TheOther"AmericanExceptionalism"WhyIsThereNoSoccerinthe UnitedStates?

TheOther"AmericanExceptionalism"WhyIsThereNoSoccerintheUnited States?

byAndreiS.Markovits

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Andrei S. Markovits

Once again, the world's most important media event which undoubtedly captured the uninterrupted attention of most of the world's male population for the entire month of June 1986, barely left the realm of esoterica in the United States.! Although the quadrennial World Cup was hosted by America's southern neighbor, Mexico, this event failed to capture the imagination of the American public. Interest in the United States was strikingly minute in comparison to that exhibited in virtually every country in the world, including those politically and economically most similar to the United States, i.e. the liberal capitalist democracies of Western Europe, as well as those quite different, i.e. members of the Communist bloc or that loose conglomerate known as the "Third World".2 Even though American television coverage of World Cup' 86 was more extensive than ever before, this major global event remained outside of the mainstream of American sports life, let alone public life in general. 3 Why does the United States continue to be so aloof with regard to the world's most popular sport? Why has soccer played such a marginal role in the public consciousness of this sports-crazed society? What are the origins and ongoing manifestations of this other "American Exceptionalism"? This paper purports to shed some light on these questions. Briefly put, the argument focuses on the "crowding out" of soccer in America's ,'sports space" as a consequence of the development of indigenous American sports which had already become entrenched in American culture by the time Britain's game of soccer reached the rest of the world. America's sport "exceptionalism", I submit, derives in good part from the same structural and historical constellations which have come to be known under the term "American exceptionalism". It is particularly America's bourgeois hegemony and legacy of the "first new nation" which contributed substantially to the continued absence of the world's most popular team sport as a major presence in American popular culture. After a brief discussion of the larger historical and theoretical issues, the paper highlights the development of soccer in Britain, followed by a discussion of soccer's crowding out "from above" in America by football and its displacement "from below" by baseball. Some final thoughts offered in a concluding section complete the article.

Sombart Revisited and America's Soccer "Exceptionalism": Some comparative clarifications

Werner Sombart, like virtually all European observers ofthe ' ,New World" before and after him, was both fascinated by and ambivalent towards this country. The
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ambivalence reflected the invariable combination of both negative and positive generalizations based on the "uniqueness" of the United States as a European extension with certain puzzling peculiarities. To Sombart, the most puzzling of these "Americanisms" was the absence of a large, well-organized, mass-based working class movement headed by a political party. Among the realistic aims of this party would be the improvement of conditions for its members and voters, who hailed from the working class and thus represented the majority of the population in all industrial societies, including the United States. To achieve its aim, the party would first attain and then exercise state power through the channels of parliamentary democracy. Given Sombart's concern, his question "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" is rather misleading. Socialism did not exist in the Europe of his time either, thus making the United States quite unexceptional to any country in the old world. 4 A far more appropriate - though definitely less elegant - title for Sombart's book would have been "why is there no large, organized, working class movement led by a social democratic party in the United States?". One could think of few more corroborating compliments to the validity and originality of the study's central observation though, than its continued relevance as one of the most intellectually exciting bodies of literature in American history and social science. 5 The parallels to soccer are striking. Just as Sombart noted the absence of what he called "socialism", we too can observe a basic absence of soccer, as the dominant participant and spectator team sport, in the United States throughout the twentieth century. This is not to say that soccer - like Sombart's "socialism" - has been completely absent from the American experience. Both appeared on these shores virtually concomitantly with their respective "inventions" in Europe and both continue to flourish in various guises. Socialist parties and movements have always existed in twentieth century America, just like the game of soccer has been played virtually without any interruption in this vast country since its introduction in the nineteenth century.6 "Socialism's" fortunes have ebbed and flowed in the larger context of American politics and intellectual life without ever coming close to attaining a dominant, let alone hegemonic, position like in Europe. Comparatively soccer has never posed any serious challenge to America's own "big three" featuring baseball, football and the somewhat distant third of basketball. One can safely predict that neither of these two "un-American" phenomena will disappear in the future, thus lending further testimony to America's pluralism in intellectual thought, politics and sports. It is equally safe to predict however, that neither will assume a place of national prominence in the United States either. Their already traditional role in America of being tolerated, perhaps even appreciated, eccentricities will thus continue. 7 I am not arguing that there exists a a direct relationship between the absence of soccer and "socialism" in the United States when compared to other industrial democracies. Rather, I will try to show that some of the same American peculiarities which led to an American "exceptionalism" regarding "socialism" also account for the subordinate place of soccer among American sports. That soccer is relatively insignificant to Americans is apparent in that what the rest of the world, with virtually no exceptions, calls "football", Americans know only as "soccer". The preeminence of the term "football" is evidenced by the

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fact that in most non-English speaking countries where the sport has pride of place, either the term "football" itself is used, modified to conform to the spelling, orthography and pronunciation of the local language, or a literal translation thereof, such as the German "Fussball" or the Hungarian "labdarugas". It is only in countries such as the United States, where the term "football" describes another sport or where Association Football is of secondary importance, that the term' 'soccer" is used. Among these countries have been America's cousins, most notably Australia and Canada, but also New Zealand and the complicated case of South Africa, all - like the United States - English speaking, former British colonies dominated by White immigrants. Does this refute the case for "American exceptionalism" with regard to soccer, thus confIning the validity of the concept only to "socialism"? I think not for the following two reasons. First, soccer's subordinate position in the sports topography of the United States, as well as of these other English-speaking countries, should not detract from the uniqueness of the American situation, in which soccer's potential for eminence as a mass sport was preempted by the creation of three indigenous team sports. Baseball, football and basketball have continued to enjoy unrivaled popularity among the American public since their respective introductions as mass sports. 8 Ice hockey developed as Canada's national sport. Having successfully exported it south of the border, Canada provided the United States with yet another, though regionally confined, popular team sport and gave many countries of the globe's northern hemisphere one of their favorite winter activities. The rest of Canada's popular sport "space" is dominated by America's "big three" though, with baseball and basketball exact replicas of the American games, and Canadian football showing only very minor modifications from its American cousin. Interestingly, Canada is among the handful of countries where the two most parochial and idiosyncratic factors responsible for America's "soccer exceptionalism" - football and baseball - have attained a respectable presence outside of the United States. Cricket occupies a major portion of New Zealand's, Australia's and South Africa's "sport space' ,, as it does in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Caribbean islands, i.e. the West Indies. The remainder of the "sport space" in these countries is filled by field hockey (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), rugby (New Zealand and South Africa) and Australian Rules football (Australia). Common to all of these countries then is the presence of cricket as the national sport, the marginal existence of soccer, and the existence of a second, rather obscure and somewhat modified British team sport. In contrast to the United States, none of these countries developed three virtually new team sports which consumed almost all the existing "sport space" of their society, as the "big three" have in the United States. Curiously, these "big three" - with the notable exception of basketbal19 - have remained almost completely confined to the borders of their creator despite the latter's preeminent position as the uncontested global leader in the politics, economic affairs and popular culture of the twentieth century. This brings me to the second reason why America's soccer "exceptionalism" differs from the ones briefly mentioned in the preceding lines. By virtue of the United States' military, political, economic and cultural hegemony throughout much of the twentieth century - often referred to with some justification as "the American century" - almost all of America's actions (or inactions) attain meaning beyond their actual reality. The concept of ' ,Americanism" has few, if any, parallels in the

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twentieth century, thus denoting the uniquely nodal position of the United States in the modern world. This country's hegemony extends beyond the immediate orbit of the liberal democracies of industrial capitalism and is equally significant to the countries of the Second and Third Worlds. Crudely put, the United States matters more in the world's affairs than do Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Important issues within these countries remain unnoticed by the rest of the world or at best become esoteric items gaining the attention of a few specialists. Newsworthy issues in the United States though are of national, as well as international, importance. Thus, the editors and sport writers of Sovietski Sport have probably never wondered why New Zealanders or South Africans seem unmoved by soccer. Along with the rest of the world's soccer fans however, they have most certainly asked themselves why soccer plays such a marginal role in the United States}O American soccer "exceptionalism" like the absence of "socialism" in the United States has received so much attention in good part because of America's predominant global position. Whereas the "socialism" debate has generated much impressive scholarship though, the question of soccer' 'exceptionaiisin" has remained confmed to the oral tradition of stadium debates and barroom chatter all over the world. Clearly the two "exceptionalisms" and their consequences for the quality of human existence in the United States can not be construed as equally significant. Soccer, while like all major sports a multi-billion dollar business, still remains a game, whereas "socialism" would, at a very minimum, most certainly diminish, if not alleviate, the misery of the American poor by its creation and maintenance of a well-functioning welfare state. Thus, Sombartian "exceptionalism" has rendered the United States, far and away the richest country in the world, to be the only major industrial democracy without, among other things, a compulsory, stateinvolved, comprehensive national health insurance for its sick. Nothing of comparable importance accompanies American soccer "exceptionalism". This second "exceptionalism" isolates the United States from a leisure activity and collective involvement though, which has captured the rest of the world's undivided attention since the beginning of this century. It is to the common origins of both "exceptionalisms" that I now turn.

