The Persistent Enigma ofAmerican Football

During my entire life, the irrelevance of football in the U.S. has left me wondering how, with so many people on this planet, the most popular sport in the world can be so secondary and dull in the land of Lincoln. In my case, there are personal reasons that leave me amazed with this unusual phenomenon, since my passion for football is inextricably linked to North American history.

Indeed, I fell in love with the game, thanks to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist witch hunt. If he had not pursued my leftist father — an Argentine official of the U.N. — forcing our family to flee from New York to Chile in 1954, it is likely that today I would still prefer the sports played in my 10 years of uninterrupted Yankee childhood: baseball, basketball and “bellicose football.” But fate decreed that I was seduced by the Castilian language, the Chilean revolution, by a lady in particular and of course, the splendor of football. When I clumsily tried to compete at the late age of 12 in the fields of Santiago with players who have played ball since infancy, I came to resent the absence of this sport at my Manhattan schools. This will change, I murmured to myself; it must change one day. Americans, with their preeminence in so many other athletic activities, cannot ever give away a game as beautiful, precise and unpredictable as this gloriously fierce dance of the human body.

I was encouraged to find a less abysmal situation when we became exiled victims again, and I returned to live in the U.S. during the 1980s. “Soccer,” as the Americans call it, started to become professional, thanks to the 1977 performance of Pele of the Cosmos Club, and millions of young Americans were already practicing the sport. In fact, for two years I coached the amateur youth team of my youngest son, Joaquín, in Durham, NC. Shortly afterward, in 1991, the young Yankees won the World Championship. In 1994, the men’s World Cup was played in nine fervent U.S. cities. In 2002, the U.S. team advanced to the quarterfinals in South Korea, making it appear as if football would become as widespread in the U.S. as it is in other countries. But was this just an illusion? The team — recently fortified by the miraculous goal from Landon Donovan in stoppage time against Algeria — dissipated quickly. After losing in overtime against Ghana, the Yankees had to depart from South Africa, leaving behind them the same question about the failure of American football that devastated me half a century earlier.

There are many things that may clarify this precariousness. Americans always saw themselves as perpetual pioneers, constantly reinventing themselves under newfangled heavens, and their most popular sports are those that have appropriated the more traditional games, modifying their rules drastically. For example, cricket became baseball, rugby became American football and even basketball can be understood as a variation of a sport played by the native peoples of America. But how do we catch the football, and turn it into something that is not football?

The predominance of these more “native” sports prevented “soccer” from winning the necessary space within an academic and professional environment to develop and obtain resources. This in turn blocked soccer’s way to greatness, envisioned by massively impoverished youth, where one’s legs might take the gifted away from the shortfalls of anonymity. American children have the same talent as the boys from the favelas of Rio or the squalid suburbs of Nigeria, but it is channeled into more clearly profitable activities from an early age.

American kids cannot marvel at the wonders of football on television. This makes it impossible for the sport to truly move forward in the U.S., since it removes something that is key to the game itself. All other sporting events paramount among Americans have interludes and interruptions in which commercial messages can flourish, but an irreplaceable attraction of football is the relentless pace of competition from the beginning of the match. As in life itself, it is impossible to stop the clock. This is a standard established so well that the organizers have resisted the almost universal outcry to admit any type of reviews by video, even if the referee makes a blatantly wrong decision that costs some contestants the game. The match continues, no matter who gets hurt. The game is not interrupted to correct errors or to allow for commercial breaks.

Does this set of circumstances mean that soccer in the U.S. is condemned to eternal extinction? History points to two bits of optimism. The first is that the U.S., despite a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, continues to attract millions of citizens from other countries, and these new residents, often illegal, bring in a contraband, undying affection for football. The second is that we are living in an exceptionally historical moment in which the famous North American exceptionalism is making waves.

If Americans are able to abandon the idea of being chosen by God to save the world, if these citizens are open to the fact that they are identical to all other human beings and therefore do not have a clear target or are not necessarily superior or virtuous, then could it be possible for America to someday soon join the rest of the species and celebrate the most beautiful sport of our time with the rest of the world? Or is it inconceivable that within a few decades, this country could finally win the World Cup?