At 11am Pacific today (Wednesday), the citizens of this great nation should turn on ESPN2 and cheer on a team competing in the most American of world sports: soccer.

No, we haven’t taken leave of our senses.

When the U.S. Men’s National Team takes on Poland in a tuneup for this summer’s World Cup, they will display the characteristics we celebrate as keys to this country’s economic success: creativity; cooperation; and adaptability. Bruce Arena, the coach, will stand on the sideline with little to do; at the time the game starts, 95% of his work will have been done. After the kickoff, it’s a player’s game. They will probe for weaknesses; adapt their positioning and play to take advantage of what they learn; and — knowing that one player can’t carry a team — work together to win.

Compare this to football, where top-down management and phonebook sized playbooks bring to mind the finest elements of command-and-control economies. Basketball’s an improvement, but most coaches view deviation from the play as a sign of a player’s mental deficiency. Baseball? There’s team play on defense, but when batter faces pitcher, it’s strictly High Noon. Hardly a model for the new economy.

Isn’t our new ideal the flat organization where everyone is empowered? Where management sets general goals and small units figure out how to achieve them, then execute? Soccer is Silicon Valley; football is General Motors.

The role of the individual in soccer also better fits our ideals. American’s aren’t supposed to be robots, but top level players in the big three American sports learn to execute, not think. That may not be good for post-sports career prospects. How many ex-college baseball / football / basketball players do you run across in your everyday life? Not many. But the habits learned in soccer have value in the real world. It’s not at all surprising to find that a professional acquaintance played college soccer* — even fake news anchors did (Jon Stewart, William and Mary, also here).

Soccer ties into national archetypes as well. What’s more American than being an underdog that gets no respect from the rest of the world? While most of the planet resents our sole superpower status for one reason or another, don’t we Americans really prefer to be the scrappy upstart — Hoosiers and Rocky and the Miracle on Ice combined? America, if you’re looking for overachievers, that is your men’s national soccer team. Despite being ranked 7th in the world, they are looked down on by the established powers. And the people doing the looking down: principally European (and Brazil, but it’s more fun to resent the French)! It’s 1776 all over again!

There’s more to like in exactly how the U.S. team has gotten to where it is today — where qualifying for the 32 nation World Cup is almost certain, rather than a once-in-a-generation accident. Their reputation is that they may not be the most skilled individuals, but they work harder than anyone else and play as a unit. While the domestic soccer league, MLS, has been on winter break, what have its best players been doing? Spending their vacation at a nearly two-month long national team training camp here in LA. Americans work harder than the citizens of other advanced nations — and so does its soccer team.

So when a small band of Americans takes the field in Germany today, tune in! If you get on the bandwagon now, you’ll eventually get to enjoy another favorite American practice: in soccer, as in economic models, we will eventually triumph.

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* I can think of five: two attorneys, an investment banker, my prosecutor brother-in-law, and my brother.

We’re not even going to get into the business models — except for this: Most places, if you want to start a soccer club, you can. If it has success, it moves up into better and better leagues (think A, AA, AAA) and can even break into the top rank. Bad teams drop into lower level leagues. Try that in the NFL. In the NBA, Donald Sterling would have received his punishment years ago (Clippers fans: can one year of success erase the last twenty?). Which better represents American-style meritocracy?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 12:27 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.