America - The First New Nation

The most important common denominator for both "exceptionalisms" and the single most pervasive underlying variable for an understanding of American politics and society is the quintessentially bourgeois nature of this country's objective development and subjective self-legitimation from its very inception to the present. This "natural", hence all the more comprehensive, bourgeoisification of American politics and society created certain structures and an accompanying atmosphere which definitely distinguished this country from all others in the "old world" and from the latter's mere colonial extensions overseas (as opposed to "new world" which, as a concept, remained tellingly reserved almost exclusively for the United States).ll Central to this burgeoning "Americanism" was the free individual who was to attain his fulfillment by being an independent, rational actor in a free market unfettered by any oppressive collectivities, be they the state or social classes, organized religion or the army. In short, bourgeois America created a new identity

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which prided itself on being explicitly different from that found anywhere in aristocratic Europe. Only by separating church from state could this new society develop a politically unchallenged secularism which in turn could be viewed as being among the most religious in the advanced industrial world. 12 Moreover, only by establishing an unprofessional military under strict civilian control - in addition to the continued presence of the' 'frontier" , yet another major ingredient of "American exceptionalism" - could the United States develop into one of the most heavily armed societies among advanced industrial countries. 13 By establishing a broad concept of equality which, however, was to remain in a permanently subservient position to the individual's freedom by merely providing him with equal access to an abundance of opportunities, this new country created an ingenious system of popular participation which was at once mediated yet also comprehensive. Above all, it created a framework for the development of powerful myths of unbound freedom and limitless opportunities, which became one of the most attractive ideologies of the modern world. Indeed, as Leon Samson has persuasively argued, Americanism carried a veneer laden with terms rather similar to those used by socialism and other movements of the left, due to the abovementioned myths. Thus socialism was "crowded out" from the consciousness and praxis of this bourgeois America (Americanism = Socialism so to speak.)14 The primacy of a bourgeois order is further substantiated by other well-known components of "American exceptionalism": the existence of the franchise for white males; the persistence of two "non-ideological", "pragmatic" and self-defined middleclass parties who, aided by a highly centrist electoral system, have successfully "crowded out" any newcomers; and the crucial role of an integrating nationalism exemplified by the "melting pot". America's soccer "exceptionalism" is also rooted in this bourgeois order. Modern sports are inextricably tied to the development of mass democracies. Sport in its organized form of regulated leisure and, subsequently, of commodified culture, goes hand in hand with such major components of "modernization" as urbanization, industrialization, education and the constantly expanding participation of a steadily growing number of citizens in the public life of politics, production and consumption. The creation and - perhaps more importantly - dissemmination of modern sports are thus part and parcel of a bourgeois mode of life. While most modem sports were actually' 'invented" by members of society's' 'higher stations" either of aristocratic or, more often, quasi-aristocratic bent, they soon became the purview of the bourgeoisie and the "masses" , if they were to gain any significance beyond that enjoyed by polo or croquet, for instance. Thus, it was the two most bourgeois societies of the latter half of the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States, which founded organized, professional, team sports played and enjoyed by the masses in their own countries, and - in the case of Britain's "inventions", especially soccer - everywhere in the world. IS The dissemination of the respective national sports correlated positively with the two countries' global position. Great Britain was still the leading imperial power and as such, the main opinion leader and cultural "hegemon" of the time. The United States, on the other hand, was still by and large an isolated "new world"which fascinated the European public, but whose concrete presence was very marginaL This isolation was in part self-imposed by America's self-identification as being distinctly

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non-European, perhaps even anti-European. Whereas Britain derived much of its internal legitimacy from being the center of a huge empire during the latter half of the nineteenth century, America attained its legitimacy by being a new, selfcontained "frontier" society, independent of the mother country - unlike its Australian and Canadian cousins. This strong ambivalence towards Great Britain, manifesting itself in a clear affinity fostered by a common language and a disdain for the old colonial master, whose very presence threatened the "new world's" identity formation, greatly influenced the development of public discourse in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This "special relationship", marked by both admiration and rejection, proved particularly significant in the realm of sportS. 16 As we will soon see, both football and baseball developed into American sports par excellence within the framework of this ambivalent and largely one-sided dialogue which America conducted with Britain about its ways. Both sports developed out of largely pre-industrial, "elite" British team activities. Through complete bourgeoisification, they became adapted to a new, commercialized industrial order in a "new world". By the time Britain's own mass sport, soccer, had been successfully exported all over the world, America's "sport space" was already occupied by former British imports now converted into genuine American games. Why was soccer "crowded out" in the United States? Firstly, the American bourgeoisie had successfully established its own national game, baseball, which largely paralleled the timing of soccer's dissemination as a mass sport in Great Britain. Secondly, young elites at the top American universities were keener on playing - and then altering - what had developed into a British "elite" sport (i.e. rugby) rather than expressing their anglophilia by importing soccer which by that time had undergone a "vulgarization" similar to baseball's in the United States. In the following section, I will offer brief descriptions of the developments of soccer, football and baseball respectively, tracing the "massification" of each sport.

The Development of Modern Soccer in Britain: From its elite origins to the world's most popular mass sport
The ancient and geographically diverse precursors to the game of soccer are well documented. 17 In disparate parts of the world such as China, ancient Rome and Greece, India and the Americas, men would gather periodically and kick some round object to and away from each other. Whether it was the skull of a defeated Danish enemy, as some English legend has it, or the stuffed bladder of a slaughtered animal, people would somehow devise a "ball" with which they played. 18 These periodic festivities, centred around a ball-like object, continued throughout Europe's Middle Ages, occurring virtually everywhere on the Continent as well as the British Isles. The game of calcio, hailing from Roman times, was the biggest "team sport" in Florence around 1500. 19 It was widely played in Italy in subsequent centuries, though - rather tellingly and in tandem with the rest of the world - modem soccer in Italy stems entirely from the introduction of Association Football by the British in the late 1800s/early 19OOs. 20 The medieval "precursor" to modem soccer was a wild, disorganized free-far-all which often ended in riots, resulting in serious injuries and occasionally even death for some participants. That authorities more

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often than not forbade the playing of football attests to the roughness of these riotous games and also to their potential danger in seriously disrupting the public order. Nevertheless, these uncontrolled, disorganized "matches" which two opposing sides would try to control the "ball" by kicking, holding, running or throwing it, became regular occurrences on or around certain festivals. Best known in England were the football games on Shrove Tuesday where crowds would gather annually to celebrate their last day of freedom before the strict and dour days of Lent. The contests in Ashbourne and Derby became legendary. In Derby, the "match" between the parishes of St. Peter and All Saints became such an intense tradition, that the term 5' derby" developed, connoting the institutionalized contest between two long-standing, usually local rivals. 21 Through the export of modern Association Football, this English term, along with many others, became commplace in the contemporary vernacular of some continental languages, such as German, Hungarian and Rumanian. These mass happenings had, in fact, little to do with what was to become modern Association Football or soccer. As James Walvin has pointed out, this pre-modem form of mass entertainment virtually disappeared from the lives of the common people during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution only to re-emerge circa one hundred years later (i.e. during the 1880s) with a fervor and enthusiasm which was to conquer the entire world with the exception of the United States 25 years later. 22 In the intervening period, the upper stratum of the English bourgeoisie, aided by several far-reaching structural changes particular to a new industrial age, turned this wild, disorganized and dangerous medieval festival into the most popular modern team sport on earth. From the very beginning of its development, modern soccer became inextricably linked to the most fundamental aspects of "modernization": discipline exacted by regulated industrial life; the strict separation of leisure and work; the necessity of organized and regularized recreation for the masses; cheap and efficient public transportation by railroads (intercity) and by trolleys (intracity); prompt and widely available mass communication via the press (introduction of the sport pages in newspapers), to be followed by telegrams (crucial for the development of nationwide betting), radio, and then television, and - perhaps most importantly - the development and rapid expansion of modern education. Though Wellington probably never said anything about Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton, the fact that generations of middle class Britons cherished this belief conveys the centrality of the so-called public schools to the dissemination of bourgeois culture in nineteenth century Britain. 23 These public schools, "ideal training grounds for merchants as well as aristocrats", formed the cradle for soccer and rugby, the forerunner to American football. Starting in the 18308, English intellectuals and educators became concerned with a complete education befitting the new industrial order. The goal was to produce not only the most efficient - but also the most well-rounded and thus fulfilled - lawyers, doctors, civil servants and scholars. Be they the ideas of "godliness and good learning" as articulated by Charles Kingsley or similar concepts put forth at various times by thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, the idea could best be summarized by that ubiquitous Latin phrase' 'mens sana in corpore sano". 24 Organized sports had suddenly attained a central role in the proper education of Great Britain's young, male, bourgeois elite. Best

