Soccer Can’t Make It Here : There Are Too Many Goalkeepers, Too Much Defense; Patriotism Counts Only During World Cup

Not even three months after the World Cup dominated U.S. sports pages, soccer has once again dipped low in the American consciousness.

Now, soccer is trying to organize a major league here.

It won’t work.

At World Cup time last summer, some Americans were caught up in a passing fancy. There was a fleeting interest in a sport that will never make it in this country for these, among other reasons:

* Although it’s a good children’s sport--appealing to many youngsters in America and other lands--U.S. adults are mostly turned off by the low-scoring games.

* Soccer’s global popularity is based partially on strains of nationalism and patriotism that aren’t transferable to regular-season U.S. sports.

* You don’t reach out to America with a defensive game that stars goalkeepers.

* American fans, used to the eye-hand skills of football, basketball and baseball players, can’t relate to athletes who are forced to play ball with their feet.

It seems clear that those who govern soccer, with the exception of Alan Rothenberg, are people without much vision.

In a case of leadership breakdown, they failed to take advantage of the World Cup euphoria here, when, anticipating a baseball strike, they failed to barnstorm America with some kind of soccer series. The opportunity was golden, and missed.

With that, they might have changed a few minds. Not many, to be sure. But they didn’t even give it a shot.

SOCCER TOO FRUSTRATING FOR THOSE WITH OPTIONS

Soccer won’t make it in America because it’s the most irritating of all the world’s games, including golf, which frustrates only those who play it. Soccer drives almost everybody nuts.

Perhaps the familiar fan violence of soccer--other than planned hooliganism--arises in large part from the kind of game it is: an incredibly low-scoring game that vexes most spectators.

And nothing can be done about it, short of a massive overhaul reminiscent of U.S. reaction years ago, when, with 700 rule changes, Americans built football out of soccer--which at first had been their national pastime, too.

In sports stadiums everywhere, soccer still requires that crowds sit or stand indefinitely, interminably, longing for a goal that might never be scored. And as they wait for the merest bit of scoring action, they grow more irritable by the minute.

The nature of an American game is incomparably different.

Points. Touchdowns. Runs batted in: More often than not, one of these is the result of the great moments of tactical and strategic maneuvering.

Soccer also has those brilliant mid-game moments--but without the payoff.

Americans demand a payoff.

U.S. PATRIOTS LIKE WORLD GAMES--NOT THIS GAME

Soccer won’t make it in America because there aren’t enough international tournaments.

When the prize is the world championship, all sports competition seems important to much of America--but that interest doesn’t transfer to a soccer game matching U.S. teams.

That has been shown many times.

Except for the major U.S. team sports, boxing, and the various kinds of racing, large numbers of U.S. fans typically pay attention to sports only when an American entry can compete internationally, in, for example, an Olympic or World Cup event.

As Raider Coach Art Shell said the other day, “I was into the World Cup when the U.S. was still in it. I was rooting for us.”

That month, across America, it was the same. And the spirit was the same in most countries.

Patriotism does that.

Though sometimes mentioned as a spur to World Cup appeal, patriotism has been greatly underestimated. It is by far the primary explanation for worldwide World Cup fondness.

Remember:

--Although World War II and the 1991 Gulf War were on a different scale, they had this in common: Most Americans were opposed to participating in either until their country was involved, after which they were overwhelmingly supportive.

--Although ice hockey stirs comparatively few Americans, many of them rank one particular hockey game up there with the major sporting events of the 20th Century: the U.S.-USSR matchup at Lake Placid in 1980, when the United States won in an upset.

“To side with one’s countrymen is instinctive,” British social scientist H.G. Wells observed.

Demonstrably, patriotic Americans care when a soccer game involves the U.S. vs. Colombia. But not when it’s Chicago vs. Kansas City.

TO RETAIN PUBLIC SPORTS INTEREST: DEFUSE DEFENSE

Soccer won’t make it in America because so many U.S. sports fans deem it a feet-focused, defensive game.

It’s an ancient game with ancient, changeless rules, and its coaches and players take advantage of that.

