Despite a few oddities (like, how in the world did Germany and France end up playing each other in a quarterfinal -- more on that later -- and was that stadium in Edmonton ever full?), I dare say this will turn out to be a successful WWC. One can hope, with maybe some justification, that the impact will be such that more women and girls get opportunities to play, and maybe play professionally if they've got the stuff to do it, and maybe not go broke doing it. One can hope that maybe the National Women's Soccer League (yes, it does exist) will get some more fans at games.
But it would be dishonest to pass off soccer as the ideal sport for the ethically sensitive fan. There are, as is the case with any sport, reasons for concern -- some of them well-known, some less so. Just to review a few:
1) FIFA. Actually this could be one, two, three, and maybe four, and the general corruption of this world governing body of soccer complicates one's reactions to some of the other issues to be considered below. I'm not even bothering to provide links here; if you haven't heard about the US and Swiss investigations of that body (I mean, really; if the Swiss are investigating you...) and can't find out more with a quick Google search it's very unlikely you could find your way to this highly obscure blog. Just look up Sepp Blatter and prepare to gag a lot.
2) CTE. After football and hockey, it's very possible that soccer is the most susceptible sport to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. At last report two or possibly three soccer players, including a Brazilian World Cup star of the 1950s, have been confirmed as having CTE by the post-mortem exams that are as of yet the only way to confirm that condition with certainty.
Think about it; not just all the headers, but all the collisions. If someone had tried to convince you that soccer was not a contact sport, hopefully the World Cup has disabused you of that naive belief. Recall the particularly frightening collision between Germany's Alexandra Popp and the US's Morgan Brian in last Tuesday's semifinal. It illustrates both just how such violent collisions can happen in the game, and soccer's particular difficulty in dealing with the problem.
One of soccer's particular charms is the utter relentlessness of the clock; it stops for nothing. It is the un-baseball in that respect. But a perpetually running clock doesn't allow for a clear diagnosis of whether a player has suffered a concussion or not. Even in (American) football, the clock can at least be stopped and the injury at least has a chance to be assessed properly (even if it frequently is not). Also complicating matters are the substitution rules in top-level soccer; unlike American football, but like baseball, a player cannot return to the game once removed. Furthermore, in such games, only three substitutions are allowed at all. So you can see the potential trouble; you run the risk of removing a player only for her or him to be o.k. after all, or you play on "a man down," or playing 10-on-11, while the player's condition is evaluated (or for good if you've already used your subs).
So how to address this? Do you stop the clock? (Major League Soccer and some other leagues are already starting to try "hydration breaks" to deal with intense heat; Orlando City may never play a home game without hydration breaks. But the idea isn't as out of bounds as it might have been a few years ago.) Come up with a "concussion substitution" who can then be pulled if the stricken player turns out o.k.? Declare the player automatically out of the game? Any or all of the above may be considered, but before long soccer partisans will be sounding like American football fans complaining about "being soft" or changing the nature of the game.
And of course, looming over all of this is the hopelessly corrupt FIFA. Is an organization that thinks Qatar in August is ideal for the game's showcase event even remotely capable of thinking rationally about the health of its players? And how much do you, the person of faith who enjoys the game, want to invest yourself and potentially your money in that particular hope?
3) Fan -isms. Until the last few decades, if Americans knew much about soccer at all (aside from the heyday of the old NASL and the New York Cosmos with Pelé), it might well have been less about the game and more about the hooliganism of some of its European (mostly English) fans. Fan racism is also a potent poison in the European game; players such as Kevin-Prince Boateng, from Ghana, and Mario Balotelli, an Italian of African ancestry, have at times encountered a horrifying racism, frequently in Italy but potentially anywhere, that might make even the most hardened Southern Neo-Confederate blanch with horror. (Seriously, read that link above only if/when you have a strong stomach.)
So far, the US game seems remarkably free of such plague. I seriously doubt it is totally free, and it's possible the game here benefits from the relative lack of coverage it gets in US media. But by comparison to the Euro game, fan racism in the US seems a lot less, possibly because soccer in the US seems to draw far more diverse crowds than the other major sports. By "diverse" I mean not only drawing fans from different races, but having what might be called un-segregated crowds; whites not always only with whites, Asian not only with Asian, and so forth. Whites hanging out with blacks hanging out with Hispanics hanging out with Asians. Easily the most such diverse sporting event I've ever attended live was my one match at Sporting Park in Kansas City, the first MLS match played there. I don't know if that's the case all over the US -- I seriously doubt it -- but it stood out dramatically to me even in the midst of a rather exciting game in an extremely modern stadium.
Meanwhile, while homophobia also rears its ugly head on occasion in Europe, MLS not only welcomed Robbie Rogers back into the league, but practically begged him to return from his premature retirement in which he dealt with the ramifications of his coming out. While the NBA went into convulsions over Jason Collins's status, and the NFL nearly fell apart over Michael Sam (not to mention baseball's ongoing straight-only facade), Rogers has spent the last couple of years settling in with the LA Galaxy with amazingly little stir after his debut. Again, I would be shocked if he hadn't received a bit of hate mail, and the US media's continuing ignoring of a sport that now regularly puts more butts in seats than the NHL and NBA might again be benefitting the league in this case, but the sport seems to be going about its business with little fuss over the subject. Not to mention that the newly-crowned World Cup champions from the US have relied on Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe for several years now with marginal fuss, and even a certain amount of activism from Rapinoe.
Will an expanding fan base possibly bring more struggle with the -isms of human culture? Will geographical expansion do so? It's something to watch in the future.
This is just a scraping of the surface. I didn't even get around to the potential pitfalls of a sport so reliant on nationalism for much of its appeal and structure; player responsibility and the appearance of making allowances for poor behavior, with troubled goalie Hope Solo as Exhibit A; and the impact of any and all of these things on youth soccer and its continuing popularity.
While the US soccer governing body seems to have its head screwed on more or less cleanly, the overarching structure and its mind-boggling corruption will be incredibly challenging for the sport in its future. It will be virtually impossible for the mindful fan to continue forward without being ever more mindful of how the sport conducts itself in the face of those challenges, and how it adapts in its continuing growth in the United States.
"Non-contact sport"...yeah, right.
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