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described in the famous book Tom Brown's Schooldays published by Thomas Hughes in 1857, it was in this atmosphere that modern soccer emerged. The game of football was played at all prestigious public schools, at both the old guard of Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Rugby, Westminster and Shrewsbury, or the new foundations of Cheltenham (1841), Marlborough (1843) and Wellington (1853).25 Until the middle of the 1840s, each school basically played its own version of football, an intramural game with almost completely fluid rules. The respective school's particular terrain dictated the kind of football played on the premises. In schools such as Eton, Charterhouse and Westminster, which had only narrow "pitches" at their disposal, space restrictions favored the so-called "dribbling game" in which the use of hands was completely eliminated. Harrovian football, not confined by space limitations but handicapped by drainage difficulties, also placed a premium on dribbling the ball, although catching it in the air or after only one bounce on the ground, was still pennitted. Conditions at Winchester encouraged "accurate kicking and dashing play" with the use of the hands also severely restricted. Rugby, followed by schools such as Cheltenham and Marlborough, was the main school at which the so-called "running game" developed. 26 The centrality of this sport to the students' overall educational experience at Rugby in the 1830s is well-described in Chapter Five of Tom Brown's Schooldays. This "running game" split from the "kicking and dribbling" game in 1863 and developed into Rugby Football, the forerunner to both American and Australian Rules Football. The "kicking and dribbling" game became Association Football (soccer) .27 With the gradual extension of the national railway system by the mid-to-Iate 1840s, the traditionally intramural game developed into an interscholastic contest in which games among the various public schools began to occur with some regularity. With the continued involvement of public school alumni in the game beyond their adolescence, football attained greater respectability and prestige. In addition to continued play at Oxbridge and the prestigious public schools throughout the 1850s, the first clubs emerged at this time, all having been founded by ex-publicschool and/or Oxbridge men on a purely amateur basis largely in the south of England. Still, the game remained disorganized, sporadic and unregulated throughout the 1850s. A set of comprehensive rules had become a necessity by the early 1860s though, since the game of football had developed into a serious sport which reached beyond the confines of England's public schools. In 1862 J. C. Thring, assistant master of Uppingham and one of two Shrewsbury graduates to form the first football team at Cambridge in 1846, issued a set of rules known as "The Simplest Game". 28 Streamlining all the rules into ten points, Thring's step - although initially only considered for use at Uppingham - represented a major development in making football an easily transferable, ubiquitously applicable game. A lively reaction and revision process followed during which the 14 points of the Cambridge University Rules of 1863 originated. On Monday, October 26, 1863 the Football Association (F.A.) was founded at the Freemason's Tavern on Great Queen Street in London and proceeded to decree football's 13 "laws" .29 These "laws" - in notable contrast to the earlier "rules" - govern the world's most popular sport to this day virtually unchanged. Rule 9 (' 'No player shall run with the ball. ") and Rule 10 (' 'Neither tripping or hacking

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shall be allowed, and no player shall use his hands to hold or push his adversary. ") especially dismayed the still numerous supporters of the "running game". The cleavage between these two increasingly different versions of football became so pronounced during the 1860s that by 1871 the supporters of the "running game" formed their own association. Entitled the Rugby Union, it completely finalized rugby's seccession from Association Football and initiated the establishment of the "running game" as an independent sport sui generis. In the same year the F. A., which to this day is the sole organizing body of English soccer, began organizing its first comprehensive tournament including all English clubs and culminating in a final match between the last two remaining teams for the F.A. Cup. Held in London every year since 1872, the Cup final still represents a higWight of the English soccer season and draws much attention on the Continent as well, due to the tremendous respect accorded there to the oldest soccer tournament in the motherland of this sport. Until 1882, the Cup Final was invariably played between two strictly amateur clubs from England's south. Moreover, most of the players were "gentlemen" who had attended one of the public schools, Oxbridge, or both. This was to change for good in 1882 when a semi-professional team from England's north, the Blackburn Rovers, played the Old Etonians for the CUp.3D Won by the southern gentlemen for the last time, the Cup moved northward as of 1883 (won by another Blackburn team, the Olympic), regained only once by a London club during the next 32 years. This hegemony of the North and the Midlands in English football signaled the demise of the exclusive "gentlemen's era" in soccer and the concomitant arrival of the game's professionalization and commercialization - in short, democratization. "Among the Blackbum players were three weavers, a spinner, a dental assistant, a plumber, a cotton operative and an iron foundry worker. "31 Throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s, soccer rapidly developed into a working class sport. Churches in particular, seeing soccer as an ideal vehicle to combat urban problems, spawned clubs all over the country. Followed by schools, neighborhood associations and factories, the game soon developed into Great Britain's most ubiquitous sport, having by that time also proliferated into the non-English parts of the British Isles. Lastly, some teams developed as de facto "winter branches" of already existing cricket clubs, thereby extending the sport season for their members to a year-round involvement. This rapid proliferation of soccer in little more than a decade was intimately related to the nature of the game itself. Priding itself as "the simplest game", soccer's rules were indeed few, clear and easily communicable to players and spectators alike. In terms of equipment, all that was needed was a ball and a relatively flat surface. Everything else - goal posts, nets, lines demarcating the field and special areas on it, boots and uniforms - was (and in certain ways still is) not absolutely essential for a soccer match. Perhaps the most important "democratizing" factor was the early awareness that average physical attributes sufficed not only to be an adequate soccer player but also a star. Just as the player(s) with the best physical attributes could not control the flow and outcome of the game, neither could the most intelligent, wily or wealthy. Indeed, it soon became evident that successful soccer always had to be a team effort in which no one individual could ever exert sufficient control to decide a game completely by himself. With the development of the passing game

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in the 1880s, soccer's collectivist identity became irreversibly established. By the mid 1880s, many factors contributed to the rapid rise of professionalism and the concomitant disappearance of amateurism in British soccer: regular newspaper coverage of the games; increased intercity matches among clubs, expanded and modernized playing fields, surrounded by viewing areas for a growing number of fans who paid admission fees; and the newly introduced work-free Saturday afternoons. This shift from amateurism to professionalism entailed a sociological change in the class background of soccer players as well as fans. As to the former, a poor working class youth from some Midland industrial slum would clearly seize every opportunity to make a better living by being paid for what essentially still remained his hobby. As to the latter, a parallel "downward" shift in class composition occurred during the 1880s, which led to a "crowding out" of the English gentlemen by the working class from both the playing and viewing dimensions of the soccer world. Walvin claims that during this time quite a few English soccer fans and players with bourgeois backgrounds snubbed soccer as an increasingly professional and "vulgar" sport and then pursued their ambitions as amateur sportsmen in other games, such as rugby. With the establishment of the English Football League in 1888, followed by a second division in 1892, the present structure of English professional soccer was established in its essential contours. This format of league play shaped the game of soccer in every country where it became the central sport. The need to maximize profits on the increasingly expensive investments which these professional clubs began to represent, was met neither by "friendly" matches on an irregular basis nor by the potentially one-time involvement in the F.A. Cup tournament. Therefore the Football League developed. Its twelve original members - all from England's north and the Midlands - would compete for the League championship by playing a continuous round-robin tournament in which each team would play every other team twice, once "at home" and once "away". By the early 1890s, English football - as the world has come to know it - was fully established in Great Britain. It was poised to conquer the world, a hitherto unparalleled feat in sports history. Soccer enjoyed a "national", i.e. class-transcendent, appeal in Britain by the late nineteenth century in spite of its professionalized "vulgarization" during the 1880s and 1890s. This fact, together with the ubiquity and prominence of British presence throughout the world during this period, helps to explain the exportability of soccer. It is telling that the sport was introduced to many countries by an eclectic group of people: visiting English sailors (France, Spain, Brazil); British embassy personnel (Sweden); British workers engaged in local projects (Russia, Rumania, Poland, Uruguay); local schoolboys bringing the game back with them following the completion of their education in England (Holland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Portugal); and members of local English clubs which expanded their sport activities from cricket and horseback riding to soccer (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, Argentina). Aided by a proliferation of coaches and other officials imported from England and Scotland, and by frequent "missionary" visits from English clubs who would tour the respective country playing exhibition matches against its newly founded teams, soccer quickly became the most dominant team sport on the European continent and in Latin America by the eve of World War I. Developments in the United States, conversely, proved a good deal less fortuitous for soccer.

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In America, soccer remained closely associated with immigrants, a stigma which proved fatal to soccer's potential of becoming a popular team sport in the' 'new world". The game's various precursors were played in the colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with documentation of a game as early as 1609 in Virginia. 32 As in England, football was played on the streets and in open squares, often leading to riot-like disturbances which, in turn, led the authorities to forbid the game on a number of occasions. Again similar to England, the game did not attain any social respectability until the first half of the nineteenth century, when the nation's top colleges - led by Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia - started playing various versions of football on an intramural basis. Outlawed periodically by university administrators because of its raucous nature and accompanying roughness both on and off the field, the game did not become organized until the 1860s. Early in this decade, students and alumni from a number of elite Boston secondary schools united to form the Oneida Football Club which remained undefeated - and even unscored upon - between 1862 and 1865, lending the "Boston Game" exceptional prominence in America's still small, diverse football world. 33 Allowing the use of hands and feet, the "Boston Game" soon became the most popular sport across the Charles River in Cambridge, home of Harvard University. Retrospectively, this synthesis may have proved an early harbinger for soccer's failure to become a major popular sport at American colleges, and subsequently in American society as a whole. By the end of the decade, the game had achieved sufficient intercollegiate uniformity to allow for the playing of the first college football game in American history, which was held on Saturday, November 6, 1869 in New Brunswick between Rutgers and Princeton. This event can be classified both as the first football as well as the first soccer game in modern American history since the game was played according to rules which were somewhere in between those of Association and Rugby Football. 34 Columbia joined the original two in 1870 and by 1872 the group included Rutgers, Princetoll, Yale and Stevens. These schools played an Association-type kicking game. Even though local differences in rules persisted, all participants agreed that the ball could not be picked up with the hands, caught, thrown or carried. Soccer in its rudimentary form seemed to have assumed an important foothold among leading American colleges. It failed to do so at the country's oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning though: Harvard persistently opposed the "kicking game", clinging tenaciously to its "Boston Game" which it had perfected in the interim. 35 When the other schools uniformly adopted Association rules in 1873, they desisted from calling themselves a league due to Harvard' s absence. Indeed, the unique prestige of this very special institution ultimately overturned the "kicking game's" apparent victory among American college students of the early 1870s and led to the running game's complete and ultimate triumph by 1877. In search of an opponent, Harvard turned north of the border to McGill University which played rugby at the time. The two universities agreed to play two matches in 1874, the first according to the rules of Harvard's "Boston Game", the second following McGill's rugby rules. As expected, Harvard won the first encounter easily and was poised to lose the rematch to McGill. Surprisingly, the Harvard team played McGi11 to a scoreless tie. 36 More important than this unexpected and respectable result for soccer's future, was the

