Dear Typical American Sports Fan: I know you must think you have
it pretty good right now, what with college football consuming your
Saturdays, the NFL taking care of Sundays and Mondays, the World
Series interspersed throughout the week, and basketball raring to
go. These are all good things, but you’re missing out.
It’s as simple as that. Sure, football and baseball and
basketball are all pretty cool and quite satisfactory diversions
from the perils of reality, but there’s more. I’m
talking real football (soccer, as we Yanks call it), the beautiful
game. It’s the most popular sport in the world, and with good
reason. Well, a good number of reasons actually. Here I humbly
submit five for your approval, which, if embraced, could quite
enjoyably transform the landscape of American sports.
1. Relegation/promotion: This is without question my favorite
concept in European soccer. Every season, the three teams with the
fewest points in the league get sent down to a lower league (with
much less prestige) for the following season. It’s kind of
like being sent to the minors, but it happens to the entire team.
It’s a collective punishment for a job poorly done.
Correspondingly, the three teams with the most points in the lower
league get bumped up a level. That’s not as fun. Think about
it. Relegation is the ultimate slap in the face for an
organization. It’s like saying, “You guys suck too much
to play up here. We don’t want to bother with you next
season.” The ramifications are awesome. In the last few weeks
of every season, the bottom five or so teams are literally fighting
for their survival (and financial future) in a relegation battle.
This transforms matches featuring the league’s worst teams
into truly compelling stuff. Considering the American implications
of such a system is an exercise in pure, unadulterated joy.
Baseball? See you later, Tampa Bay, Kansas City and the Cubs.
Football? Miami, Arizona and Detroit, it’s been nice knowing
you. Basketball? The league will be better off without Portland,
New York and Atlanta anyway. The prospect of relegation keeps
things fresh and dynamic, and I would love to see Matt
Leinart’s face when he learned that his Cardinals were headed
for the drop. Of course, this system would require some reshuffling
and a creative fashioning of lower leagues and divisions, but it
would be so worth it in the end. Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats
a relegation battle.
2. The commentators: Nothing beats a relegation battle, but the
announcers come close. Ask people who their heroes are and
you’ll hear the same tired answers over and over again.
Abraham Lincoln. Martin Luther King, Jr. Mahatma Gandhi. Mother
Teresa. Ask me? Ally McCoist. John Motson. Andy Gray. Clive
Tyldesley. These men are some of the finest soccer commentators in
the world, known best to me for their work in the FIFA video game
series, and known best throughout Europe for their work as real
live commentators. Sometimes I struggle to understand exactly what
they are saying, but it all just sounds so much better in the
British accent. Take, for example, the phrase, “He just wants
to score goals.” Pronounced in an American accent, it’s
just okay. But add the British flavor and maybe an exclamation
point, and you’ve got the stuff that dreams are made of. And
perhaps the greatest thing about their announcing style is that you
can use it on just about anything. Your roommate moves from his
chair to his bed to read? In the accent, it sounds more like:
“Well, uh, he’s found something clearly unsatisfactory
with the chair and he’s made his way for the bed. Really
cracking stuff we have here…” I feel American sporting
events need to institute a quota of British commentators,
regardless of their purported knowledge. It’s just something
that needs to happen.
3. FanZone: So there’s this show on Fox Soccer Channel
called FanZone. It’s shown once a week and it might be one of
the best shows on television. FanZone takes two (perhaps
inebriated) fans of rival teams and allows them to do commentary
for a match between their teams. Hilarity ensues. I’ve read
columns before that have claimed this would most certainly work in
America, yet it still hasn’t been done. Why not?
4. Cups: One of my favorite things about soccer is that it
combines two essential elements of sport, both rewarding teams for
their performance over the course of the entire season and mixing
in a playoff element. In American sports, a team can get hot at the
end of the season, sneak into the playoffs, and then steamroll its
way to a championship, while another team that has had prolonged
success over the duration of the season could catch an unlucky
break and then have nothing to show for its efforts. Here’s
what happens in the English Premier League. There are 38 league
matches, and the team with the most points at the end of those
matches is the league champion. The first match matters just as
much as the 38th, and that’s pretty special. Additionally,
there are a number of cups that teams compete for. In England, a
team can compete for the Football Association (FA) Cup, the Carling
Cup and the Champions League trophy (a Europe-wide tournament).
These are generally single-elimination tournaments. The FA Cup, for
example, is a tournament featuring teams from every division of
professional English soccer, and it allows for some of the most
stunning upsets in sport. Imagine if the Bakersfield Blaze beat the
New York Yankees. It’s kind of like that.
5. A delightfully fickle media: Remember when Wayne Rooney
bought his fiancee an elephant for Christmas? I do, because the
British media reported it. Remember when a member of the media
posed as a Saudi sheikh and duped Sven-Goran Eriksson into
discussing something he shouldn’t have discussed? That was
fun. Remember when we thought Thierry Henry was leaving Arsenal
because his brother’s girlfriend’s sister’s dog
barked so? Me neither. But you get the point. The British media
seems to have no shame, and I have a good time with it. In America,
sports media in particular seems to take itself much too seriously.
It’s sports. It’s fun. Let’s report about
elephants. And let’s get ready for some real football. You
won’t regret it.
E-mail Regan at dregan@media.ucla.edu.