Futbol Monograph #2
I recently learned an interesting piece of trivia. As everyone knows, only Americans call soccer, ‘soccer’. In other countries it is variously known as football, futbol, fusball, or other variants of foot + ball. It makes sense, since soccer is played with the foot using a ball and American ‘football’ uses neither a foot not a ball – since balls are round. So what does the rest of the world call American football? Actually, I really like their name for it. It is much more descriptive and in fact should be a name preferred by Americans. They call it Gridiron, after the lined-field upon which it is played. Now that is a name for American football! Hard hitting and painful. “Gridiron.” You can just hear the crunch. But even I agree that NGL doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like NFL.
But that isn’t really what I’m writing about today. My second monograph on futbol concerns organization. There are many reasons we love to play and to watch sports. The competition. The excitement. The thrill of not knowing what is going to happen next. It is no accident that sports are so often used as metaphors for rising above the miserable human condition. And of course, we watch because we can imagine ourselves out there being the hero and the superstar, and as children we got enough of a taste for some real empathy to kick in.
In gridiron, however, this imagination rarely rises above the level of a Walter Mitty daydream. Most people aren’t built for gridiron either physically or mentally and the leagues are structured so that only a very select few can run the gamut and emerge unscathed in the big leagues. Not only do genes play a part, but health at the right time, good coaching at the right time, a good team at the right time, and simply being in the right place at the right time, are key factors. Many talented athletes never achieve beyond high school or even club play due to the whims of fate.
Moreover, in gridiron, there is a set team structure. The NFL is at the top with it’s teams followed by college football with its conferences of set teams and then high schools with it’s winners and losers. From year to year this doesn’t change. The good teams vary some as do the bad but the teams are always the same. No matter how bad, the teams that make up the SEC or the Big Ten rarely change no matter how inept they may be. There are perennial favorites of course as well as doormats. How many cellar teams stay there year after miserable year, with no real motivation to improve. Some even learn to wear their annual failure to perform as a badge of honor, claiming academic excellence or commitment to ‘fair play’ whatever that means. Either way, no one wants to see another year of 2009s Detroit Lions. But – sigh – we probably will.
World Futbol is different, and far more exciting. Take the English football league system for example. The English Premier League (EPL) is at the top followed by a number of lesser leagues usually based out of various towns and cities all over England. The EPL has twenty teams. Several are almost always at the top. Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, and this year, Aston Villa are serious contenders – much as in gridiron. The other fifteen teams are distributed down to the last place team. But in the EPL the last place team can’t simply sit on its losses and wait until next year, because the bottom three teams are relegated into the next division down, the Championship League. And the top two teams from the Championship League move into the Premier League to compete with the big boys. The third team to move up is determined by a playoff which produces arguably the best games of the year.
Those relegated, on the other hand, receive huge blows to their prestige and wallet. Those that move up are showered with accolades and riches. This is true for each of the leagues, of which there are seven, each with several dozen teams. And beneath these are regional teams. Teams fighting to rise above relegation sometimes produce the most exciting games against top teams in their struggle to avoid the boot, as last week’s victory by last place Espanyol over first place Barcelona in the Spanish Premier Division reminded us.
The truly wonderful thing about these leagues is that it is possible for a local team, analogous to a YMCA team, to move all the way into the Premier League as long as it keeps winning. That is exactly what has happened with Hoffenheim in the German Bundesliga this year. Hoffenheim is a sleepy little German village with just a few thousand people but their team, which in the late nineties played little more than Sunday pickup games, is leading the Bundesliga over perennial favorite and financial giant, Bayern Munich. It took money, millions from the founder of the software giant SAP to get there, but the path exists nonetheless, for poor kids from villages in Bosnia who had no hope of college scholarships, to strive for a dream and attain it, as happened for Vedad Ibesivic, the leading goal scorer in Germany this year. Who incidentally, wound up in St. Louis as a refugee. How’s that for a winding path?
The flip side of this is that some formerly great teams, for whatever reason, fall out of the top leagues and tumble, sometimes for years, into cellars from which they never return. Leeds United comes to mind, a once great football power in England that has fallen on hard times and tumbled several divisions. Will we ever see them in the Premiership again? They’ll have to fight to get there.
It is fun to imagine what gridiron would be like if they adopted this system. Cellar teams in the SEC, Big Ten, Pac Ten, and other conferences would be tossed out and winners in lesser conferences would move up to take their place. The NFL could shed franchises not bent on excellence and pick up hungry, talented teams from feeder leagues. Detroit and other perennial dogs couldn’t simply stop trying but would be forced to fight for their lives. It would also greatly expand the sports economy, allowing semi-pro and arena teams to become part of something that actually matters. The same system could be even more easily applied to baseball and basketball, neither of which require expenses approaching that needed to field a viable football team. And the games played to avoid relegation would force struggling teams to rise to a new level. Winning a championship would come to mean far more than being handed an elaborate metal and stone icon that gathers dust on a shelf.
There are reasons that futbol is the world’s most popular sport. It is highly accessible – all that is needed is a ball of rags and a flat spot. It is fun, with basketball-like action that includes everyone on the team. Every position is a skill position, and the skills are fun to master and then use to crush the competition. Anyone can play. Basketball has been reserved for the very tall, football for the big and durable, baseball for those willing to take a lot of performance enhancing drugs. In futbol, almost any body type can be honed to a sharp edge. These are all factors, but I think one of the most important reasons that futbol is the world’s most popular sport is because it brings something so very American to the game. You can start at the bottom and work your way to the top – if that’s still possible in the land of the free.