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Harvard team's unanimous enthusiasm for the game of rugby which the players henceforth embraced wholeheartedly as their own. The "Boston Game", having been a hybrid between rugby and soccer and thus still including more kicking and footinvolved ball contact than rugby, was dismissed as sleepy and boring. In its stead, the "running game" developed in its then purest form as Harvard's unchallenged team sport. Barely one year later, in 1875, Yale's well-established rivalry with Harvard proved stronger than its membership in a loose association with Columbia, Princeton and a few other schools then playing the "kicking game". In that year the first "Game" between Yale and Harvard was played, with Harvard winning easily in a game Yale had never played until then. That year Yale still fulfilled its" soccer obligations" to Columbia and Wesleyan, but by 1876 Yale had dropped soccer and replaced it with rugby. The other universities followed, with Princeton succumbing last in 1877. Rugby's triumph over soccer at American colleges was so thorough that soccer did not reappear on American campuses on an intercollegeiate level until 1902. By that time American Football- rugby's successor in the "new world" - had gained an unshakable prominence in American college life. 37 Stigmatized as slow, boring and devoid of action due to the relative paucity of scoring when compared to any of the "Big Three" American sports, soccer has, since its re-introduction as a varsity sport, languished in the giant shadows cast on it by football and later basketball. At American universities, as in American society, soccer has remained largely the domain of foreigners and recent immigrants, both as players and spectators. Let us now look at the developments of football and baseball respectively, so we can better understand what occupied the American "sport space" upon soccer's arrival on these shores and how this "preoccupation" led to the "crowding out" of the world's most popular sport. Since we just discussed the origins of American football in the context of soccer's failure in the United States, it seems best to continue the paper by looking at football before turning to baseball.

"Crowding Out From Above": The case of American football

What Harvard had started by sticking to the running game, Yale completed by offering football its charismatic "founding father" and most influential modernizer. Indeed, Parke Davis, "the Plutarch of early college football", explicitly equated WaIter Camp of Yale to George Washington by stating that "what Washington was to his country, Camp was to American football - the friend, the founder, and the father." 38 Attaining legendary fame as a player and reformer during the game's most formative years, Camp "was said to have been the model for the fictional character 'Frank Merriwell of Yale' ", America's first and greatest sports hero on whom a whole generation of American boys was weaned after 1896. 39 Camp's major and lasting contribution was to transform football from a quasiaristocratic English game to a quintessentially bourgeois American activity of the twentieth century. Astute observers of American sports and culture such as David Riesman and Michael Oriard have drawn explicit parallels between Waiter Camp and Frederick Winslow Taylor. 40 Simultaneously, though presumably independently of each other, both were engaged in the modernization, regularization and

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systematization their respective fields - football and factory production - which were undergoing far-reaching changes ofbourgeoisification (and Americanization) at the turn of the century. Waiter Camp could be described as the leading figure in the' 'Taylorization" of a sport which, following the successful conclusion of this process, clearly emerged as American football. Under Camp's leadership, rugby's ad hoc and free-for-all scramble for the ball, the unpredictable English , 'scrum' " became the clearly delineated American "scrimmage", in which the offensive and defensive teams confronted each other. Confusion and ambiguity still continued however with both sides vying for the ball simultaneously at the beginning of each play, often tying up the ball and thereby impeding the commencement of the game. Therefore further clarification was added by awarding what was to become the "center snap" to the offensive team. Undisputed possession of the ball was thus established. Camp and his reformers "taylorized" the field by drawing clear lines on it, making a team's progress, movement and location perfectly measurable at any time of the game. The gridiron - in and of itself a Taylorist concept - set the stage for football's subsequent and lasting domination by statistics (yards per carry; total passing yardage; total running yardage; etc.). In order to regulate and encourage movement on the gridiron, and to counter the "block game" in which each team would keep the ball for "its" half of the game, Camp introduced a rule requiring a team to make five yards in three downs, extended to ten yards in four downs in 1912. 41 Camp reduced the number of players per team from 15 to 11 and each player was assigned a specific position in which he was expected to excel and specialize. He devised the arrangement which became standard - seven linemen, a quarterback, two halfbacks, and a fullback. As part of his "scientization" of football in which game plans, strategy, and tactics assumed an increasingly central role, Camp also introduced a rule which permitted tackling as low as the knees. This maneuver to bring a man down was more efficient, though also more brutal, than the earlier method of wrestling an opponent to the ground. The dangerous "wedge" appeared, perfected by Harvard to become the more devastating "flying wedge", only to be countered by Camp's Yale teams with the "shoving wedge". Play became violent, routinely resulting in major injuries and frequent deaths. Finally President Roosevelt, having seen the photo of a mangled Swarthmore player in the newspaper following a particularly savage encounter between Swarthrnore and Pennsylvania in 1905, personally demanded that the game be reformed to eliminate such obvious brutality. Only thereafter did Camp and others institute changes which eliminated overt and willful maiming without, however, compromising the roughness of the game which was deemed essential by virtually every educator and opinion leader in the country. President Roosevelt's involvement led to the establishment of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association in December 1905, headed by Captain Palmer Pierce of West Point. It was renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.) in 1910. With WaIter Camp in charge of the American Football Rules Committee, the last substantial rule changes were undertaken yielding a game by the eve of World War I which has basically remained intact on both the collegiate and the professional levels to this day. One of the most important reforms was the forward pass which established the "aerial attack'" as yet another weapon in a team's offensive strategy. This reform fostered the honing of finesse and precision at the expense of sheer

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physical force, thus further contributing to what had already become a highly "taylorized" sport. Baseball had become the sport of the lower classes, "enjoying" the social prestige of stage acting or gambling in Michael Oriard's words. Football developed into the most popular sport among America's middle class by the turn of the century when soccer made its triumphant conquest of the European continent and Latin America. 42 Initially dominant only in the elite schools of the East Coast, football rapidly spread westward establishing itself at places such as the University of Chicago (coached by the legendary Amos Alonzo Stagg), Oberlin, Michigan and Notre Dame in the Midwest, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley on the West Coast. The 1920s witnessed the proliferation of college football in the South and the Southwest, with both regions producing major powers by the 1940s. That football remained the virtual prerogative of collegiate America, underscored the middle class nature of football's first four decades. Football games on Saturday afternoons in the fall, especially around Thanksgiving, became essential ingredients of American bourgeois culture. College football attained such a hegemonic position in American middle class culture, that it succeeded in "crowding out" the professional game - as well as soccer - until the founding of the National Football League in 1920, and arguably well into the post-World War 11 era. Professionalism did not however remain excluded from the world of American football. One aspect of the mens-sana-in-corpore-sano ideology of the American bourgeoisie was the perception of football as a bastion of amateurism, in fact though, professionalization of the college game had clearly set in by the turn of the century . Gate receipts provided welcome revenue even to the wealthiest universities such as Yale, where in 1903 "income from football equaled the combined budgets of the law, divinity, and medical schools". 43 Yale was the first university to professionalize its coaching staff and its rivals, initially protesting this vulgar betrayal of amateur ideals, proceeded to hire their own professional coaches. Staying competitive was critical for winning, which had graduated from being everything to being the only thing. The explicitly professional football game originated in the cultural peripheries of America's steel and coal regions, such as Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas of Allegheny County. Spreading later to the industrial regions of Ohio, professional clubs were established in towns such as Akron and Canton (the location of the Professional Football Hall of Fame). Most teams were owned by wealthy businessmen who liked the game, wanted to provide some entertainment to the local population (which often included a disproportionately large number of their own employees) and make some money in the process. Initially, most players were local working class members with an occasional college graduate hired as the special star, as was the case with the legendary William WaIter (Pudge) Heffelfinger, Amos Alonzo Stagg's teammate at Yale. With the gradual growth of the professional game and its departure from America's hinterlands into the country's cultural centers though, college graduates began to furnish the majority of the players. A situation developed where American universities served as professional football's farm system, a function which they still perform. American higher education - an essential institution of American bourgeois life - continues its deep involvement

