Soccer & Society

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American soccer at a crossroad: MLS’s struggle

between the exigencies of traditional American
sports culture and the expectations of the global
soccer community

Zack Blumberg & Andrei S. Markovits

To cite this article: Zack Blumberg & Andrei S. Markovits (2021) American soccer at a
crossroad: MLS’s struggle between the exigencies of traditional American sports culture
and the expectations of the global soccer community, Soccer & Society, 22:3, 231-247, DOI:
10.1080/14660970.2020.1802255

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2020.1802255

Published online: 30 Jul 2020.

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SOCCER & SOCIETY
2021, VOL. 22, NO. 3, 231–247
https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2020.1802255

American soccer at a crossroad: MLS’s struggle between the

exigencies of traditional American sports culture and the
expectations of the global soccer community
Zack Blumberg and Andrei S. Markovits
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

ABSTRACT
With the formation of Major League Soccer (MLS) in 1996 the United States
joined the soccer world by featuring a profession league on the very top of
its soccer pyramid. However, over the past 25 years, MLS has encountered
two formidable obstacle in its navigating treacherous waters. On the one
side it faced the Scylla of the Big Four North American sports leagues that
have created a sports culture that MLS entered but could not fully embrace;
and on the other side MLS encountered the Charybdis of the global soccer
world’s very own culture which MLS had to address and accord special
attention. The paper highlights the tension that MLS has faced throughout
its existence.

Introduction
On 6 April 1996, the San Jose Clash won the first-ever game in Major League Soccer (MLS) history,
defeating D.C. United 1–0 in front of a sold out crowd of 31,683 at Spartan Stadium on the campus
of San Jose State University. That game represented the beginning of a new era for both American
and global sporting cultures. It also embodied the inevitable collision and uneasy coexistence
between the world’s most powerful nation and the world’s most popular sport.
Starting in the second half of the 19th century, and affirmed after the end of WWI, the United
States became the dominant political and cultural force of the 20th century that TIME Magazine
quite appropriately labelled the ‘American Century’. Following the conclusion of WWII, the United
States established itself as a global superpower that lorded over virtually every aspect of public life in
the capitalist world, from politics to the economy, from societal mores to popular culture. Though
America’s hard power was unrivalled in the world; it was perhaps its soft power that proved even
more formidable and potent in extending America’s influence across the globe. The country’s
movies, music, habits and way of life seeped into the world’s most guarded nooks and crannies with
no censorship or walls – Iron or otherwise – providing an effective way of opposing them. Even
though Paul McCartney must have been joking when he stated that it might very well have been The
Beatles’ famed ‘White Album’ which led to the Soviet Union’s demise, this view simply reinforces
the irresistible nature of American cultural power in much of the 20th century, most certainly in
its second half. Even though the Beatles were, of course, British, their art that captured the world
was deeply anchored in that quintessentially American amalgam called rock and roll. After all, it
was Paul McCartney’s bandmate, co-author and co-composer John Lennon who famously said that
before Elvis Presley there was nothing!

CONTACT Zack Blumberg [email protected] 718 Onondaga St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
232 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

There was, however, one massive lacuna and one marked exception to this American power: The
world of Association Football, henceforth called ‘soccer’ in the rest of this paper. This is all the more
remarkable since on many key dimensions of global sports, the United States was – just like in other
aspects of global culture – the most dominant global power. A quick glance at the quantity of
Olympic medals makes it clear that the United States was indeed every bit as dominant a power in
sports as it was in politics, culture and economics. With its 2,827 medals in both winter and summer
Olympics, the United States has more than twice as many medals as does the runner up Soviet
Union/Russia with its 1,122. And yet, there has been something in sports that has rendered the
United States different from much of the rest of the world. This comprises the crux of the concept
called‘American Exceptionalism’: Not the normative notion that the United States is one iota better
than any other country but the empirical reality that it is indeed different from most. Case in point
of what we mean by ‘Exception’: Only the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Liberia, Palau, the
Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands use the Fahrenheit scale in lieu of
Celsius to measure temperature as does, of course, the United States. So ‘exception’ is then best
understood as an empirical oddity, not as a normative position. And such oddities have ruled
American sports since their inception in the middle of the 19th century and continue to do so until
today. The United States is, after all, the only country that has four team sports dominating its
internal sports culture – baseball, basketball, American football and ice hockey – while most
countries only have one. Some have two and only Australia and England have three, though
some of those are regionally separate, as in Rugby League dominating England’s North and
Rugby Union its South; in Australia, Rugby League is New South Wales’s and Queensland’s
hegemonic sport; whereas Australian Rules Football dominates Victoria and the other states. No
country in the world has anything close to America’s college sports in which men’s football and
basketball have comprised the core of America’s hegemonic sports culture. Formula One has
dominated the world’s car racing yet it has barely registered in the United States, where
NASCAR and INDY CAR have been culturally dominant. We can list further examples to illustrate
our point of America’s empirical difference that, of course, does not only pertain to sports but also
to major facets of American politics and society. And then there is the world of soccer that
constitutes a fascinating conundrum part of which our paper hopes to explore. There does not
exist a more global team sport than soccer. And yet, in the world’s most dominant team sport with
a massive cultural reach beyond the actual field of play, giant America has been a minnow, an
irrelevant also-ran. Despite the American national team’s reaching the semi-finals of the first World
Cup in Uruguay in 1930; despite Bert Patenaude’s being the very first player to score a hat trick in
that venerable tournament; despite the miracle of Belo Horizonte when at the 1950 World Cup the
lowly Yanks eliminated all-mighty England from its first participation in the World Cup; the United
States remained throughout virtually all of the 20th century – the aforementioned ‘American
Century’ – a totally insignificant denizen of the game’s periphery. A core in the world’s politics,
culture, technology, universities, Nobel laureates, the United States remained in the periphery of the
global game’s construct with its core being Western and Northern Europe and – until the advent of
the second globalization commencing in the late 1970s and early 1980s – Argentina and Brazil.
Yet, towards the end of 20th century, even in the world of soccer America began to assume some
importance. Led above all by the World Cup’s being held in the United States in 1994 – by any
measure far and away the most successful tournament among all such played between 1930 and
2018 – the 1990s initiated a new era in the world of American soccer but also in that of the global
game as well. There were many reasons for this: A confluence of a politically altered world mainly
due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites; changing demographic developments in the
United States initiated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 also known as the Hart-
Cellar Act; socio-economic and cultural shifts by virtue of the massive suburbanization of America’s
white middle class that appropriated hitherto marginalized consumption habits and rendered them
essential parts of a much more cosmopolitan America; the global connectivity facilitated by the
introduction of new technologies; and dimensions of international patterns in the sport world that
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 233

