ABSTRACT
This essay is the result of incidental anthropology, that is, intensive long-term (five years) participant observation without my being aware at the time that I was an observer, just before I became a professional anthropologist. While I did not ‘write up’ this incidental fieldwork at the time, my analysis of the US soccer scene has taken place in the quarter of a century that I have lived in the UK, mostly as a way of explaining the US attitude to soccer to puzzled Europeans. How can Americans love that often slow-moving, endlessly ritualistic, padded up game they call football instead of the fast-paced, highly skilled, brutally beautiful and endlessly enthralling game that is real football? And worse, how did rounders, a simplistic version of cricket played by children and girls, become a national sport, baseball, and the source of great amusement with its World Series, an event that shrinks the world to fairly small proportions? 2
