Why Doesn't America Love Soccer?

Why isn't soccer as big in America as in the rest of the world?

After all, the game can be 90+ minutes of sheer cardiac arrest! In the 2010 World Cup opening round, that's what happened to Team USA's rooters.

Team USA — I call them the Glorious Yanks — scored the only goal scored by either team in its game against Algeria — it was both teams' third and final first-round match — and, instead of being sent home, the Yanks went through into the next round as outright winners in Group C!

One single goal, coming in the first of four minutes of extra time, tacked on to make up for clock stoppages during the ordinary run of play, made all the difference.

Only in a game where anything can happen can the outcome turn on a dime that way. Soccer is a low-scoring game; anything can happen.

Do Americans hate that it's so low-scoring? Yes, I think that's a big part of our resistance to soccer.

But it's low-scoring because of the laws of the game. Take the offside rule. It says that when the attacking team has the ball in the defenders' half of the field and plays the ball forward toward the defenders' goal line, no member of the attacking team shall gain an advantage by being closer to the goal line than anyone on the defending team, other than its goalkeeper. When the ball is played forward, even if you're not the player it's directed toward, you'd better have at least one defender closer to the goal than you ... and the opposing keeper doesn't count.

The offside rule makes it hard to score in soccer. That's what it's there for.

Earlier in the Algeria game, the referee called USA's Clint Dempsey offside when Dempsey scored the apparent first goal of the game. The goal was wiped out.

TV replays showed conclusively that Dempsey was in fact onside at the moment when the ball was played forward in his direction, and the goal should have counted. But it didn't. So, much later, with the score knotted 0-0 in the 91st minute of the game, when the USA goalkeeper thwarted a shot by the Algerians and heaved the ball upfield to star midfielder Landon Donovan, and then twelve seconds later Donovan had put the ball in the opposing net after three other players had touched the ball — including the Algerian goalkeeper — it was pure ecstasy.

It wouldn't have been pure ecstasy if the Dempsey goal had stood.

But for the fact that the game was tied at the time of Donovan's tally, and draws are permitted in the World Cup's first round, it would have been ho hum. If the game had wound up being drawn, though, Slovenia, from Team USA's Group C, would have advanced alongside England, and our men would have been packing their bags for home.

So, yes, had the Dempsey goal stood — as it would have stood if there had been no offside rule — chances are USA would have advanced in a cakewalk of a high-scoring game. USA were clearly the better of the two teams on the pitch that day. What's more, the Algerians were obviously out of gas toward the end, while the superbly conditioned Yanks were still crisp. In the sense that the offside rule puts a damper on scoring by both teams, it helps the lesser team keep from getting blown out by the greater on any given day.

Still, the better team on paper won the USA-Algeria game. Moreover, the team that played better on that given day won the match. Justice was served. Yet the result might so easily have been different, which is why soccer-loving Americans, tiny in numbers, let out a yell that could be heard on the moon when Landon Donovan managed to score that decisive goal.

Americans should love soccer. The game is exquisitely balanced between being too low in scoring and too high. The inferior team sometimes wins — or draws, in games that can be drawn. Justice is not always served.

But that's a good thing! It's why heart-stopping emotion rides on every shot in the most popular sport in the the world, the one that the rest of the world calls "football."