can be labelled as this world’s ‘second globalization’ following its first one hundred years before.1
While it is true that the globalization process has been a continuous one, we think it conceptually
helpful to differentiate its two periods that we have termed ‘first’ and ‘second’. In the former, the
globalization process occurred by dint of the military might of Europe’s colonial powers of Spain
and Portugal subsequently followed by Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and
Denmark. This reached its apogee in the late 19th century and the period before World War I. It was
clear-cut in its parameters and quite simple to understand in its power relationships. In stark
contrast to this phenomenon, the second globalization is much more multifaceted and complex in
terms of its players, its structures and its effects. Of course, the United States has played leading role
in this, but its influence has been far more circumspect than that of the old European colonial
powers. Whereas the first globalization was most definitely an analogue system, the second has been
quite clearly digital.
As to the second globalization’s role in American sports, the soccer World Cup held in the
United States in 1994, was a central piece in this development. It was not only by dint of the
tournament itself and its singularly impressive success that this was the case, but also by this
tournament’s being the catalyst to the development of a new structure in American soccer in this
decade that forms the focus of this paper, Major League Soccer (MLS). Our effort here will not be to
offer a history of MLS. Nor do we provide an account of MLS’s current state of existence. Rather,
our work uses MLS as an entity in which the contest that we mentioned between America’s political
and cultural dominance in the world on the one hand and its meekness in the soccer world on the
other has raged. This paper analyzes MLS’s unique status as an American league for a non-
American sport. We focus on the contested relationship between soccer’s global identity and
America’s sporting identity and how this tension affects the league’s perception and image both
domestically and globally. We use MLS to explain America’s departure from global soccer’s
periphery and arrive in its semi-periphery at the time of this writing. Whether it will make it to
the game’s core remains an open question, though clearly the United States has all the structural
requirements to make that happen.2

MLS’s Lacuna in legitimacy as a consequence to the clash between American and

global sports cultures
The view from America: early obstacles
Today, nearly 25 years after its founding, MLS remains stuck in a legitimation vacuum. Sadly but
perhaps tellingly, MLS has been unable to gain the respect of either American sporting culture or
the global soccer community.3 Many traditional American sports fans still see MLS as fundamen­
tally foreign, essentially as un-American and inherently different from established American
leagues such as the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL, which occupy the centre of the American sports
space. This is partly due to Americans’ still gauging the following of professional soccer – as
opposed to the sport’s being played by millions – as somehow un-American.4 Added to this burden
for MLS is the fact that the technologies of the second globalization that have transformed the world
into a village have made it possible for every American soccer fan to be a knowledgeable consumer
of the world’s best leagues anchored in Europe. This predicament has created an inhospitable
terrain for MLS to manoeuvre, leaving it a bit in a no man’s land and preventing it from reaching
the core of American sports culture.
Rendering matters more formidable still is that the global soccer community, particularly in the
game’s core in Europe, sees MLS as a feeble, gimmicky American league, with rules and ideas that
demonstrate prima facie America’s fundamental misunderstandings about how soccer should be
governed and played. This then leaves MLS disrespected both in its domestic home where it is seen
as hawking a foreign product and in its global soccer home where it is perceived as an unwanted
intruder relying on gimmicks to gain legitimacy in the United States which, if anything, renders the
234 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

league even more disliked in soccer’s core. The United States and soccer are somehow
a blasphemous mix for many European soccer fans.
On a basic level, soccer’s perception within the United States as foreign is admittedly quite
accurate. Unlike the Big Four Team sports, which were all developed (if not invented) in North
America, soccer is an import from abroad. With the partial exception of hockey, each of America’s
Big Four sports has an origin story tying it to the United States. Baseball is the poster child for this:
Contrary to the Abner Doubleday myth, the modern game originated in New York City in the 1840s
and 1850s. With many variations, of course, the game has been played ever since,5 with the
founding of the first professional sports league of any kind, the National League in 1876, as perhaps
its most important foundational moment.6 While American football was originally the purview of
the college-based upper class, it has a similarly origin story; it represents a particular American
offshoot from various codes of soccer and rugby originally developed in the United Kingdom, with
a unique set of rules.7 Basketball, the most recently-created of the Big Four North American team
sports, has perhaps the most authentically American origin story; it was actually invented in the
United States (albeit by a Canadian) in 1891. Very soon thereafter, the game came to be played
primarily by immigrant groups, and, just like baseball, was used as a means of showing their
devotion to American society and their eagerness to join it as its fully accepted members.8
In comparison to these backgrounds, soccer’s historical ties to the United States remain weak.
Soccer never really settled into attaining an indigenous cultural presence in the United States. As the
continued struggle over the sport’s proper name – is it soccer or football – demonstrates, the game’s
very identity was never settled definitively.9 Although the sport enjoyed relative popularity during
the 1920s, the ‘Soccer Wars’ of the late 1920s shuttered the American Soccer League, the ASL, the
nation’s only viable and quite popular professional league.10 At the core of these ‘wars’ lay yet
another decisive difference between soccer and all major American team sports. This pertains to the
ultimate authority in the sport’s very identity which in all American sports rests solely with their
respective leagues but which in soccer lies with country-wide federations that determine and
adjudicate all rules and regulations which all leagues and teams must follow at the pain of being
excommunicated from the soccer-playing world in case of insubordination. That is exactly what
happened in the late 1920s in American soccer. Due to insubordination to the country’s federation,
the ASL became a renegade operation meaning that all its players, games and records were
excommunicated from the world of soccer.
Soccer was also a latecomer to the American ‘sports space’ in which the era following the
conclusion of WWI and the 1920s attained a great importance: If a sport became ensconced in
a society by the 1920s, it had a good chance of remaining culturally salient for the rest of the
century.11 This is not to say that latecomers always failed. However, the barriers of entry became
increasingly steep meaning that a sport’s cultural proliferation after the 1920s, having failed to
spawn serious roots before, was unlikely and fraught with difficulties. Add to this the organizational
difficulties that American soccer encountered in the course of the 1920s culminating in the soccer
wars, and the stage was ripe for failure.
Contrast the fate of the Big Four North American sports leading to their dominance of the
American sports space. Baseball had become the national pastime by the beginning of the 20th century
at the latest with all its institutional and cultural prerequisites. Football had assumed total dominance
of American college sport with the relatively late creation of the professional game at the beginning of
the 20th century and the founding of the American Professional Football Association in 1920 renamed
the National Football League in 1922 a strong case in point. The founding of the National Hockey
League in 1917 represented merely an institutional landmark of the presence of the game that had
become deeply embedded in much of Canada and significant part of the United States by the turn of
the 19th to the 20th century. Only basketball lacked any professional leagues of substance at this
temporal juncture but – in stark contrast to soccer – it had become widely popular in every nook and
cranny of American public culture being played in armouries, inner cities, wide and narrow spaces of
all kind by everybody, including women. Since the Big Four American sports all originated in North
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 235

