Soccer Ticket Policy Seems Un-American
What would the U.S. Soccer Federation and D.C. United do if, someday, the Queen of England tried to buy tickets to a World Cup game at RFK between the United States and England?
Well, now we know, don’t we?
Should the Queen calls for tickets someday -- “Your majesty, will you be paying by credit card or crown jewel?”--our RFK ticket seller will say something like this. (He’s had plenty of practice.)
“Your Majesty’ doesn’t sound like an American name. May we assume that you’ll be rooting for England?”
“I most assuredly will be.”
“In that case, Your Majesty, we only sell the best tickets at RFK, including all the ones in the lower deck, to pro-American fans. We want to keep our ‘home-field advantage.’ Who knows, you might heave a tiara at our goalie. But we can give you four seats together, top row, upper deck, right next to the Honduran Ambassador.”
Come on, people. Have we lost our minds?
The power brokers of U.S. soccer admit their policy. They stick our soccer visitors in the Frank Howard home run seats. Way up. Last year, Guatemalans got the nose-bleed-seat treatment at a World Cup qualifier. Now, it’s the Hondurans who have been treated shabbily so that, at Saturday’s Cup qualifier, they’ll be few and far away.
Even Honduran Ambassador Hugo Noe Pino couldn’t get a seat anywhere in the lower deck until he found the wife of an aide with an American-sounding name to make the phone call for him. Then plenty of good seats suddenly materialized.
“It’s unfair,” said Pino. “I understand they want to preserve home-field advantage ... but just because they know we are Hondurans, they deny us tickets.”
Darn tootin’, says the U.S. Federation and D.C. United. “Our objective is trying to win this game,” said Kevin Payne, president of D.C. United. “We don’t go anywhere to the depths that other countries go in creating a hostile environment.”
That’s encouraging. What, no bands playing all night outside the Honduran team hotel? How sporting. Why, we probably won’t even throw any bags of urine at Honduran players. Why should we pass up that great Caribbean tradition in both baseball and soccer?
Since when does the United States, in any international competition, stoop to the lowest possible standards of others rather than trying to establish the highest possible standards for ourselves?
Ok, don’t mention the Ryder Cup at The Country Club.
In sports, you need to be careful which road you start to travel. International soccer’s standard has, for many years, been: “No standards.” Before we start to emulate the lowest-common-denominator behavior of world soccer, maybe everybody should read, “Among the Thugs.” A journalist infiltrates one of the many notorious gangs of English soccer hooligans. On arriving at the soccer grounds, he says, “I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants; I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalist social deviants in a frenzy.”
In soccer, this is actually the road MORE traveled. Do we want to start down it?
One local U.S. team supporter, who bought 800 tickets, has started an initiative called “Project Mayhem” to ensure that U.S. foes “do not consider coming to the U.S. for a game a vacation.” Thursday, he planned to give tickets to the fans who gave the most enthusiastic “welcome” to the Honduran team as its flight arrived.
Here’s a fellow after Ted Leonsis’ heart. The Caps owner found ways last spring to screen potential ticket buyers by area or zip code so that Penguins fans could not buy playoff tickets to games at MCI Center on the Internet. The ploy helped the Capitals, who won one of three home playoff games before their annual elimination.
One of the best aspects of American sports is that, in many of our games, we still sell tickets on a first-come, first-served basis. We don’t divide up by nationality or city or ethnicity. Though expensive ticket prices have a de facto class bias. At least to some degree, we allow the ballpark or the stadium be a true melting pot where you never know who you’ll sit beside.
Sometimes, in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium, there are going to be a couple of Red Sox-Yankees fan fist fights. They last about seven seconds. Occasionally, a Redskins fan and Eagles fan may take their discussion to a physical level.
In sports, 99 percent of the time, proximity leads to sanity. You internalize, through games, that people who are very different from you are very similar. They just root for a different team or country. Even in college football, fans of opposing teams sometimes tailgate together. Some even marry each other.
In recent years, U.S. Soccer has been strategizing to improve home-field advantage. Big games against Mexico were scheduled in Columbus, Ohio and Foxboro, Mass., rather than Los Angeles, with its large Mexican population. I can see that choice being made beforehand, but blatantly selling tickets based on the ethnicity of the name of the buyer is about as un-American as it gets.
All around the world, when sports shows its worst face, it is often about excessive nationalism, stereotyping of the opposition and creating a sense of sport-as-warfare. When American sport is working at its best, it subtly teaches people--who think they’re very different from each other--that they’re far more similar than they thought.
Relegating Honduran fans to the upper deck of a stadium, or denying them tickets altogether, goes beyond sport. It’s totally out of line with American egalitarian principles.
What could be more American than walking up to a ticket window, offering your money to watch your team and being given the best available seat that’s left in the stadium?
And what could be less American than walking up to that window, or calling a ticket operator, and being asked, “What did you say your last name was? Who will you be rooting for?”
In this country, we may have to register to vote Republican or Democrat. But at least you don’t have to register--as a Redskin, Terrapin or Wizard fan--before we’re allowed to buy a ticket.
The U.S. Soccer Federation and D.C. United are wrong and should be change their policy. They made a bad decision.
