Here is an excerpt from Kissinger's 1986 article on how the different playing styles of the major soccer powers reflect their national personalities. Some editor should get Kissinger to update it to see how much things have changed in 20 years.
World Cup according to Character
The German national team plays the way its general staff prepared for the war; games are meticulously planned, each player skilled in both attack and defense. Intricate pass patterns evolve, starting right in front of the German goal. Anything achievable by human foresight, careful preparation and hard work is accounted for.
And there have been great successes. Of the last six prior World Cups, Germany has won two, was second twice, third once and out of the running only in 1978. At the same time, the German national team suffers from the same disability as the famous Schlieffen plan for German strategy in World War I. There is a limit to human foresight; psychological stress on those charged with executing excessively complex maneuvers cannot be calculated in advance. If the German team falls behind, or if its intricate approach yields no results, its game is shadowed by the underlying national premonition that in the end even the most dedicated effort will go unrewarded, by the nightmare that ultimately fate is cruel ? a nightmare reinforced by the knowledge that the German media are unmerciful when high expectations go unfulfilled. The impression is unavoidable that an outstanding national soccer team has not brought a proportionate amount of joy to a people that may not in its heart of hearts believe joy is the ultimate national destiny. [More]
Tom Piatak responds:
Soccer represents the same sort of insidious threat to the American national character as did the metric system, nearly foisted on us in the dark days of the '70s. Fortunately, we survived that threat, thanks in part to the patriots who filled all road signs giving the speed in kilometers per hour with buckshot.
Soccer is the metric system in short pants. It is the "sport" (if such a word applies to an activity as soporific as a telephone book reading contest) the rest of the world plays, and desperately wants us to play, so we can become like the rest of the world and lose what makes us American. Give it no publicity, lest the real Americans who read your site think they are "supposed" to follow soccer and end up just like the Europeans, rioting and looting out of the sheer boredom generated from watching such a game.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Proud American citizen here, disregard my ethnicity if possible. Fan of your writing, but dislike the typical Anglo bad rep soccer gets. Soccer would have become popular if it was not for the Germanophobia that arose in WWI (the most successful team up to that time was Bethlehem Steel, if I recall the name correctly) and the immigration halt of the 20s that assimilated the turn of the century immigrants - missing out on soccer being one of the few negative side effects on America.
ReplyDeleteProbably due to being raised in a different culture, I have this position. And most likely, so do you. I admire being able to identify with the soccer player, as no other highly collaborative sport is so easy to pick up and yet hard to master. The field, the structure, the scoring, have an art-imitates-life-imitates-art feel to them - feeling of scarcity, promotion and relegation, a fluid pace of play that sometimes crashes or simply grinds dramatically, lots of bad calls (by the way, do feel it is less logical to riot when teams win, as it happens in American sports), hierarchies, teams founded by workers and bourgeois, class, urban, regional divides, you name it. Camus really liked soccer, and he was a goalkeeper to boot.
Perhaps it is less entertainment and more mass fervor - but precisely I'd have thought a race realist who critiques consumerism would be interested in a deeper analysis than "soporific", at least. After all, I have some interest in American sports: the founder of the soccer club I like was an American who also played and encouraged baseball, basketball, and boxing - to the point of allowing club membership on standing in a ring until blood was drawn. And, I am quite interested, among others, by the Green Bay Packers, an NFL club owned by its fans; at how the quarterbacks are predominantly white (even the one who started not standing to the flag, lol); at how baseball can grind for hours and still be loved by even Supreme Court judges; at how NBA players can only be admired on the court and not when they talk politics. And so on...
At any rate, even if we disagree completely, you must admit that if Americans are to field a national team, we might as well field a patriotically good one... and not just the women's. If we don't, we risk giving white liberals a terrible cultural weapon; they are the ones who profit off of the current state, preferring to focus on beer gardens and rainbow flags at stadiums instead of finding and encouraging talent (not just mooching off of parents). Specially terrible is for many newcomers to see such a terrible men's team and decide to keep rooting for their older flags... think about that.
Regards.