America prior to 1920, their domination of the American sports space as of the interwar period
became part of American culture.12 By 1920, the landscape of America’s sport space was set or frozen.
This was not the case for soccer. By being a latecomer and then mishandling its chance of success in
the 1920s, soccer in America struggled for decades to find a niche in the already-saturated American
sports space. This story of America’s sport space, written largely by the 1920s, ties directly to MLS’s
contemporary struggle for market share, profits, and legitimacy in the eyes of the American people.
Even today, only 7% of Americans list soccer as their favourite sport, so it is ultimately unsurprising
that MLS has been unable to make much headway in the American sport space.13
Furthermore, an additional factor separating MLS and America’s Big Four sports leagues,
especially with regard to American fan perception, is the existence of the worldwide soccer
community that, by virtue of the sport’s global orientation, inherently creates and regulates the
environment in which MLS must operate. MLS has never possessed the luxury of developing on its
own, in an environment shielded by the rest of the world. This would have never been possible in
soccer’s case by dint of the sport’s centralized ‘Catholic’ organization in which FIFA and the IFAB
have remained the game’s pope-like global rule givers and sole legitimate organizers armed with the
immense power of excommunication. Add to this the contemporary world spawned by the forces of
the second globalization and it is clear that MLS’s dual existence of an American entity on the one
hand and a global entity on the other disallowed the luxury of autonomy and unencumbered growth
and development.

Contemporary America: MLS & soccer in the era of the big four
The presence of a broader non-American professional soccer community affects MLS’s presence
and aura within America in two crucial ways: first, it creates a uniquely diverse international player
base, and second, it relegates MLS to a secondary league. For the Big Four leagues, the idea of
American dominance is implicitly assumed by American sports consumers, since all those leagues
are both heavily American and represent the apex of their respective sports. There is no better
example of this than the National Football League (NFL), which is the be-all-end-all of football
culture. Although there is a Canadian Football League (CFL), the NFL is the only hegemonic (and
generally relevant) professional league for American football in the world. Furthermore, American
athletes massively dominate the NFL; 97.45% of the league’s players come from the United States.
As a uniquely American fixation, the NFL is a purely domestic hegemon, with almost no footprint
outside the United States with the exception of the Super Bowl and NFL Sundays in London that
constitute essentially temporary American cultural islands in Britain. Although baseball, basketball,
and hockey are not quite as America-centric as football, they still fall primarily within the purview
of American sports culture. First, the NBA, NHL, and MLB are all the top leagues in their respective
sports, and while each sport has foreign leagues, these leagues have significantly less prestige than
their North American counterparts. Secondly, each of these leagues (with the partial exception of
hockey) have predominantly American player bases. 75% of NBA players come from the United
States, along with 71.5% of MLB players14 and 26.5% of NHL players (though when including
Canada, this number rises to a relatively comparable 72.1%).15 More generally, none of these
leagues is genuinely global, since each league’s supply of foreign players is primarily drawn from
several specific countries: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela for MLB; Canada,
Australia, France, Croatia and Serbia for the NBA; and Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Finland and Sweden for the NHL. Broadly speaking, the United States’s hegemonic sports leagues
are both elite – the absolute best of the best – in their respective sports and primarily American,
creating a culture in which American dominance is presumed, almost preordained.
In comparison with the Big Four, MLS is perceived as a significantly lower-quality league that is
far from being the best of the best in the sport. Moreover, it is comprised of players from around the
world. Both of these notions reinforce the larger idea that American professional soccer is a massive
outlier and clearly outside the norms of established American sports culture, placing it near the
236 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

