late 1860s, when it wasn’t greatly mourned by the players who eased it out while gradually building a new game.
But until the early 1860s, when London’s Football Assn. codified the rules of soccer at a convention in a Queen Street pub, soccer was still the favored game here, too.
In the fall months, it was the only game that U.S. colleges played until the players, who had learned it from their British cousins and uncles, began to change it.
The changes were all made by student-athletes at Princeton, Harvard and other Eastern colleges. They apparently wanted a livelier pastime.
In the first major revision of the rules, Princeton’s 1860s teams, dissatisfied with 1-0 and 0-0 results, defined the winning side as the first to score six goals.
America’s famous first intercollegiate football game, won by Rutgers over Princeton in 1869, 6-4, was basically a soccer game with the six-goal rule.
Although that rule didn’t last, other changes did. And in time, the students, as they continued to tinker with soccer and its successor here, rugby, produced a different game.
Making changes yearly during decades of experimenting, they developed and then authorized ballcarrying plays, forward passes, blocking and tackling, a vital scrimmage process, a four-down possession rule, and the many other appendages that make football what it is.
That make it unique.
*
In the evolution of soccer into American football--a long development period that lasted through the brief American rugby era in the 1870s--no coach or college administrator played any role, according to a turn-of-the-century rules committee member, Parke H. Davis.
In a 1911 book, “Football,” Davis summed up: “The native genius of the young American for invention was (decisive).”
As one development followed another, Davis noted, the student geniuses discarded everything about soccer except its British name, football--which still survives, both in America and Britain, identifying two different games.
Hence, World Cup promoters, planning boldly for 1994, are out to reverse the tide of history.
Can they do it? Just because Americans turned it down once, is big league soccer still off limits here?
Soccer’s leaders, unhappily for them, will find that it is.
They are appealing to a new generation, true, but 20th-Century Americans, in their zest for scoring action--for touchdown passes and slam dunks and home runs--clearly resemble those who originated American football so long ago.
Although, conceivably, soccer will make some gains some day, it will never be a threat to football.
“Soccer is a nonviolent aerobic sport,” said Kevin Starr, professor of urban history and planning at USC. “So it would be nice to think it will (challenge football). But the fact is, it’s not part of the American temperament.
“Sport acts out the deeper dimensions of a culture. And for (that reason), I suspect that soccer won’t take root here in the sense that football has.”
Considered the foremost authority in his field, Starr said it was understandable that for more than a century, the soccer-loving British people would hang onto their traditional pastime, year after year, while Americans were tailoring the identical game into something more violent, intellectual and dramatic.
“British soccer fans are a (product) of their society,” the historian said. “They have had a stable, class-bound society with a solid working class for more than 100 years. You leave school after the eighth grade as your father did, you live in the same house all your life, you play the same game.
“In America, we have more fluidity, and we don’t have class rules. American football was created by people who, after the eighth grade, attended high school and then college. It was created in the colleges by middle-class and upper-class people who had the leisure to do it.”
As a consequence, it is the world’s most complex game. There is nothing in soccer, for example, like fourth and one.
*
The surviving evidence is indicative that the athletes who developed American football in the 1860s, ‘70s and ‘80s--Walter Camp and the other college students--were wholly different in outlook from contemporary Britons, or even modern Britons.
U.S. athletes of that era were representative of a dynamic, newly settled country. They were more adventurous, imaginative, creative and self-confident than their European cousins and uncles--the ones who decided to stay put instead of migrating to the new world.
And, among other things, those 19th-Century Americans concluded that it was senseless to go on playing a game with the least-skillful parts of the body--the feet.
They preferred to use a hand, an arm or a fist to make a point.
They would have loved the leaping, gravity-defying adventurers of 1990s basketball.
Still, even today there are Americans who love soccer, too, Rothenberg among them.
“The skill level is fantastic in (championship) soccer,” he said. “And it’s even more incredible that they do it with their feet.
“Soccer is a game of anticipation. (Low) scoring is not an issue. The style of play is the concern--(whether) they play aggressively. It isn’t the number of goals, it’s the times your heart is in your throat that counts. The fewer goals there are, the more precious.”
Well, maybe.
But no one could sell that thought to the developers of American football: the enterprising young students who were related, psychologically, to the flinty industrial entrepreneurs who in the same era made modern America.
And selling it today will be harder.