They habitually tend to fortify defense and depress offensive artistry--which, in the U.S. opinion, is doing things backward.

To Americans, sports action means offense, plays that lead to scoring by such gifted athletes as Jerry Rice, Ken Griffey or Shaquille O’Neal.

But despite their great talent, America’s numerous sports stars can’t do it without periodic alterations in the structure of their game.

In any sport, defense dominates unless artificially restrained.

As a consequence, U.S. sports leaders constantly seek a balance of defense and offense, retooling regularly.

* The NBA has been fighting defensive muggers with proposed changes in the three-point basket and other rules.

* NFL leaders promoted an immediate increase in touchdowns this fall with another round of rule changes designed to give their offensive artists more running room.

* Baseball, which revises few rules, again updated the game’s mechanism this year, apparently allowing the strike zone to shrivel up some more in a continuing effort to control pitching. One result: an avalanche of home runs and runs batted in during what was one of baseball’s great seasons, while it lasted.

Each year, by comparison, soccer changes nothing. Its basic rules were last updated 130 years ago at a famous convention in a London pub.

SOCCER IS REPAIRABLE, BUT TRADITION GETS IN THE WAY

Soccer won’t make it in America without enlightened leaders who see that their game is built around a monstrous thorn--the goalkeeper--who plays an overpowering role in the scoreless ties.

Goalkeeping is an incessant drag on soccer as a spectator sport--and on ice hockey, too, not to mention every other game that puts a player in goal.

It happens every week: Clusters of excellent soccer players can be seen doing everything they did right last week, when, repeatedly, they brought the ball down the field with great skill and nursed it in, winning a big game, 1-0. But this time, there’s a quicker goalkeeper.

Result: 0-0.

The star of the game isn’t the world-class striker who can do everything with his feet except tie shoelaces. The star is a young man whose mission in life is to hang around a gate and see that great athletes don’t get in.

Accordingly, soccer’s leadership faces one major challenge: summoning the courage to abolish goalkeepers.

There are dozens, hundreds, of ways to score points that are more sensible and more appealing than having to get a ball past a goaltender.

Basketball found one way. In its earliest days, the first basket was a box that was put on the floor. When defenses responded predictably, stationing a goaltender there, the game’s American inventors reacted at once, hanging a peach basket above his head, then passing a rule against goaltending.

That ended that.

Soccer’s international leaders could, if they chose, respond in kind. They have some alternatives. They could, for instance, replace the goalkeeper and his cage with a three-foot-by-three-foot box on a post several feet high.

A goal would be a kicked ball or header ringing a chime as it hit the box.

If that seems too much an American solution, it should be noted that Americans allow goalkeepers in some of their sports, too.

But in most of those sports, there are almost as many spectators as goalkeepers.

Therefore, to win over America, soccer’s starting point has to be a realization that goalkeeping is one of the game’s two unacceptable detriments. The other is the massing of defensive players in front of the goal to help the goalie blot out all shots.

In a typical recent instance, that made great strategy and atrocious theater, enabling weaker Italy to take Brazil to 0-0 in a game for the world championship.

If that sort of soccer is deplorable, it’s also repairable. All leadership needs to do is change some rules.

The game’s international leaders would, however, have a problem with that.

What handicaps them is that creativity was in such short supply everywhere in the age when soccer evolved so long ago.

The earliest soccer players were undemanding, poorly paid laborers, easily satisfied, making it easy for a simple, unimaginative game to get under way. And tradition has kept things as they were.

By contrast, the American games, baseball, football and basketball, were invented by people who had the courage and imagination to leave Europe in the first place, many to escape its traditions. In the New World, creativity was prized.

In Europe and Latin America, soccer players still learn almost everything there is to learn about their simple game as kids, and in time, as adults, they are still guided by those earliest traditions and remembrances.

U.S. youngsters--tomorrow’s football and basketball coaches and players--grow up reading about rule changes, and experiencing, first-hand, the game’s constant stream of improvements.

The tradition in America is to break tradition. So America plays ever-changing forms of football, basketball and baseball.

In other countries, the tradition is to do today what they did yesterday, so they play soccer.