Roundabout: Soccer, Shootings, Senate, FOOTBALL

In which Josh takes a brief spin around the bloggable items in his head this evening.

Soccer

Rob tipped me off yesterday to the latest English column critical of MLS and its handling of David Beckham, by Martin Samuel of The Times. Unlike most of its genre, though, it’s actually well-thought-out (which I would expect, since it was Rob that sent it to me) and merits a response.

I can confess to being at least as confused as Samuel at the post-Beckham proliferation of coverage of MLS in the English press. The league is getting better and pulling in more stars, but it’s barely more newsworthy in the English context than, say, the Portuguese or Greek domestic leagues. They care about Beckham’s fitness for international play, and that’s all, which is fair; the variety of Premiership jerseys in my closet is entirely based on the wanderings of Claudio Reyna, Brad Friedel and Tim Howard. But the other problem is that, since Beckham plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy, the public face of MLS management in Britain is Alexi Lalas. For those of you not up on your American soccer history, consider Lalas as GM the equivalent of your favorite team in another sport hiring, say, David Wells, Sterling Sharpe, or Jeremy Roenick. He’s always been an entertaining commentator because he’s opinionated and unconcerned with public reaction. But that doesn’t make him an intelligent manager, and does make him an awful ambassador. I’ve said all along that I don’t mind having Beckham in MLS, it’s just a shame he had to go to such an incompetent organization as L.A. The image Lalas projects to an international audience is why.

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PI: Would you like some elitism with your soccer?

Steven Wells’s Guardian blog entry this morning on English attitudes toward American soccer provoked a rather visceral reaction from this quarter. Of course, provocation was his goal, calling out traditionalists as xenophobic “little-Englanders” simply afraid that resurgent U.S. soccer could displace Britain from yet another field in which it regarded dominance as its birthright (capitalism, naval warfare, etc.). And he might have a point.

But it takes chutzpah to condemn prejudice in one paragraph and in the next type this:

Public toilets, atheism, publicly funded radio and association football - these are all things of which no society can have too much. Witness the fact that soccer-playing America is massively liberal, loving, caring, socially conscious and nice. While soccer-hating America consists of increasingly isolated gangs of Bush- supporting, bible-bashing, gun-crazed, dungaree wearing, banjo-playing, quasi-fascist chicken-lovers and their twelve fingered, pin-headed, cyclopic, drooling monster children.

Bias and hyperbole aside, he inadvertently touched on a key conflict of English-speaking American soccer fanhood — one that was easily observable during the 2006 World Cup, when U.S. political blogs that otherwise condemn spectator team sports as low culture (and don’t even ask about NASCAR) professed sudden admiration for a European-based game. Soccer has an internationalist cachet in America that no other sport can match; that self-identification was virtually irresistible to the young, urban, well-travelled and politically alienated.

But if soccer support in English-speaking America becomes strongly associated with the cultural elitism of urban left-wing Euro-wannabes, the sport’s commercial horizon is awfully close.

Can MLS succeed as a niche product for this fanbase plus the Hispanic market? At its current scale, perhaps — it’s a well-off demographic. And maybe that’s fine. But if MLS wants to overtake the National Hockey League and join the top ranks of North American sport, it needs to be accessible to the casual fan who’d just as soon go to a baseball or American football game. That won’t happen if you have to buy a whole set of cultural assumptions with your ticket, when you’d rather just have a hot dog and a beer.

This post constituted my first entry over at PitchInvasion.net, a new blog hosted by Thomas Dunmore focusing on soccer fan culture. Give it a read — it’s well worth your while.

Post out of tune

As I write this, George Allen is holding onto a twelve thousand-vote lead in the Virginia Senate race. He might win, he might not. I’m sick of him either way, I just didn’t want to put the Democrats in control of the Senate.

The Washington Post needs a good kicking, though, for its treatment of Virginia regionalism in the final weeks of the campaign. Sunday’s inset under the front page banner headline, titled Md., Va. Challengers’ Fate May Depend on Inner Suburbs’ Muscle, was perhaps the most clear in its arrogant dismissal of downstate opinions as relevant to the national picture.

In the case of Northern Virginia, dramatic growth and changing political attitudes that set it more in tune with the rest of the country than the rest of Virginia are vital to Democrat James Webb’s challenge of Republican Sen. George Allen.

Let’s do a little bit of math here, starting from estimates of a basically even country and state (which seem obvious). I’m going to slightly overstate Northern Virginia’s size for the sake of estimation, and call it 1/3 of the state’s population. I’ll further estimate that downstate is roughly 60-40 Republican, which puts them 10% out of sway with an even country. If that’s the case, downstate Republicans are 40% (3/5 * 2/3 == 6/15) of the state, and downstate Dems are about 27% (2/5 * 2/3 == 4/15). To make up for this kind of a split and get it to even, Northern Virginia has to go 70/30 to the Democrats (NoVA R: 1.5/15 or 10% of the state; NoVA D 3.5/15 or 23%).

To boil that down: NoVA is considerably less than half the state’s population. If the state is even, and NoVA is to provide an even counterweight at a statewide level to the Republican downstate, NoVA has to be MUCH more disproportionately blue than the rest of the Commonwealth is red. The country would have to be 55% Democratic to make this kind of divergence even (15 points either way). It’s not.

So, Posties, give us a break with the superiority crap. NoVA isn’t more in tune with the rest of the country, it’s just more in tune with the rest of your country — which doesn’t appear to stretch much more than 100 miles or so from the tracks of the Northeast Corridor.

More Randomness!

The Fill BTN With Random Stuff ‘06 campaign continues this week, as we again wander North America through the text of a blog.

Up in the True North, Canadians elected a Conservative government for the first time since 1993 on Monday. Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper immediately provoked a minor spat with the USA by announcing plans to outfit three new naval icebreakers for Arctic duty; Canada claims sovereignty between the lines of longitude of its northernmost points of land all the way up to the North Pole, a claim generally ignored by everyone else on the planet; the Arctic was a submariners’ playground throughout the Cold War, and various countries have continued to sail below the icepack since. For my money, this is, as usual for Canada, a domestic political play thinly disguised as a foreign-policy dispute. Firing off a few small-caliber shots at America never hurt a Canadian pol, and Harper is in a tenuous position as the leader of a minority right-wing government that will have to work point-by-point coalitions with three opposing left-wing parties: the traditional rival Liberals who they forced out of power, the wacky near-socialist New Democrats, and the separatist Bloc Québécois. The Liberals in particular knocked Harper off in 2004 by trying to paint him as “George W. Bush-lite”, and cut into a once-big Tory lead this year the same way; being mildly irritating to us before he even gets into office is probably sound strategy. It’s vaguely disappointing, but Harper merits withholding judgement for now; if he can stay away from the spite that characterized Canadian Liberal governments’ transborder relations, he’ll be a major upgrade for both countries.

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Katrina Sidenotes

I’m going to hit some side issues to the hurricane/flood disaster down on the Gulf Coast, because I’m not sure my thoughts on the direct situation will be helpful to anyone involved. I’ll just suggest heading over to UMCOR or the American Red Cross, breaking out the plastic and skipping a few meals out this month.

One of the key points of conflict on the governmental response has been the functionality of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Questions have especially been raised over whether its capabilities were reduced as a result of its post-9/11 alignment as a component of the Department of Homeland Security. Some people are suggesting that FEMA be returned to its Clinton-era status as an independent Cabinet-level agency.