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with football true to its legacy as the cradle and inventor of this quintessentially American sport. 44 All those involved in football (the players, fans, coaches and team owners) came to view the game not only as profoundly American, but also as fundamentally modem contrasting it favorably to that other American sport - i.e. baseball. This led to the erroneous but still powerful myth which continues to glorify baseball as a rural game. Baseball having developed into America's "pastime" populated by the country's masses, seemingly lacked the vigor and drive of modernity associated with football's "scientific" aura. Rather than cultivating the leisurely image of a "pastime", football prided itself on replicating the tough, strategic, determined and ultimately victorious side of American life. Football prominently featured all the values central to bourgeois capitalism in the United States: British elite origins to provide the necessary historical legitimacy coupled with American "robust manliness" to distinguish it clearly from its "soft" , disorganized, Victorian predecessor;45 individual effort combined with intricate team work; hierarchical control in tandem with corporate cooperation; and equality of opportunity and access accompanied by the survival of the fittest. 46 Just like American capitalism, so too was football made bearable by the' 'rules of the game". In notable contrast to both soccer and rugby, American football - like baseball - developed a mass of intricate rules which served as a lingua franca for the sport in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society dominated by bourgeois values of individualism rather than the noblesse oblige collectivism of the British aristocratized sports world. Whereas a common culture among players - and between players and spectators - permitted British sports to develop with a minimal system of policing, a similar self-regulating approach was impossible in a country with a constant influx of new immigrants, who had the importance of being number one impressed upon them on arrival. In addition to providing a common ground of understanding, rules also helped systematize and quantify American sports. The performance of a team, as well as ofthe individual, could be more' 'objectively" measured than in the murky, collectivist British team sports. One could thus tie remuneration, advancement or demotion to a player's "numbers", analogous to the reward system in a Taylorized form of industrial production. The existence of written - as opposed to culturally internalized - rules also fostered an atmosphere in which a premium was attached to devising "trick plays" , designed to mislead consciously the opponent by staying just this side of what the rules permitted or indeed by violating them outright in the hope that the policing authorities would not notice. "Trick plays' " basically unknown to soccer, rugby and cricket, became woven into the fabric of American football and baseball. Lastly - as in politics - clearly stated, written and universalistic rule had an equalizing effect on American football by enhancing its attraction to otherwise disparate social groups. Rules thereby enhanced participation and contributed to the popularization - if perhaps less to the democratization - of this sport. It is now time to turn to America's earliest popular sport which helped "crowd out soccer from below".

Crowding Out From Below: The case of baseball

Purportedly, Jacques Barzun once said, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball". UntiI the 1950s, baseball was far and

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away America's most popular sport. From the very beginning of its development, baseball's successful proliferation among America's nlasses depended on its identity as "American". Football never denied its British origins and indeed proudly pointed to William Webb Ellis' alleged run at Rugby in 1823 as the inception of the game. In contrast, baseball went to great length to deny having had any relationship to the British game of rounders, all the while stressing the truly "Americanness" of the game's every facet. In this context, the still widely held myth of Abner Doubleday having originated the game in Cooperstown, New York in 1839 was created. To the enthusiastic cries of "No rounders!", a group of 300 prominent baseball enthusiasts, including Mark Twain and Chauncey M. Depew, gathered at Delmonico's in New York City in 1889 to hear the fourth presIdent of the National League, Abraham G. Mills, declare that' 'patriotism and research" had established beyond any doubt the American origin of Baseball. 47 The creation of the Abner Doubleday myth was to squelch forever the British claim that baseball was a descendant of rounders. Baseball's "devotees found it increasingly difficult to swallow the idea that their favorite pastime was of foreign origin. Pride and patriotism required that the game be native, unsullied by English ancestry." 48 Intense American nativism, apparent already during baseball's "take-off period" in the 1850s, ensured baseball's eventual success as "'the American National Game". Ties to rounders were consciously denied and baseball was systematically defined as "anti-cricket": faster, more action-packed, tougher, requiring more ingenuity and individual initiative. In short, baseball was better suited to and more accurately reflected life in the "New World". The following analysis will focus on the evolution of baseball as a game and as a national institution in a curious temporal parallel to soccer's development in England. Baseball's tempestuous era - reflecting central conflicts in American society of the late nineteenth century - came to a more or less accepted conclusion by 1903, at the exact time of soccer's conquest of the world. Having developed into America's mass sport and national pastime between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, baseball had successfully ensconced itself in America's ,'sport space". Thus little room remained for soccer to develop on the popular level, as it did first in Great Britain, then on the European Continent and in Latin America, and eventually in the rest of the world. Baseball's precursors stretch back to America's colonial period when an array of games with names such as "town-ball" and "round-ball" were played on village greens primarily in New England and New York. Completely regional in character - as attested to by such names as the '" Massachusetts Game", '" New England Game" and "New York Game" - virtually all of baseball's forerunners hailed from the British game of rounders in which a batter would "'round" the bases - or "goals" - after having "struck" the ball which was thrown to him by a "bowler" belonging to the opposite team. In an interesting and lasting parallel to soccer, baseball's success was in part based on the fact that virtually no equipment or special physical attributes were necessary to enjoy or excel at the game. Like soccer, baseball thus enjoyed "democratic access" in that the game was accessible to all and no exotic equipment or locale were required. 49 Any elongated bat-like object, be it a broomstick, paddle or rifle, served adequately for hitting the ball. Any vaguely round object - regardless of exact size and consistency - could serve

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as a ball. Versions of this game - involving hitting and throwing a ball and running "the bases" - proliferated in the northeast of the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. Like football (as yet undifferentiated into Association and Rugby), the initial and all-important codification of baseball occurred in the quasi-aristocratic milieu of educated gentlemen. In 1845 a group of 40 bourgeois male New Yorkers (professional men, merchants, white collar workers and several "gentlemen") joined together in forming the New York Knickerbockers, the world's first organized baseball team. 50 Under the leadership of Alexander Cartwright, the Knickerbockers created the first written rules of baseball. Despite constant changes since, these rules have provided the main contours of the game to this day: the four-base diamond; 90-foot base paths; three out, all out; batting in rotation; throwing out runners or touching them; nine-man teams with each player covering a definite position; and the location of the pitcher's box in relation to the diamond as a whole to mention but the most important ones. 51 Cartwright and his reformers also specified the weight of the ball as well as the circumference of the bat in order to provide uniformity for competition. The Knickerbockers played their first game at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey against the New York Base Ball Club on June 19, 1846. In that same year, J. C. Thring, one of soccer's major codifiers, organized the first football team at Cambridge. The baseball game lasted only four innings, "because by that time the New York Club had scored the 21 'aces' (runs) necessary to win under the rules". Also an elaborate social affair, the ensuing dinner assumed almost equal importance to the contest on the field. This tradition continued until the end of the next decade as other teams joined the Knickerbockers in New York (notably the Gothams, Eagles and Empires) as well as in Brooklyn (The Excelsiors, Putnams, Eckfords and Atlantics) and competed in a series of regular games held on an inter- as well as intra-city basis. In 1858 a team of Manhattan all-stars first played their Brooklyn counterparts and thereby inaugurated a rivalry which was to last exactly one hundred years. Throughout the 1850s, baseball caught the fancy of people in all walks of life leading to a proliferation of clubs organized largely along occupational lines. Policemen, barkeepers, schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers and even clergymen had their own team. This rapid "downward" dissemination led to baseball's development first as "New York's game", then the "Northeast's game" and ultimately "America's game" following the conclusion of the Civil War. Since baseball was most popular and its rules most codified in New York, what was known as the "New York game" became nationally accepted by 1860. As with football in England at that time, the increased facility and expansion of railroad travel fostered intercity contests. Moreover, the growing availability of newspapers, in which the first regular sports pages appeared, also helped the game's popularity during a critical formative period. A fundamental transformation of the game accompanied this geographic and social expansion. Though still dominated by amateurs, competition became keener. Winning, which had been accorded only incidental status during baseball's "gentlemen era", developed into the game's raison d'etre. Gone was the view which allowed each batter to have "his hit". The central aspect of modern baseball developed, which dictated a fundamentally and structurally antagonistic relationship