periphery. First, almost half of MLS players (49.6%) were born outside the United States and
Canada. Additionally, unlike the American hegemonic leagues, MLS’s foreign player base does not
hail primarily from a few specific countries. Instead, the league is truly global, with players hailing
from 72 different nations (for reference, the NBA is the most international of the Big Four, with 42
countries represented).16
Additionally, although MLS is inherently different from most United States-based sports leagues
because it lacks a dominant American presence, the league’s biggest problem with regard to fan
perception within the United States comes in the form of the comparatively low quality of its
product on the field. While each of the Big Four leagues represent the pinnacle of quality in their
respective sports, the truly global nature of soccer means there is a whole legion of elite leagues
around the world; MLS is, at best, a middling league within this global hierarchy.17 For American
fans, who are accustomed to watching the world’s best, this appears to be a major sticking point. In
an era of complete globalization, Americans’ desire for the best possible product poses a major
problem for MLS, since Americans interested in watching soccer can find games from nearly any
league in the world on their smart phones. Nothing is more indicative of this than MLS’s TV
ratings, which are uninspiring at best. Even within the United States, MLS is not the most-watched
soccer league. During the 2019 season, the league averaged 237,517 viewers per match18; mean­
while, the English Premier League, broadcast exclusively on NBC in the US, averaged 391,000
viewers per match.19 This, more than anything else, speaks to MLS’s struggle for legitimacy within
the American sports space. Notwithstanding the general unpopularity of soccer in the United States
as a whole, MLS’s relative lack of quality means American soccer fans would prefer to watch the
world’s best leagues, regardless of location, rather than support the development of their own
national league. Although MLS fans and executives might hope that America’s budding infatuation
with the Premier League could increase soccer’s overall popularity in the United States and help
legitimize MLS, albeit as a lower-level, localized product, this does not seem to have happened yet.
Not only does the Premier League currently have more American viewers than MLS;the former is
also currently gaining popularity much more rapidly than does the ladder: Between 2016 and 2018,
the Premier League’s American TV viewership grew by 69%, while MLS’s only did by 8%.20
Unfortunately for MLS, it appears that even as more Americans become interested in soccer, not
many American Premier League fans are translating their newfound interest into a passion for their
domestic league. Although it is obviously impossible to predict the future, this current trend does
not look promising for MLS.
Americans generally purport to dislike soccer for many reasons. Among them are its players’
constant flopping to the game’s low scoring. Perhaps the worst is soccer’s ubiquitous and frequent ties/
draws which American sports fans hate in particular.Then, of course, there is the scourge of fan
violence and racist behaviour; but also the sport’s uninterrupted flow of play. Americans dislike soccer
on account of its paucity (and relative insignificance) of individual statistics as well as its many levels of
performance which range from league championships to cup ties, from international club contests to
the whole world of national teams. There is no point in listing any of these in greater detail because
they all come down to one thing: that soccer is somehow incompatible with the American mentality,
the American creed; in short, that soccer remains foreign to most Americans.21
Within the American sports space, MLS also suffers in another way: while soccer is seen as
unamerican, the league itself is still undeniably American, creating a difficult situation for MLS.
Within American culture, some items benefit from being perceived as foreign; they are viewed as
high-quality, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated because of their foreignness (for instance, German
cars or French wines). However, in the era of second globalization, when actual foreign products are
available at the push of a button, MLS cannot capitalize on this: although Americans who are
actually interested in soccer may associate the positives of being foreign with the sport as a whole,
this does not carry over to MLS in particular. Instead, the perception of foreign products as cultured
lends legitimacy to the hegemonic (and genuinely foreign) European leagues, which can attract fans
through both this appeal and the superior quality of their product. The interactions facilitated by
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 237

the second globalization make the desirable foreign much more acceptable than was previously the
case; knockoffs and imitations have a hard time gaining authenticity.
Despite this, MLS has begun moving slowly from the cultural periphery towards the edge of the
American sports establishment in recent times.However, this is a slow and gradual transition. In its
early years, MLS was not even remotely comparable to America’s major sports; the league was
a minnow and on the periphery of American sports culture. Today, the idea of MLS as a foreign or
outsider league is still reinforced by the very concept of the ‘Big Four,’ which excludes and singles
out MLS, the only significant North American pro sports league which is not considered part of the
group. In recent years, however, MLS has strengthened its presence in certain ways (though not
enough to be considered completely comparable to the Big Four). In some areas, MLS has grown
fantastically: today, the league has a higher average attendance than two of the Big Four leagues22
(NBA and NHL; though this is part because both leagues play smaller, indoor arenas). In tandem
with that, MLS’s TV viewership has increased every year from 2012 through 2018; the five most-
watched MLS regular season games ever are all from either the 201823 or 201924 seasons.
However, MLS is still soundly on the edge of the core of American sports, something which can be
quantified through the league’s lack of financial power. Although MLS does not publicly release statistics
about its total league revenue per season, Forbes estimated that the league’s revenue for the 2017 season
was about 644 USD million.25 In contrast to that, during the 2017–18 season, the NHL, the smallest of
the Big Four leagues, made 4.86 USD billion, or over 7.5 times more than MLS.26 With regard to
revenue, MLS’s numbers place it closer to the CFL (average revenue of around 200 USD million
per season)27 than to the leagues with which it wishes to be associated. Similarly, the average value of
MLS franchises is 313 USD million,28 less than half of the NHL’s average franchise valuation of 667
USD million.29 While MLS continues to grow, the financial disparities between the young soccer league
and the Big Four are a reminder that there is more to being part of the core of American sports culture
than having the league’s scores shown on the ticker at the bottom of ESPN feeds.

The view from overseas: soccer for Americans or American soccer?

Whereas MLS’s inability to gain a significant foothold within the conventional American sports
space includes all of the just-mentioned tropes and constitutes a significant part of its struggle for
legitimacy and authenticity; all of these perceived negativities pale in comparison to the league’s
most pressing concern in our view: its struggle to be seen as legitimate and authoritative by the
global soccer community. This aspiration is stymied by the league’s inherent American-ness.
Crucially for MLS, the league has faced the uphill battle of portraying itself as a real soccer league
since the day it first kicked off in 1996. For the entirety of the league’s existence, it has attempted to
find the right balance between ‘Americanizing’ the sport to appeal to the domestic audience and
upholding the traditional values which global soccer culture holds dear. Among global audiences,
MLS’s position as an American sports league, operating within the sphere of America’s unique
sporting culture, delegitimizes the league greatly.
For the entirety of its history, MLS has struggled with the idea that America’s love for tinkering
with sports rules that is so essential to the identity of every American sports league is antithetical to
the fundamental consistency of soccer. When it was first founded, MLS’s focus skewed heavily
towards attempting to ‘Americanize’ soccer in the hope of making the game that was perceived as
alien by the average American sports fan more acceptable and more familiar. It is unclear whether
tinkering with the game to ‘Americanize’ it would have ultimately proved successful. What is amply
clear, however, is that these experiments met with anger and mockery by the global soccer
community thereby leading to their gradual abandonment by MLS with passing years. It was yet
another instance in which MLS’s conundrum – of succeeding as a soccer league in the American
sports market while remaining a loyal follower of the global game – became a difficult hurdle for the
league to overcome. Globally, the baseline rules of soccer are quite simple: the game is comprised of
two 45-minute halves, with added time tacked on to each one for stoppages in play. Each team is
238 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

