One word sums up the article written in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues in 2012, OUTDATED. American soccer history has had many major benchmarks and breakthroughs to “average Americans”, but the one that put soccer on the cover of newspapers, and forever in the mind of casual American sports fans is the signing of David Beckham to the LA Galaxy in 2007. I believe that American soccer history can be broken up into two periods, Pre-Beckham and Post-Beckham. Although this article was posted in 2012, the author did not use a single piece of evidence from the Post-Beckham era. In fact, his only mention of the 2010 World Cup came in the conclusion of the article.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahTl_MI9bS4

This video shows Puyol and Xavi, two reknowned players for Spain, celebrating their victory of the World Cup with the senyera.  The senyera is the red and yellow flag and represents the nation of Catalunya, so it is really interesting to see it appear, while the players are celebrating a win for all of Spain.  It is really cool to see how politicized football has been over time in Spain.

Buffington does a great job of defining national culture and its construction and does a fascinating examination of the role of soccer in the US.  He describes national identity saying that:

“These assertions often evince the notion of national singularity through reference to two intertwined themes: internal homogeneity and external difference. The claim of internal homogeneity emphasizes collective similarities over domestic variation by highlighting what members of a national community share, such as common history, traditions, sense of place, and other mutual experiences (McClintock, 1997).” (pg. 136-7)

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U.S. Ambivalence Toward the World Cup and American Nationalism

Given the preeminent role that mass media plays in both the formation of national communities and dissemination of international sporting events, it is not surprising that this well- developed body of literature on sport and national identity has often taken texts created by the media as a primary source of data.

Reaction: Mass media is very important to nationalism because everyone watches television or reads the newspaper so it is easy to build nationalism.

National Identity and Sport

Sports helps you to express yourself in a public place which makes you feel like your part a larger community when you see others who are routing for the same team. Media helps by to enhance this feeling by the language that they use along with the visual.

Question: How can sports provide a particular potent site for national groups to articulate the way they prefer to represent themselves and to be seen by relevant others?

National Sporting Styles

Nationality is often invoked through the allocation of sporting style. This comes with the playing style, tactics and skills that differentiate teams.

What binds the representation of teams and fans together is the tendency to present style as a characteristic of that nation more generally. In this sense, collective performance and shared understandings of sport become framed as indicative, or “indexical” (Blain & O’Donnell, 1998, p. 369), of broader behavioral and mental patterns thought to be rooted in national identity.

American Exceptionalism

the reason for soccer not being popular in the united states can be because of the other sports that crowded it out. Another is that soccer does not hold the same cultural significance as it does in many other parts of the world.

TIFO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iLL57puZPM

U.S. Ambivalence Toward the World Cup and American Nationalism

-Through the lack of media attention, the World Cup is a “neglected subject” which fails to be recognized as a factor of national identity in the US.

-“Previous research has interpreted similar stories on American ambivalence toward soccer as an accurate reflection of the sport’s low cultural valence, adding it to a list of other ‘American exceptionalisms’”.

National Identity and Sport

-The US wanted to use the claim of external differences and chose not to emphasize the importance of soccer in order to establish their individuality from other nations.

-Although it is interesting that in the US, soccer is now becoming a much more prominent sport as the MLS is drastically expanding and players from Europe are now joining clubs in the US as they become older.

National Sporting Styles

-The manners in which a club plays, wins, and loses are indicative of the identity of its nation

Differentiating us from them: The United States versus the world

-The game of soccer was perceived in a very passionate and extreme manner in countries throughout the world, but must have seemed rather controversial when the US had games such as Football.

– While support for the US national team grew only upon realizing that the team in the 2002 World Cup did better than expected, was the media really behind the rationale of Americans generally being unenthused with soccer?

-In the US is “life will go on as normal, while the rest of the world goes crazy over the World Cup”

-It seems as though Americans were reluctant to approve of soccer due to the fact that it seemed foreign and they did not wish to conform to the rest of the world.

Representing Sport Fandom as National Culture

-It is difficult to represent the interest of soccer in America based on how “passionate” the people interviewed were.

-The US attempted to use technology as a means of facilitating the formation of their national identity.

http://www.mlssoccer.com/history/season/2000

This is an article I found online that is basically a recap of the 2000 MLS season, I thought it would be important to share because this was the first time the MLS decided to split into three conferences instead of playing the season with an Eastern vs Western structure. while this idea didn’t work and the MLS was forced to go back to having only two conferences I thought it showed the level of confidence MLS executives had in the league being successful and continuing to grow.