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between the pitcher and the batter. The pitcher was no longer to "serve" the batter a "hittable" ball, but in fact do just the opposite. By trying to make it as difficult as possible for the batter to hit the ball, pitchers developed fastballs, curves, sliders and various breaking pitches to confuse, mislead and basically trick the batter whose repeated failure to "strike" the ball would lead to his forfeiting his role as a batter. To keep pitchers from throwing balls out of the batters' reach, the system of "balls" was invented whereby the batter was allowed to advance to first base in case the pitcher exceeded his permitted allotment of throwing "faulty" balls. Baseball's anti-English, anti-cricket self-identification increased with the game's gradual distancing from its amateur roots. This nativist strain was also evident in certain rule changes such as the elimination of making an "out" by catching a batter's hit on one bounce, which was associated with the more serene, slower and gentlemanly cricket. "Surely, what an Englishman can do, an American is as capable of improving upon", boasted a sporting paper52 and thus this "archaic" rule was relegated to baseball's "muffins", as amateurs became known in the days of the game's increased professionalization. Gate receipts developed into an important source of revenue for the clubs, leading to baseball's "enclosure movement". Fences provided a clear separation between "ball parks" and the outside world. They also helped separate spectators from players, providing a more orderly spatial arrangement for a rather unruly crowd. Last, but certainly not least, these "enclosures" eventually led to the institutionalization of the "home run" , one of baseball's most exciting events. With victory assuming paramount importance, professionalism rapidly displaced amateurism during the post-Civil War era. While every team had its share of , 'rounders" (baseball's equivalent to football's "ringers") who "revolved" from one team to the next following the most lucrative offer with reckless abandon of any team loyalty or moral constraints, in 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings appeared as the first official all-professional team in baseball, indeed in any modern sport. Two years later, the first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, was established. Lasting only four years and representing 10 teams, this league was dominated by the Red Stockings who had moved from Cincinnati to Boston. Best described as the most unregulated capitalist phase of baseball, the charismatic entrepreneur, best represented by Albert Goodwill Spalding, the pitching star of the Boston Red Stockings, characterized this early era. Spalding, typical of entrepreneurs in America's burgeoning bourgeois society, was a missionary, modernizer and moneymaker all rolled into one. By further standardizing the game's equipment (balls, bats, uniforms) Spalding continued to develop the modern game of baseball while simultaneously helping his sporting goods business become a flourishing enterprise. His missionary zeal to spread baseball - and also the wares of his company - extended beyond the confines of the United States. Having returned from a triumphant baseball tour of Canada, Spalding "conceived the idea in 1873 of taking a baseball team over to England to demonstrate what the Americans had cooked up out of rounders crossed with cricket. "53 His conviction that the superior American game would inevitably catch on with the English during a number of exhibition matches played in 1874 proved utterly illusory. Baseball did not excite the British who found it dull and hardly a worthy departure from the children's game of rounders. Conveying the

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unbound optimism of that special breed of American entrepreneur, Spalding remained undeterred by his failed mission of 1874 and embarked on a second, even more ambitious, journey in 1888/89 to bring baseball to the rest of the world. He took an all-star team called "All Americans" to Hawaii, Australia, Egypt, Italy, France and England. The results were even more embarrassing for baseball than during the first trip though. Other than in Australia where the game met with a polite but unenthusiastic reception, baseball was greeted with a mixture of disinterest, derision and even hostility on the team's other stops. Italian and French spectators found the game dull and uninspiring. The British still dismissed it as the American version of rounders, though some particularly benevolent critics conceded that baseball was faster and more scientific. 54 Not until the mid 1920s did baseball's prophets once again embark on a proselytizing mission which - with the exception of attaining positive results in Japan - failed abysmally once again. Three explanations seem plausible for baseball's failure to capture the imagination of sports fans outside the United States and its immediate geographic orbit. First, its "Americanness" not only rendered it incomprehensible outside its cultural context, but also lent it a real - albeit unjustified - aura of immaturity and vulgarity, particularly in British eyes. Second, the 1888/89 trip occurred at a time when these countries were still insufficiently bourgeoisified to embrace a sport on a mass level. This had already happened with baseball in the United States and soccer in Great Britain, but these other countries were not yet ready for it. Third, the 1920s expedition failed because soccer vvas already well ensconced as the premier mass sport in the world, and "crowded out" any serious competition. The one notable exception, where the baseball rrrission actually proved rather successful, was Japan. Returning to baseball's unregulated capitalist phase of the early 1870s, this era witnessed open gambling and drinking among the spectators and players before, during and after the games. Players, as well as umpires, accepted bribes to "fix" games in full view of the public. The generally anarchic atmosphere was heightened by the common practice of "raiding" players. A club had been "raided", if some of its top players, whom it had barely signed a few weeks before, disappeared from its roster only to show up in a rival team's uniform the next day. By the mid 1870s all involved saw that baseball was in dire need of some sort of streamlining. Begun in 1876, this process lasted until 1903 when the present organizational form of major league baseball was established. Led by Spalding, baseball's "domestication" commenced with the founding of the National League in 1876, the world's oldest still functioning professional sports league, predating the English Football League by twelve years. The National League was limited to eight clubs. Each was guaranteed "territorial rights" by being the sole representatives of a city which had at least 75,000 inhabitants. In addition to this important monopolistic market position, clubs agreed to refrain from "raiding" each other's players by introducing the so-called' 'reserve clause". This cartel-like agreement, which lasted nearly one century, gave each club complete, quasi-feudal control over its players by giving it a continuing option to rehire them each year and thus prevent them from selling their labor power to the highest bidder in the free market. 55 Players thus became a team's property, a serf-like arrangement common to other professional sports with mass appeal, such as soccer. With baseball having become America's most popular form of entertainment by

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the early 1880s, other entrepreneurs saw the sport as an excellent venue to make money. Therefore the rival American Association developed in 1882, its eight teams charging lower admissions than their counterparts in the National League and playing on Sundays. 56 Periodic trade wars, benefitting fans and players, ensued between the two rival leagues. The result was the eventual demise of the American Association in 1891 and the absorption of four of its teams by the National League, thereafter comprised of twelve clubs. In addition to trade wars, another occasional occurrence in the baseball of the late nineteenth century further strengthens our analogy with feudalism. Just as there were numerous, destructive, peasant revolts which brought about few tangible gains for the peasants in the Middle Ages, so too did baseball players conduct periodic costly "wars" against the owners leading only to minor attainments for the players' cause. Efforts to unionize were invariably defeated and the owner-imposed "reserve clause" successfully stymied the players' attempts to use their market power to gain better conditions and, more importantly, to enhance their control over their own existence in baseball. After a trade war at the turn of the century, the National League, weakened by internal strife and the jettisoning of four of its clubs, entered into a peace agreement with the newly formed American League forming the pinnacle of what became henceforth the cartel of "Organized Baseball". The peace agreement between the two leagues led to the establishment of the World Series57 and an arrangement in which the sixteen major league teams (eight in each league) represented ten cities. This format lasted for fifty years until the Boston Braves of the National League transferred to Milwaukee, thereby sparking a period of relocation and the establishment of new franchises which continued until the 1970s. Following another organizational restructuring in the wake of the 1919 "Black Sax" World Series scandal, "Organized Baseball" was led by a single commissioner beginning in 1920. The game entered its golden era which not even World War II could interrupt. With the gradual proliferation of radio broadcasting during the 1920s, the establishment of the "Yankee dynasty" and the introduction of night games in 1935, baseball achieved an unchallenged hegemony in American sports. Not until professional football's meteoric rise in the 1960s was that hegemony challenged. Baseball's overwhelming popularity with the American masses proved sufficient to "crowd out" soccer "from below" in the United States.

Conclusion
This paper argues that the particular nature of America's development as "the first new nation" contributed considerably to the "crowding out" of soccer as one of this country's major spectator sports. Specifically, it is this essay's contention that some of the most salient social and historical constellations which led to the absence of a large working-class party in the United States, making it the world's only advanced industrial country to suffer from this considerable deficit in the conduct of its politics, also helped exclude the United States from the world's most popular mass sport. It was above all America's early and comprehensive bourgeoisification - as myth and reality - which created both "exceptionalisms" whose legacies are with us to this day.

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Just as the on why there is no socialism in America mainly focuses on the period between the Civil War War I, so too did I concentrate much of this paper's empirical on the pre-1914 era. As such, any serious concern with either one - or - of the two "exceptionalisms'" demands by necessity a historical approach since it was at a certain era of American development the overall stage was set. The overall contours of this stage have by and large renlained intact. a thorough historical exploration of topics such as the two American "exceptionalisms" not only helps us understand their origins but also their continued presence in our world. This, of course, is not to say that an understanding of the pre-World War I situation remains sufficient as an explanation for the failure of socialism and/or soccer in contemporary America. Surely one would have to spend some time analyzing the phenomena of Stalinism and McCarthyism - just to mention perhaps the most obvious cases - for a proper analysis of the continued absence of a large, mass-based, left-leaning party in the United States of the 1980s. Similarly, soccer's marginal existence as a major spectator sport in contemporary America has probably a lot more to do with its inability to land a long-term television contract with one of the major networks, than with it being "crowded out" by baseball "from below" and football "from above" before the turn of the century. Yet, the very fact that none of the networks has ever been willing to extend such a contract harkens back to an era when public tastes in mass sports were formed all over the world and bestowed with a remarkable endurance. In that, even the United States cannot claim to be an exception.
NOTES

* Thanks to Michael Oriard for letting n1e see his work in progress and sharing his extensive knowledge with Ine. Space restrictions necessitated the deletion of extensive documentation which accompanies the original version of this article. Upon request, I would be glad to supply the interested reader with the unabridged paper.
1. I would like to draw the reader's attention in this context to Paul Hoch' s very useful term of "sexual apartheid" denoting the fact that sports often transcend the many lines of demarcation (be they class, status, ethnicity or religion) among men only to exclude women almost completely. It is interesting to note that this phenomenon of "sexual apartheid" is virtually ubiquitous all over the world. See Paul Hoch, Ripp off the Big Ganze: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite (New York, 1972), 147-66. 2. While it is very difficult to obtain reliable data on how many people watched the World Cups of 1978, 1982 and 1986 respectively, there can be little doubt that these events have hitherto attracted more television viewers than anything else in human history. More than 2 billion people watched the World Cup final in 1978 with the figures being 3 billion and 3.5 billion for the same event in 1982 and 1986 respectively. Over 5 billion people watched the entire tournament in 1982 and 8 billion followed it four years later. (All these figures were obtained from the Secretariat of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in Zurich.) In substantiating her point that soccer is far and away the world's most popular spectator sport, Janet Lever in her excellent study on soccer in Brazil states the following about the final game of the 1978 World Cup: 'In other words, nearly half the l1J'orld's people shared a single event. (Emphasis in the original) ... To put this figure in perspective, the combined audience for two weeks of Olympic events was one billion people in 1976." See Janet Lever, Soccer Madness (Chicago, 1983), 20. 3. The television data corroborating this point are overwehlming. World Cup events remained confined to the realm of esoterica and immigrant subcultures when compared to such mainstays of American sports as the World Series (baseball), the Superbowl (football) and the NBA championship series (basketball).