From Soccer to Football
Landmark dates and events in the evolution of soccer into modern American football: * 1640. FIRST BRITISH SOCCER GAME. Site: Westminster Abbey, London. * 1795. U.S. TOWN-TEAM ERA. Unlimited numbers of villagers, facing each other across an imaginary line between towns, seek to win by kicking a ball into the other team’s town. * 1810. U.S. SOCCER ERA. Begins with intramural games at Harvard and other Eastern schools. * 1820. FIRST U.S. RULE BOOK. Written at Princeton by student-athletes who borrow the key rules generally in use in British soccer--then and now. In particular, carrying the ball is forbidden, and only one scoring play is provided for: one point for kicking a ball between two posts. * 1860. FIRST BREAK WITH BRITISH SOCCER. Princeton, dissatisfied with low-scoring games, specifies that the winning team shall be the first to kick six goals between goal posts 25 feet apart. * 1869. FIRST INTERCOLLEGIATE FOOTBALL GAME. Rutgers defeats Princeton, 6 goals to 4. Except for the six-goal rule, it is basically British soccer with 25-man sides. * 1871. OVER IS IN. It counts as a goal if the ball is kicked either over or under the crossbar. * 1872. FIRST RUNNERS. A prophetic Harvard change permits “any player to catch or pick up the ball and run with it if pursued by an opponent (but) only so long as pursued.” * 1875. UNDER IS OUT. To count as a goal, the ball must be kicked over the crossbar. * 1875. RUNNING IS IN. Among America’s student-athletes, running with the ball is now general. * 1876. RUGBY IS IN. America abandons soccer entirely--except for its British name, football--and adopts Britain’s basic 1871 Rugby Union rule book. Running with the ball legalized. Fifteen-man sides. * 1878. SCRIMMAGING IN. American football players, already ignoring the new rule book, originate a line-of-scrimmage process allowing the side with the ball to keep it until it is fumbled or kicked. * 1880. MILESTONE RULES. U.S. rules committee belatedly approves two landmark changes originated earlier by student-players: eleven-man sides and the new scrimmage process. These revisions mark the end of rugby’s brief term as America’s pastime. * 1881. THREE DOWNS. The new scrimmage rule is revised to require that the side with the ball gain five yards in three downs to keep possession. This is the definitive change in the evolution of soccer into football. * 1883. SCORING SYSTEM AUTHORIZED. A scheme mandating two points for a touchdown--along with four points for a conversion and five for a field goal--reflects the merit that American players continue to see in rugby’s big plays. * 1906. FORWARD PASS LEGALIZED. * 1911. MODERN SCORING SYSTEM. After the rules committee had altered the scoring formula five times in three decades, U.S. teams recommend the change that has lasted: six points for a touchdown, one for a conversion, three for a field goal. Soccer continues with one scoring play, a one-point play. * 1912. FOUR DOWNS. The precedent-setting 1881 scrimmage rule is amended to require that the side with the ball gain 10 yards in four downs to keep possession. * 1918. MORE RECEIVERS. Ends as well as backs are now eligible to catch forward passes. The same name, football, continues to be used by Americans and foreigners, although, by now, they’re playing different games. * 1993. HASHMARK CHANGE. In college ball this season, the hashmarks will be moved in to sites 60 feet from the nearest sideline. This rule has evolved typically. In an earlier era, the ball could be, and often was, placed an inch from the sideline.
--Sources: Encyclopedia of Football (Treat, 1952), Sports Encyclopedia (Neft, 1971), History of Pro Football (Claasen, 1963), Football (Jones, 1936), Football (Davis, 1911), (NCAA (1992-93).
Scoring Evolution
The 350-year development of American football since the first soccer game in 1640 is reflected in the sport’s many scoring changes. Here are the points awarded over the years for field goals, touchdowns, points after touchdowns and safeties.
Year FG TD PAT S 1640-a 1 0 0 0 1869-b 1 0 0 0 1883 5 2 4 1 1884 5 4 2 2 1897 5 4 1 2 1904 4 5 1 2 1909 3 5 1 2 1912 3 6 1 2 1958 3 6 2-c 2
a--First soccer game, played in Westminster Abbey, London, when soccer was known as football. b--Rutgers vs. Princeton, America’s first intercollegiate football game, when soccer was still known as football. c--Optional in college football.
