Part One of a Series on Style in American Soccer

*As the U.S. National Team attempts to qualify for the World Cup in 2010, I will write a series of pieces concentrating on the style, or lack of it, of American soccer.

As far as I can tell we’ve been “developing” a style in American soccer for the last century. Our attempts to produce one have hinged on lame imitations of successful international styles, namely European ones.

This once made a certain amount of sense. You learn from successes, from those who know better than you. So since the sixties we have flooded our coaching marketplace with Brits. Apparently they won a World Cup. And they sound like they know what they’re talking about even if they don’t. Since the seventies, we’ve bought into Dutch methodologies like weight loss pills for our dense soccer genes. In the nineties, after soccer became one of the most widely played youth sports in the nation, our youth soccer organizations continued to look to Europe (Eastern, Northern and Western), to those anglicized countries that spoke our language, for coaches and advice.

As Jay Martin notes in a 2000 NSCAA article entitled, “The Emerging American Style,” the aspects of these stylistic fads “became an end instead of a means to an end.”

Over the last decade or so, we have latched onto a new and much more executable fad, which is actually more of an ethos than a fad. We are finally starting to promote the simple and largely Latino sensibility of giving the game back to the players. Organizations like USSF and USYSA, for example, praise the value of small-sided-games that approximate the fluid street soccer environments so integral to the magic of the South American game. Letting players learn and think for themselves has become a more important goal in this country than ever before.

If American organizations, camps, and academies are practicing what they preach is another issue. Because so many coaches and governing bodies validate the money they make by selling their knowledge as erudite, I’m skeptical that we can ever truly give the game to the players in this country. But we are on the right track, however slowly and hypocritically we get there. And I hope we don’t bag this movement before it truly takes hold.

Does American Style Exist?

Although the word style can smell like gelled hair and expensive threads, it is not a material trait. For it to be real, it cannot simply be adopted. It comes from within and without, from the collision of instinct and environment, nature and nurture. We know this. We know that a nation’s soccer style has its roots in that country’s cultural and social fabric. Brazilians play with the flare that lives in samba. Germans play with lethal efficiency and technique. Italians play with a heart-rendering deceptiveness. Americans play with … Freedom?

There have been rudimentary studies on the defining characteristics of the model American soccer player. The ones Jay Martin gives from an “unscientific survey” are as follows: Athletic Ability, Attitude, Work Rate and Coachability.

These are all well and good, but what the hell do they really mean? These characteristics describe the valuable traits of American athletes in general, particularly American football players. And one could easily argue that these characteristics represent the problems with American soccer. They lead me to imagine the paradigm American player as a 6’2, 200 pound brute, who can run the 100 in 10 seconds flat, really freakin wants to freakin win, and does whatever the coach tells him. “Tackle harder. Fuck yeah!”

Sometimes I fear that the values our culture ingrains in American athletes dooms us in the one true world sport; that our culture pumps out athletes so good at following directions that they can’t think for themselves; that we value athletic physique and explosive ability much more than subtler traits like guile, deftness, and flare that we forget to develop the later; that our sporting culture favors condition over instinct – order and repetition over imagination and creativity. I fear that our culture makes it too easy for us to forget about the different, subtle type of athlete that soccer requires. As Paul Gardner succinctly points out: “Ask yourself if Maradona or Pele or Beckenbauer or Cruyff would have made their high school basketball or football teams. Too small, all of them. Not among the best ‘athletes.’” The same can still be said for most of the best players in the world today: Messi, Robinho, Ronaldinho. Some might eclipse the six-foot mark (Gerrard, Ronaldo, Kaka and Ibrahimovic), but none would qualify as “athletic” by any American definition of the word. Instead, they all play with unique styles, as unorthodox as they are beautiful.

Does our sporting culture doom soccer or can we use our supposed athletic values as a baseline, a springboard, to a style that can compete on the world stage? The optimist in me believes the later.

I think we are finally reaching a moment in the strange and protracted evolution of soccer in this country that requires us to trust our own culture, our own sensibility, to forge unique players and therefore a unique way of playing. This means trusting more than just our athletic values, which should be easy given this country produces freakish athletes in almost every imaginable sport. More fundamentally, we should trust our good old American values – cultural, social, and political. Yes, work ethic, but also thrift and self-sufficiency, toughness and brashness, ingenuity and multiculturalism. These are the elements of our national fabric that I can latch onto, that I see every day, that I brush up against when I take the bus in the morning. And I have faith that these are the elements that will one day lift us out of mediocrity and into the realms of the international elite in the soccer world.

Maybe I’ve been infected by the new president’s optimism for the future. I’m spewing sappy abstractions that have little relevance to a game played on the ground with feet and a ball. I know as well as Obama does that faith is worthless without the elbow-grease involved in execution. But faith comes first.

Of course we need to execute. We need to develop better technical training in our youth systems, to the point in which we blur the line between instinct and memory. How we do this is still unclear. But it seems like we are finally realizing that such results occur with the right balance of nature and nurture, not just the later. Trusting our own nature, letting our players figure out the game for themselves, will let our players imprint their own wills and minds on the rugged slates of international competition.

We are witnessing execution, however slowly it unfolds, in the way the game is developing at the youth and professional levels in this country. And as the American game develops, so too does style.

The U.S. National team, for example, has long made grit and work ethic core elements of its success. Although its convincing 2-0 win over Mexico revealed nothing new, it was also an impressive display of team defense and all around work. The U.S. players didn’t “let them breath,” as Michael Bradley said after the game. The U.S. attacked efficiently and with purpose.

This is the continuance of something good. It is very real. And it has lots of room to grow, even if it doesn’t have a name yet, or maybe especially because it doesn’t have a name yet, or a blueprint to follow.◊

*The second part of this piece will dilate from more abstractions, like the globalization of style in the international game, to more concrete details of the ways the U.S. is trying to improve to compete with the world’s top teams.

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