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4. The original title of Sombart's work as published by the renown house of J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) from Tuebingen in 1906 was Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? The English translation is: lhy is there no Socialism in the United States?, first published by The Macmillan Press, London and by the International Arts and Sciences Press of White Plains, New York in 1976. 5. The literature dealing with "American exceptionalism", or at least certain aspects of it, is vast. Here I will list only those works which I have found particularly important in my teaching and research over the years. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1947); John M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset (OOs.), Failure ofa Dream? Essays in the History ofAmerican Socialism (Garden City, 1974); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, 1960); idem, The First New Nation (Garden City, 1967); idem, Agrarian Socialism (Garden City, 1968); idem, Revolution and Counterrevolution (Garden City, 1970); the exchange between Sean Wilentz and Michael Hanagan in International !Abor and Working Class History, Number 26; Gwendolyn Mink, Old Lahor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State 1875-1920 (Ithaca, 1986); and Jerome Karabel, "The Failure of American Socialism Reconsidered" in The Socialist Register (1979), 204-227. 6. For the most thorough account of soccer in the United States see Zander Hollander (ed.), The American Encyclopedia of Soccer (New York, 1980). 7. As to soccer's existence in the United States, the two following quotations seem rather revealing: "Although various attempts have been made, soccer has obstinately refused to take root in the United States. It has for many years been extensively played at a minor level, particularly in Philadelphia, where there has long been a proliferation of leagues, and in St. Louis, where it is very popular in schools," [John Arlott (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Spons and Games (London, 1975),381]; and "Soccer is a sport you play, but you don't watch or follow, " [An I I-year old girl on Boston television in the summer of 1986.] While soccer is obviously being played in the United States, the vast majority of the players are youngsters under the age of 19, 30 % of whon1 are young women. Soccer in the United States is predominantly a game for middle class, suburban boys and girls who stop playing it once they reach their 20s, never having developed any interest in following the sport on a professional level, instead seeing it as a pleasant, "egalitarian" and "nonsexist" form of recreation. 8. The United States is the only advanced industrial country which developed three major team sports which, performed on the professional level, fill its "sport space" . Even here, however, data amply demonstrate that it is somewhat erroneous to speak of the "Big Three" in terms of their popularity as television spectator sports since basketball has a substantially smaller audience than football and baseball. Needless to say, many surveys do not even include soccer and those that do show soccer consistently at or near the bottom of the American television viewers' preference as a spectator sport. 9. It remains somewhat of a mystery to me why basketball became the only successful American export hailing from the' 'Big Three". Indeed, its success can be measured by the fact that, following soccer, it constitutes the world's second most popular team sport. The Federation Internationale de Basketball Amateur, founded in 1932, had 133 Inebers in 1982, with the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), established in 1904, numbering 147 member nations (13 nations more, incidentally, than were held together by the multisport International Olympic Committee IOC). See Janet Lever, Soccer Madness, pp. 27, 33-34. Three of basketball's essential characteristics could perhaps account - at least in part - for this sport's successful internationalization in contrast to the American parochialism of football and baseball. First, just like soccer, basketball is blessed with having very simple rules. This means that the game was easily transferable to the most diverse cultures, since it was easily understood and appreciated. Second, basketball only requires five players which has made it cheaper than baseball, necessitating little equipment, and a good deal less expensive than football which requires much equipment. Last, unlike baseball, football and soccer, basketball was explicitly designed as a winter, Le. indoor, sport. As such, it has never had any serious rivals, which could pose a major challenge to its proliferation following the massive build-up of indoor arenas during the post-World War II period in virtually every country of the First and Second Worlds. 10. See: "A newspaper at the top of its games: Sovietski Sport works hard to keep its readers informed on the NBA, NHL ... ", in The Boston Globe, July 20, 1986.

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11. Thus, for example, Antonin Dvorak's famous symphony in E minor, opus 95 known to music lovers as "From the New World", wanted to capture and convey something "typically American", not Canadian or Australian, to its European audiences. The composer was fascinated by the United States as a multiethinic and multicultural society whose music he experienced as having original elements which could only enrich that of the "old world". See Friedrich C. Heller, "Antonin Dvorak: 9. Symphonie 'Aus der neuen Welt''' in Playbill of the Salzburger Festspiele 1985 (July 29, 1985), n.p. 12. For a fine comparative analysis of this issue, demonstrating a more ubiquitous and serious religious involvement on the part of American population when contrasted with inhabitants of other advanced capitalist societies, see WaIter Dean Burnham's superb essay: "The 1980 Earthquake: Realignment, Reaction, or What?" in Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers (eds.), The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York, 1981), 98-140. 13. The data about the United States being an "armed society" is nothing short of frightening. According to information obtained from Handgun Control Inc. in Washington, D.e., there were 102 rnillion firearms in the United States in 1968, with the quantity increasing to 165 million by 1978 and 240 million by 1985. Currently, one out of every four U. S. households has some sort of firearm, half of which are loaded. 14. Leon Samson, Towards a United Front (New York, 1933). 15. It is interesting to note that Great Britain and the United States dominated the five Olympic Games held before World War I (1896, 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912). Among the total of211 gold medals awarded in this period (with one event having been voided out of a possible 212), the United States won 82 and Great Britain 36 bringing their total to 118 which amounted to 55.7 % of all the gold medals obtained by winners in these five Olympics. If one adds the 4 gold medals won by Australians, 3 by South Africans and 5 by Canadian athletes, the "Anglo-Saxon" total of 130 gold medals yields 61.3 % of all the gold medal.., awarded in these events. The Anglo-American dominance becomes even more pronounced when it is contrasted to the 81 gold medal winners hailing from other countries among whom none ac"hieved a position of clear superiority. This is yet another clear manifestation of the fact that the invention, development and practice of organized sports were very much the domain of the most pronouncedly bourgeois societies at the turn of the century, i.e. the United States and Great Britain. 16. Michael Oriard has superbly captured the essence of this "special relationship" between Great Britain and the United States, highlighting the American side of the dilemma: "As former colonials, Americans looked to the mother country for leadership in athletic matters as surely as they imitated British art, literature, and other cultural expressions in the nineteenth century. But it is equally important to note our distinctive adaptations of English sporting customs. The historical moment of America's colonizing, the rejection of monarchy and aristocracy for an egalitarian ideal, and the consequent differences in American social, political, and educational institutions had profound implications for the native sports culture." Michael Oriard, "In the Land of Merriwell: Fair Play and American Sports Culture," Chapter Two of the manuscript of a forthcoming book, p. 87. 17. The word' 'soccer" is an abbreviation of Association Football. More precisely, it derives from "association" forming a linguistic parallel to "rugger" which in turn became the vernacular for Rugby Football. Brian Glanville, certainly among the foremost soccer experts in the world and one of the game's best chroniclers, tells this interesting anecdote in connection with the origins of the word "soccer": "Why soccer, though? (Emphasis in original.) The only plausible theory I have ever come across is that the credit, or blame, belonged to Charles Wreford-Brown, a famous center half for Old Carthusians and the Corinthians. Sitting in his rooms in Oxford University, so it is said, he was visited by a friend who asked him whether he were going to play 'Rugger' or Rugby football. To this, in a burst of inspiration, Wreford-Brown replied, 'No: I'm playing soccer,' the world being a corruption of 'Association' in the sport's correct name, Association Football." See Brian Glanville, A Book of Soccer (New York, 1979), 4, 5. 18. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, 14. 19. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Sports, 14. 20. Calcio's only major legacy is the fact that the game of soccer - referred to in most languages by a variant of the English term "football" - is still called calcio in Italy. 21. Glanville, A Book of Soccer, p. 4; and James Walvin, The People's Game: A Social History of British Football (London, 1975), 14.