allowed 3 substitutions throughout the 90 minute match; if the match ends level, it concludes as
a draw unless it is in a knockout competition. Within the soccer community, these rules are
universal: essentially every league in the world, from the English Premier League to the
Romanian third division, follows these rules.30 However, MLS quickly disregarded these essential
rules in an attempt to make soccer more palatable to Americans.
For its first several years, MLS attempted not to be an American soccer league, but rather to be
a soccer league for Americans. MLS’s first commissioner, Doug Logan, was tasked with altering the
game in whichever ways he thought would attract the most American viewers. As David Wagerin
observed, when MLS was first founded, the league appeared ‘impressionable (to rule changes) when
confronted by the fact that soccer matches often end in a draw – and in particular the chilling
possibility that a television commentator might utter a final score of 0–0.’31 For instance, MLS utilized
an American-style game clock which counted down from 45 to 0, instead of up from 0 to 45, as the rest
of the world had done for well over one century. Additionally, the league did not allow ties/draws;
games that were level after 90 minutes were settled by a penalty shootout that more closely resembled
an ice hockey shootout than the penalty shootouts traditionally used in soccer. Some stranger changes,
such as replacing throw-ins with kick-ins and enlarging the goals, though seriously debated and
considered, were ultimately never implemented in actual play.32
MLS’s early attempts to Americanize soccer were a colossal failure since these measures proved
unpopular within the United States, and rendered the league essentially illegitimate within the
global soccer community. As Wagerin pointed out, ‘that MLS should risk losing the interest of
a committed audience (first cultivated through the 1994 world cup) in search of a more transient,
thrill-seeking fan seemed a dubious strategy.’33 The league’s already meagre attendance dropped in
the years between 1996 and 2000, and MLS was forced to change course. Looking back today, many
figures involved in the early years of MLS admit that Americanizing soccer was a bad idea from the
outset. ‘I wasn’t opposed to prospective changes in the game – the sport should continue to look at
itself and try to change with the times – but I didn’t think we should lead those changes. I thought
that would dramatically hurt our credibility. My attitude was, if Spain, France, Mexico, or Argentina
want to do something and we decide to follow them, that’s one thing. But for us to be presumptuous
enough to lead was not a good policy,’ said Kevin Payne, the former president and CEO of D.C.
United, one of MLS’s founding clubs. Many former players, even American ones, agree with Payne.
‘Shootouts were stupid. It was the stupidest thing you could possibly do. I don’t know why we were
doing that. I don’t know why we had overtime, I don’t know why we couldn’t just have a tie,’
complained retired striker and United States soccer legend Eric Wynalda. Former MLS defender
Tab Ramos summed up the entire situation succinctly, saying ‘the game is a simple one . . . we tried
too hard to make it different and impress people who don’t like it anyway.’34 In 1999, the league
finally relented, abandoning shootouts and allowing ties.35
Although MLS has worked to improve its reputation as a gimmicky American league, it has been
unable to eliminate this perception completely. Even today, MLS has many attributes that differ­
entiate it from most top-tier national leagues, and hinder its quest for global credibility and
legitimacy. A number of MLS’s features are tied to the league’s franchise system, which is ubiquitous
in American sports (the Big Four all use it) but unheard of globally. On the surface level, the league
even struggles with the purely symbolic issue of whether to use American or traditional nomen­
clature for teams. Initially, as part of the league’s effort to Americanize soccer, teams were named in
the American fashion, with the city or state followed by a team ‘name;’ among MLS’s founding
franchises were the Tampa Bay Mutiny, Dallas Burn, and Colorado Rapids. Over time, as the league
shifted to try and project itself as more in accordance with global soccer practices, it transitioned to
using more traditional soccer nomenclature, with newer teams named things such as Los Angeles
FC, Atlanta United FC, and FC Cincinnati. One team with an American-style name at its founding,
the Kansas City Wizards, even rebranded by assuming the more traditional Sporting Kansas City.
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 239

Today, the state of MLS team names is fittingly reflective of the league’s general position: the odd
combination of American and European-style names symbolizes the league’s struggle to find
a middle ground between fitting in with American sports culture and remaining legitimate in the
eyes of the international soccer community.
This position of ambivalence and ambiguity pertains to other dimensions of MLS’s existence.
Thus, for example, many of the league’s rules and regulations occupy a grey zone in that they do not
fully comply with standards used by the Big Four North American leagues, but are also not quite
congruent with standards common to global soccer culture. For instance, MLS’s roster management
system is complex and convoluted, featuring elements of both the American and global systems.36
In order to fit with other soccer leagues around the world, MLS teams move players in and out of the
league through the traditional transfer system, buying and selling contracts on the global market.
However, within the league, teams can trade or waive players, in the same style as the Big Four
American leagues. Additionally, MLS is the only major soccer league in the world which uses a draft
to allocate young domestic talent, a tactic taken from American sports culture.37 Perhaps most
controversially, the league uses an American-style salary cap, which serves two purposes: first, it
prevents teams from overspending and thus running the risk of going out of business38; but second,
it increases parity, a uniquely American concern of the continent’s sports culture which is rendered
more unusual still by virtue of creating a system of redistributive justice not associated with
American capitalism but more in line with European social democracy. However, in the world of
soccer, otherwise egalitarian Europe has no such mechanisms or ambitions. Instead, unbridled
capitalism provides the norm. In the global soccer community, financial inequality among teams
forms part of the game. Barring a catastrophic shift or some unexpected exogenous interventions
that alter the playing field substantially such as the purchase of a team by a foreign billionaire,
Manchester United will always be wealthier and more successful than Watford Football Club. That,
in the world of soccer, is simply accepted as the way things work. In notable contrast to this
situation, in proudly capitalist America, a socialist-style enforced equality in team sports rules with
parity among teams is seen as a positive, indeed as an absolute prerequisite for the sport’s success in
the crowded American sports market in which the league as an entity hawks its product in fierce
competition with rival leagues hawking theirs. With the league being the primary entity instead of
its teams, this model requires that leagues eliminate inequality among teams.
The clash between these two disparate models is visible when comparing MLS to the rest of the
soccer world. Over the past decade, the big 5 European soccer leagues (English Premier League,
Spanish Liga, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, and French Ligue 1) have had an average of 3.2
different champions, and just four teams (Juventus, FC Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, and Bayern
Munich) account for over half the total titles won in these leagues over the past decade.39 In contrast
with that, MLS has had 7 different champions across the past decade, with only two teams (LA
Galaxy and the Seattle Sounders) winning multiple championships.40
Another of MLS’s burdens hails from its innately American desire to be the best as soon as
possible and its refusal to accept its place within the global hierarchy of soccer leagues. While other
leagues of similar calibre to MLS (Liga MX, as well as many semi-peripheral leagues in smaller
European countries) understand their role as leagues whose primary goal is to sell players to the
core leagues, MLS clubs refuse to accept this. This is primarily manifested through MLS’s fixation
with purchasing big-name players who are past their prime as a method of garnering credibility not
only in North America but in the soccer world beyond. To be sure, the necessity for MLS to sign
big-name players also has an American component in addition to its global one in that the league
knows that the American sports consumer is more likely to recognize such stars than less known
athletes. Once again, MLS finds itself between two irreconcilable forces: Signing too many has-beens
has earned MLS the reputation as a ‘retirement league’ which overpays disinterested former stars in
a desperate attempt to gain domestic popularity and global respect.41 Not signing such marquee
names runs the risk of having MLS’s product become invisible in the crowded and star-studded
world of American team sports.
240 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

