![]() Television broadcast rights continue to fetch eye-watering sums, and, earlier this month, Amazon entered the soccer market for the first time. ![]() The leading European leagues-England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy-generated almost eighteen billion dollars during the 2016-17 season, a nine-per-cent increase, and Manchester United recently posted record annual revenues for a single club (around eight hundred million dollars). By any number of metrics, it is the most popular sport on earth, and the current tournament arrives at a moment of new highs. Photograph from Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Gettyīut, unlike the Olympics-the only occasion when most people have any time for figure skating or race walking-the World Cup serves as a quadrennial testament to soccer’s year-round appeal. ![]() With the possible exceptions of the Olympic Games and the verdict of a papal conclave, no other recurring event is capable of inspiring so much global fervor.Ī school football team practices in the playground, in Islington, London, in February, 1938. The sixty-four matches at the last tournament attracted a cumulative audience of more than three billion. Then, there’s the matter of the World Cup’s peculiar pull. A recent Gallup poll found that soccer was the favorite sport to watch for seven per cent of Americans-higher than hockey, and only slightly lower than baseball. team’s failure even to qualify, but there’s every reason to hope that it will. It remains to be seen whether American enthusiasm will survive the U.S. But when England is, inevitably, knocked out-by the quarter-finals, in all likelihood-I will soon put it out of my mind and turn to the truly meaningful business of watching teams like Germany, Spain, and Brazil. My neutralism has its limits: I will doggedly follow the progress of England’s national team in the World Cup, which is now under way in Russia. I mentioned in passing that I don’t support a team, and he groaned, envying my freedom to “simply drift with the action,” when he had spent his life “chained by the ankle to Tottenham Hotspur.” When Immanuel Kant defined the true judgment of beauty as existing “apart from any interest,” he was also describing the charmed position of the modern soccer neutral-able, say, to admire Lionel Messi’s turbocharged yet feathery left foot, on display for Barcelona, without the mildest twinge of annoyance that he doesn’t play for “us.” Not long ago, in central London, I bumped into a male acquaintance and we started talking soccer. ![]() Yet I am considered one of the lucky ones. And when I’m feeling curious or apprehensive about the future of the game, and about the sheer range of soccer I might one day feel obliged to obsess over, I’ll read up on Major League Soccer or the Chinese Super League-generally agreed to be rising forces, though still currently a place for second-rank talent and the occasional fading, pampered megastar. Now and again, some turn of events-a wonder goal, or horror tackle, or unexpected trade-will force me to dig a little into the Superliga Argentina or the Brasileirão, where many of the best players start out but never stay. This comes with certain drawbacks-requiring me, for instance, to devote energy and interest to all twenty participants in the English Premier League, the most competitive and popular in the world, as well as to the élite clubs from the other European soccer countries. In soccer terms, I am what is known as a “neutral,” someone who loves the sport but doesn’t follow any particular club or team.
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