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22. See chapter one in Walvin's The People's Game entitled "Pre-Industrial Football", chapter three "The Rise of the Working-Class Football", and chapter five "England's Most Durable Export". 23. Michael Oriard, "In the Land of Merriwell," 95. 24. Orland, "In the Land of Merriwell," 90. 25. See Percy M. Young, The History of British Football (London, 1968), 62. 26. It is in this context that the name of William Webb Ellis means a lot to American football fans. According to a number of first-rate sources such as The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History} of Professional Football (New York, 1977), 10; Young, The History of British Football, 63; and David Riesman and Reuel Denney, "Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion" in the American Quarterly, Volume 3, number 4 (Winter 1951), 311, 312, it was in 1823 that William Webb Ellis, a Rugby student, picked up the ball in a match at his school, tucked it under his arm and ran with it past the goaline. Walvin, in an interesting departure, claims this whole thing to be untrue and maintains that this myth was invented by Rugby fans and alumhi in 1895 as a post-hoc reassertion that the game of rugby had originated at their school. (See Walvin, The People's Game, 34). If Walvin is right, then the origins of American football - via rugby - are based on an equal myth to that of baseball's supposed invention by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. It is interesting that baseball's Doubleday-Cooperstown myth also arose at the end of the nineteenth century, thus paralleling football's William-Webb-Ellis myth with respect to time of creation. 27. See Walvin, The People's Game, 42-43; Young, The History of British Football, 89-92; and Ph. Heineken, Das Fussballspiel. Association (ohne Aufnahme des Balls): Seine Geschichte, Regeln und Spielweise (Stuttgart, n.d.), 15. 28. Young, The History of British Football, 79. 29. Young, The History of British Football, 93, 94. Among the many commonalities between soccer and basketball- team effort, both centred on collective strategies requiring constant on-thespot improvisation as opposed to the execution of clearly defined plans brought in from the outside of the actual contest a la American football - is most certainly the fact that both only had 13 rules at their respective founding which to this day still form the core of each sport's essential existence. It is telling that Dr. lames Naismith, the founder of basketball, used a soccer ball when he invented the new winter sport in 1892 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Both sports are "simple games", making them easily understandable and readily transferable across diverse cultures. Soccer, however, is even more "democratic" than basketball. Not in need of hoops and indoor arenas, soccer, above all, continues to be played by "normal" people rather than giant-like athletes who have all but become de rigueur in any kind of competitive modern basketball. For a nice analysis contrasting basketball and soccer on the one hand with football and baseball on the other, see Robert W. Keidel, "The Soccer-Basketball Connection", Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, July 17, 1986. 30. Young, A History of British Football, 113. 31. Walvin, The People's Game, 74. 32. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, 35. 33. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Sports, 21. 34. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Sports, 22. 35. It still remains somewhat unclear to me why Harvard refused so steadfastly to play the kicking game, sticking tenaciously to the running-style Boston game and then converting to rugby following the matches with McGill in 1874. One hypothesis might be that the university's anglophilia and strong preoccupation with imitating Oxford and Cambridge as closely as possible, led it to identify with rugby as being the "proper" sport for students at America's oldest and most prestigious university. There can be no doubt, however, that it was ultimately Harvard's unique prestige and standing among America's colleges at the time which swayed the other universities away from a soccer-style football which they were already playing making them embrace the Harvard-dominated running game. Thus, Harvard can be accorded an important role in the development of America's "soccer exceptionalism' , . 36. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, 25. 37. Hollander, The American Encyclopedia of Soccer, 26. 38. The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History ofProfessional Football, 10. In a brilliant application of Max Weber's tripartite scheme of domination - charismatic, traditional, legal-rational Seymour Martin Lipset shows how the early institutionalization of George Washington's charisma as this "first new nation's" first president and foremost military leader helped create a smooth

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transition to and a legitimate continuation of the legal-rational form of authority which has regulated much of the public discourse and behavior in the United States for over two centuries. See Lipset, The First New Nation, 21-26. 39. The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of Professional Football, 10. 40. Riesman and Denny, "Football in America," 318, 319; and Oriard, "In the Land of Merriwell," 112. 41. All of the preceding information is derived from Riesman and Denny, "Football in America"; The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of Professional Football; and John Arlott, The Oxford Companion to Sports and Games, 321-323. It is helpful for the argument to furnish yet another detail concerning the origin of the necessary yardage rule, since it conveys the difference between the myth of a leisurely and gentlemanly activity on the one hand, and the reality of a fiercely-contested bourgeois game in which winning became all-important on the other. When Camp and his colleagues devised the American scrimmage out of the British "scrum", they assumed "that the chivalrous Ivy Leaguers would gladly give up the ball when they could not gain ground during the scrimmage." (The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History ofProfessional Football, 10). This, however, was clearly not the case. Worried about being outperformed and outwitted by its opponents, each team chose to play it safe by simply maintaining possession of the ball as long as possible, which in effect meant one-half of the game. Trust in the opponent's honest intentions and the simple desire just to enjoy playing a good game regardless of winners and losers - so essential to a quasi-aristocratic, noncompetitive, gentlemanly atmosphere - had all but disappeared in American sports and society, even at the nation's most elite universities. 42. Oriard, "In the Land of Merriwell," 107. 43. Oriard, "In the Land of Merriwell," 114. 44. It is worth mentioning in this context one of early pro football's most significant legacies to America's sports world. It was in New York City's Madison Square Garden that a "World Series" was played indoors between two profe(;,sional football teams in 1902 and 1903 giving rise to the same - and subsequently much more !Jopular - event in the game of professional baseball. See The NFL's Official Encyclopedia Histor.,. of Professional Football, 12. 45. In the context of discussing professional football's precursors, The NFL's Official Encyclopedia History of Professional Football contains a passage which provides an excellent example of the atmosphere underlying the formation of American sports (especially football) which - if not explicitly anti-British - was clearly conducive to separate the "new world's" sports from those of the "old"; "Pittsburgh's first athletic clubs were the Allegheny Athletic Association and the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Such clubs emerged after the Civil War, according to researcher Thomas Jable, as an antidote to Victorianism. American men could through competitive athletics at their clubs 'countermand the Victorian principles of delicacy and refinement.' Football, aggressive and sometimes violent, served this need especially well; it 'represented a significant triumph of robust manliness over tender and fragile femininity'." The NFL's Official Encyclopedia, 11. 46. The link between American football and capitalism has often been made. For a relatively recent comparison between "democratic" and "capitalist" American football on the one hand and ,'socialist" European soccer on the other, see Congressman Jack Kemp's following views as expressed in "The old quarterback doesn't approve of that other football ganle" in The Boston Globe, May 12, 1983: "In debate about a resolution urging the United States to try to snare the World Cup games, up leaps this ex-quarterback, a 13-year veteran of pro football, to snipe at soccer. First he thinks there still may be folks out there who don't understand that what the rest of the world knows as 'football' is not the football he knows and loves ... 'I think it is important for all those young out there, who some day hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist ... ' ... 'He [Jack Kemp] believes that football is entrepreneurial capitalism, it has a quarterback, someone who is in charge, while soccer is based more on the European socialist tradition; no one's in command, it's more of a sharing, cooperative game.' ... Jack was speaking 'extemporaneously,' the aide continued, as if that alone should explain it. 'He tells that all the time to Little League footballers when he travels around the country, and their eyes glaze over.'" 47. Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York, 1960), 8,9. 48. Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, 8, 9.

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49. One of the reasons baseball and soccer developed into' 'people's sports" has a lot to do with the accessibility of both games. Just as stickball, for example - availaing itself of such urban props as fire hydrants or parked cars in lieu of bases - formed an integral part of inner city dwelling in the Uoited States, so has soccer continued as a street game in the cities of Europe and Latin America. These environments have created many major stars for both sports. There is yet another dimension to the "democratic" component of soccer and baseball. In noticeable contrast to football and basketball, neither of the two previous sports necessitates any special physical abilities such as exceptional height or strength. Indeed, exceptional physical attributes which are the sine qua non for any successful football or basketball player could in fact be detrimental to a career in either baseball or soccer. While excellent athletes, soccer and baseball players look "normal". 50. Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, p. 16; and Robert Smith, Illustrated History ofBaseball (New York, 1973), 18-22. 51. Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, 19, 20. 52. As quoted in Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years, 65. 53. Smith, Illustrated History ofBaseball, 44. For a detailed biography of Spalding and his role in baseball, see Peter Levine, A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball (New York, 1985). 54. David Q. Voigt, "Reflections on Diamonds: American Baseball and American Culture" in Journal of Sport History, Volume 1, Number 1 (Spring 1974), 18, 19. 55. On Organized Baseball's "reserve clause" which ruled the game's capital-Iabor relations until the courts struck it down as being unconstitutional in the early 1970s, see John Arlott, The Oxford Companion to Spons, 59. 56. Arlott, The Oxford Companion to Sports, 59. 57. The term "World Series" smugly conveys America's "sport exceptionalism" . Few aspects of American culture seem more peculiar, incomprehensible and irritating to European sports fans than calling the contest between two domestic teams for what essentially is the United States championship "world series" as in baseball or "world championship" as in professional football and basketball. Contrast the three American "world championships" to soccer's World Cup where virtually all 144 countries belonging to FIFA play lengthy elimination tournaments for the right to participate in the quadrennial final event still comprising 24 teams. The eventual winner can thus legitimately bear the title of' 'world champion" during its four-year incumbency. Moreover, world championships in all team sports other than the American "Big Three" are bestowed upon a country in this world of nation-states, not upon a club. Thus, world championships, typically, are won by all-star teams whose members are all citizens of the same state.