Lastly, MLS’s legitimacy on the world stage is burdened by a complex but abstract phenomenon:
the contrast between soccer’s position within American culture and soccer’s traditional role within
most other cultures. Whether still anchored in reality or not, soccer around the globe is seen as the
sport of the working class. The game was born and cultivated in gritty, industrial Northern English
cities like Stoke, Bolton, Burnley, and Preston.42 Through that origin story, soccer has established
itself worldwide as the sport of the people; given its low bar to entry (one essentially needs only
a ball) this is understandable. Today, soccer maintains this gritty, masculine, working-class identity:
across Europe, soccer fan bases are consistently at least 60% male, and often much beyond that.43
Thanks to this, soccer has developed and maintained a global reputation as a tough, gritty sport,
with fan bases that demonstrate their devotion to their team through aggressive displays of
masculine energy, which often include violence, brutal racism and ties to right-wing ideologies
such as fascism.44 In short, in countries in which soccer constitutes the hegemonic sport, its culture
and milieu thrive on a decidedly counter-cosmopolitan ethos.
Meanwhile, soccer’s American identity is almost diametrically opposed to the sport’s global
identity: soccer in America has the stout image of being the world of cosmopolitanism, of high
culture, of women, middle and upper-middle class white suburbanites with clearly liberal politics
and a deeply tolerant view of the world. While soccer around the world is consistently more popular
with men than women, the opposite is true in the United States. As of 2018, 8% of American women
listed soccer as their favourite sport to watch, while only 6% of men did.45 Furthermore, within the
United States, soccer is disproportionately popular in wealthy, liberal areas. The states where soccer
is the most popular in the United States are Washington, Maryland, New Jersey, New York,
California, Massachusetts and Washington, DC.46 These six states plus the District of Columbia
are among the 15 wealthiest areas in the United States.47 Washington D.C, Maryland, and New
Jersey are 1, 2, and 3 respectively. They are not only rich but also politically liberal;since 2000, all
seven areas have consistently elected the candidate of the Democratic Party as president of the
United States in every election.48 Even within popular culture, the disparity between American and
global soccer fans remains stark. While the global stereotype of a soccer enthusiast is a violent male
hooligan, the American soccer stereotype is closer to that of a soccer mom. This person is a middle
or upper-middle class white woman with two university degrees, holding a professional position
like that of a lawyer or a doctor who lives in the suburbs, drives a minivan, and uses it to shuttle her
children and their friends between soccer practice and ballet classes, and could be defined as the
type of global, cosmopolitan citizen that traditional European fans view with such derision.49 In
notable contrast, the term ‘football mum’ either does not exist at all in England or if it does, its
connotation is completely different from that of ‘soccer mom’ in that it merely depicts a footballer’s
mother not an active fan of the game and its culture or a sociological category of the game’s main
consumers. Unlike elsewhere, where the game of football has been totally tied to the male industrial
working class, this has not been the case for soccer’s recent growth in America. That segment of the
American population was instrumental in the growth of the Big Four and is still consumed with its
interest in these Big Four leagues. Soccer’s growth in America, in contrast, has been driven by two
different social strata: the white professional middle class in America’s suburbs, and as a segment of
this stratum, middle-class professional women. However, perhaps representing soccer’s overall
growth and gradual movement towards the core of the American sports space, men have recently
become more interested in the sport.In 2017, 38% of American men said they were ‘interested’ or
‘very interested’ in soccer in comparison with only 26% of women,50 statistics that more closely
resemble those for soccer globally and the Big Four hegemonic sports in the United States.
Moreover, a further disparity between soccer’s position in American and global culture is visible
through the difference in demeanour between MLS supporter culture and global supporter culture.
Tout court, the latter have nothing but contempt for the former, whom they see as inauthentic
wannabes and copycats who are unable to become real fans even if they tried. Generally, American
sports crowds are much more relaxed than their European counterparts and primarily sit and watch
the game. In an attempt to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their global colleagues, MLS fans
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 241

have attempted to adopt more ‘European’ fan mannerisms for which the Europeans have only
rewarded them with mockery and insult. For instance, a video of a Seattle Sounders fan leading
a group of fans singing ‘fight and win’ in support of the team was uploaded to a page on Reddit
known as r/cringe, where it received over 1,500 upvotes, marking people’s acknowledgement of the
‘cringeyness’ of the chant. Nearly all the comments on the post made fun of the chant, with people
saying things such as, ‘it’s like they’re trying to force the soccer culture from Europe starting day 1.
They handed out pamphlets with lyrics and had people like this trying to start chants also. Was so
cringy I haven’t been motivated to go back,’ and ‘this is one of the only cringe videos I genuinely
can’t watch for more than 10 seconds.’51
Ultimately, all these factors contribute to MLS’s inability to gain legitimacy on the world stage.
Within the global soccer community, the league’s distinct American influences render it illegiti­
mate, since it is fundamentally different, in many regards, from nearly every other league and, of
course, first and foremost because it is American. Because of this, the league struggles to project
itself as a credible institution, and thus remains burdened by the image of merely hawking
a bastardized American interpretation of soccer.

