James Galvin

There is a common misconception in Ireland and elsewhere that Americans don’t like soccer. The average American sports fan doesn’t have access to the media coverage and the soccer tradition that exists in Europe, but they can still tell Zidane from Ronaldo.

I lived in Massachusetts for 7 years growing up, moved around a bit, and in every school I attended, each day during our lunch break, I mean “recess”, we didn’t play baseball or American football or golf or hockey - we played soccer. Along with all of my friends, I played in the regional soccer youth league, which was extremely well organised with ~12 local teams for each age group (u-8, u-10, u-12, u-14, u-16). This was not an urban area, and to have 60 underage teams playing each week was impressive. Whats more, the very good players attended try-outs for ‘competitive’, and moved on to better teams in bigger leagues.

In football-mad Ireland, my local town didn’t have a single team, and I would have had to drive some distance if I wanted to play competitively as a 14 year old. Any potentially talented footballers would be playing GAA. I know there are lots of people living outside of Cork City and Dublin who were good enough to trial for clubs, but there was no route for them to take.

On the other hand, the USA got hammered today, and I have been amazed by the naivety of the comments I’ve seen since from American fans - thankful that its “only Italy” they’ve got to beat. I said they liked soccer, and played soccer… I didn’t say they knew anything about it.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 2:46 am and is filed under General, Soccer, Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.