Authenticity and artificiality: building cultural credibility on the world stage

The final factor preventing MLS from gaining credibility both domestically and globally is simply
the league’s novelty. Anything new lacks lore, pedigree, and charisma. It misses the legitimating
gravitas of tradition. Since MLS emerged not from below, from the grassroots of a sport and its
culture but rather was a creation from above, it has never been able to shed the burden of
artificiality, worse of venality. And as is the case with many constructs of culture, they lose their
authenticity the minute they are associated with money which renders them illegitimate and
inauthentic. Somehow the presence of money – of modernity – eliminates purity. This trope is
widely present in every European soccer league. Add to this that America has long been associated
in others’ mind with venality and money at the expense of deep culture which America simply
cannot possess, it is not surprising that a new league in America could never lose the stigma of being
merely a money-making operation. During its foundational years, MLS did little to dispel the
perception that America focused on money over tradition; Wagerin noted that MLS selected Doug
Logan as its initial commissioner specifically because his ‘ability to generate large sums of money
was naturally his most desirable skill.’52
In tandem with MLS’s overly emphasized focus on profit, the league lacks any of the pre-modern
charisma associated with top sports leagues, both in America and around the world. Although other
soccer leagues, such as the English Premier League and La Liga, are equally as focused on making
profits as is MLS, they also have great amounts of lore and history to draw upon, making them appear
authentic and exciting. Largely thanks to MLS’s recent founding, the league lacks this, and has trouble
presenting itself as anything more than a money-making operation. Dennis Crowly, the founder of the
tech company known as Foursquare and the chairman of Kingston Stockade FC, described ‘MLS [as]
masquerading as authentic soccer when it’s not.’ Crowley elaborates, explaining that fans ‘are looking
for authentic experiences, things they can have a real emotional connection to; in ways that don’t feel
manufactured. They want to feel a connection to what the product is about and what the brand stands
for.’53 As a hyper-modern league, MLS has trouble defining exactly what its brand stands for, since its
development was largely inorganic. Unlike soccer leagues in much of the world, MLS’s development
did not come through a grassroots movement representing local churches or pubs, but rather through
a group of board members attempting to create a scheme for earning cash.
Despite the bevy of problems MLS faces in its struggle for both global and domestic
legitimacy, there is hope for the league, something demonstrated in recent years by clubs
such as Atlanta United and the Portland Timbers. Both represent an important recent devel­
opment in American soccer: these clubs are not concerned about how they fit within either the
mould of American sports culture or global soccer culture, and have instead flourished by
242 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

developing their own authentic identities. In the case of Portland, this identity is largely tied to
the team’s fan culture, which is passionate and unique (the team has sold out every home match
since 2014). First, the club embraces its ties to the Pacific Northwest. Nothing embodies this
more than the club’s mascot, Timber Joey, a lumberjack who cuts rounds from a log for each
goal the Timbers score (after the game, the rounds are presented to the goal-scorers).
Furthermore, the club has developed a passionate, involved fan base without emulating
European fan behaviour. The club’s main supporters group, the Timbers Army, uses their
platform not only to enhance the atmosphere at matches, but also to show support for
antifascist movements, primarily through tifos (large, coordinate flag displays) projecting
various antifascist logos.54 Through such actions, the Timbers have developed an authentic,
unique fan culture that provides the passion often associated with traditional European fan
bases but without the anger and violence associated with the latter. Above all, the fan culture in
Portland emerged completely from the grassroots level thus, giving it a solid sense of authen­
ticity. While this is excellent for MLS as a whole, it is worth noting the Timbers have a cultural
advantage over most MLS teams: a pre-existing sense of tradition on which one can build. The
Timbers have existed in several incarnations over time, going back to 1975, when the club was
first founded as a member of the North American Soccer League (NASL).55 Because of this, the
Timbers have an actual heritage going back beyond MLS’s founding date of 1996, which gives
them a unique advantage and simultaneouslyhighlights the importance of history and tradition
in establishing culture and legitimacy.
Although Atlanta United, just like the Portland Timbers, can boast of having a passionate fan base,
the club has further provided a blueprint for how to run a successful, globally respected MLS team. In
doing so, Atlanta United have not only enhanced their own legitimacy but provided some to MLS as
well. Most crucially, Atlanta United have embraced their role as a selling team within the global
market, and have positioned themselves as an attractive spot for young South American players
looking to break out and make a career in one of the top European leagues. The club’s biggest signings
to date reflect this. Since being founded in 2014, the club has signed five major South American
players, all under the age of 25: two Paraguayans, Hector Villaba and Miguel Almiron, as well as two
Argentines, Ezequiel Barco and Pity Martinez, and a Venezuelan, Josef Martinez. The club has already
sold two of these players, including Almiron, who was sold to Newcastle United FC of the English
Premier League. As Paul Tenorio, a soccer writer at The Athletic explains, this is a major step for MLS.
“[Selling] helps to close the perception gap between the current level of MLS and the way the world
thinks about the league,’ said Tenorio. ‘While international TV deals have put MLS on a bigger stage
globally, there is no quicker way to change minds than for fans to see the effectiveness of players
developed in the league. In that way, a [young player] is far more valuable to MLS as a successful
Bundesliga starter than he is as a home-grown star in Harrison, New Jersey. The league’s ability to sell
players on to bigger stages opens it up to a different market when it goes to buy players. By selling
a player like Miguel Almirón this winter, MLS will have sent a message to players in South America
and other countries that you can use MLS to develop and grow, and use it to make the jump to the top
European leagues This isn’t something that would be unique to MLS. It happens in Liga MX and in
countries like the Netherlands and Belgium,’ he explained.56 Going forward, Atlanta United provide
a model for how MLS teams can legitimize themselves in the global soccer community and earn
respect for the league as a whole while also attracting American sports fans by putting a winner on the
field as Atlanta United clearly did by becoming champions of MLS in 2018.

Conclusion
The battle between cultural and sporting hegemons emanating from the second globalization is
a complex and nuanced situation, with many twists and turns. In this paper, we used North
America’s premier professional soccer league, MLS, to highlight the clash between exigencies
demanded by being in the core or the periphery of this contest. MLS’s struggles for legitimacy
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 243

and authenticity represent the fundamental contest resulting from the collision between America’s
sports culture and professional soccer’s on the global level. Essentially, this is the story of any
newcomer who, at the beginning, is inevitably ‘othered’ by all insiders be they, in this case, the Big
Four American sports leagues on the one hand and the established soccer powers of Europe and
Latin America on the other. Nobody likes newcomers in any entity and the established forces will
always try their best to discredit the newcomer. Why should this be different in the world of
Association Football! The newcomer always lacks gravitas and authenticity. At best, they are
a parvenu, a nouveau riche, who will never be accorded full membership in the inner circle until
they pass a threshold that nobody can predict or foresee. This just happens at some point! Making
matters more complex for MLS still is the fact that it is an American entity. Nothing pleases the
world more than seeing the United States – Goliath – struggle in something as globally important as
soccer! Schadenfreude, a permanent part of the human condition, is a particularly potent ingredient
in all sporting cultures whose very essence centres on winning and losing. Few things are nicer than
seeing Goliath struggle or better still, lose! Experiencing otherwise dominant America be an also-
ran in Association Football is delightful to many!
Add to this a particular burden that MLS continues to carry: the hegemonic cultural dominance
of British English in the arena of soccer! Any commentator with a British accent derives instant
legitimacy and authenticity as an authority in the game that Americans simply do not have and for
which they have to fight to prove their mettle. Indeed, an American accent – unlike any other – has
proved all by itself to be a particular a priori impediment to acceptance of American soccer players
and coaches in Britain.
Today, MLS still strives for acceptance and legitimacy as it competes for respect on both the
domestic and global fronts.MLS exists in the uniquely uncomfortable position of balancing two
distinct sporting cultures. While the league has not yet attained daylight in its fight for acceptance
by its two main constituents – the large American sports public and the global soccer community –
teams such as Portland and Atlanta have provided a look into how MLS could develop itself going
forward. Gauging from these positive examples, MLS’s road to winning authenticity in both of these
disparate and rivalling worlds might be in its position as a denizen of the semi-periphery, neither
the core nor the periphery. Crucially, MLS’s two main aforementioned problems, its lack of
legitimacy in both the American sports space and in the global soccer community, are actually
highly interconnected. As the second globalization and the English Premier League in particular
have proven, not all Americans are inherently opposed to watching soccer, even if they consider it
to be foreign or unamerican.Their biggest concern seems to be with MLS itself. From MLS’s
perspective, this means that the key to entering the core of American sport culture is finding
a way to gain respect within the global soccer community.This would then potentially allow the
league to enjoy the same prestige and perception of quality that has helped popularize the Premier
League and other elite European leagues in the United States. However, while diagnosing MLS’s
problem (a need to gain legitimacy on the world stage in order to move towards the core of the
American sports space) is easy enough, finding a way to do this is much more difficult. Soccer
leagues cannot magically become better overnight. Thus, MLS is stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle:
its current reputation as a middling league dissuades top players from playing in it, and in turn, the
league’s inability to attract top players prevents it from improving its quality and reputation.
Much to the disappointment of MLS executives, there is likely no easy fix for improving the
league’s reputation abroadand boosting the league’s chances of entering the core of American
sports. Developing tradition and heritage fundamentally takes time.Under the best of circum­
stances, MLS may be able to do so over the course of years or decades. By refocusing MLS’s mission
away from being a ‘soccer league for Americans’ and towards being an ‘American soccer league,’
league officials have seemingly learned from their mistakes, and have already helped shed some of
MLS’s reputation as gimmicky and thus lacking gravitas, which is absolutely a must for the success
of a newcomer. As Strutner, Parrish, and Naughright note, ‘although MLS faces a difficult road to
244 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

international respect, the evolution of the league over its first ten years illuminates a glimmer of
hope for American soccer fans longing for a viable and respectable domestic league.’57
Going forward, MLS as should learn from the Portland Timbers and Atlanta United and should
focus on copying and understanding their recent successes, which represent smart strategies for both
individual clubs and MLS as a league. From Portland, individual clubs (and the league in general)
should learn that tradition and culture cannot be bought or centrally constructed;they must be allowed
to develop authentically from the grassroots over time. By following in Portland’s footsteps, MLS
could help shed its image as inauthentic, and gain cultural respect in the greater soccer community,
including outside the United States. Similarly, MLS as a whole must come to realize, as Atlanta United
does, that achieving global respect and relevance is first and foremost about understanding its role in
the greater soccer community. By signing ageing, over-the-hill stars in an attempt to improve the
league’s profile rapidly, many MLS teams are perpetuating the stereotype of the league as a retirement
home for has-beens, which is not advancing the league’s desired profile as a serious soccer entity.
Atlanta United, on the other hand, has pursued that all of MLS should be following in the coming
years. By accepting its role as a mid-tier club that can develop and sell young players, but fulfiling that
role well, Atlanta United have helped legitimize MLS as a whole, leading the higher-tier European
leagues to begin considering MLS a reputable league for player development. Although it may be
difficult for MLS executives to accept that one cannot build robustness from the top, understanding
this is the first step towards achieving global legitimacy and acceptance.
Lastly, MLS’s final tool for entering the core of the American sports space is a simple one: time.
Luckily for the league, soccer is most popular among young people; while only 1% of Americans
above 55 said soccer was their favourite sport, that number rose to 10% among people aged 35–54
and 11% among people between 18–34.58 Additionally, soccer is the second most popular youth
sport in America, with more children ages 6–17 playing soccer than any other sport except
basketball.59 Alas, there exists no compelling link between playing a sport and following it.
Whereas millions of people bowl, few follow professional bowling. While there is no guarantee
the popularity of soccer among young Americans will one day translate into increased popularity
for MLS, it is certainly a promising sign for the league’s chances of one day breaking into the core of
American sports culture.While addressing all the aforementioned challenges will not be easy, there
may be space for MLS as a legitimate league that will have gained its much-wanted and much-
needed (and dare we say much-deserved) authenticity both within the American sport space and
the global soccer community.

Notes
1. Markovits and Rensmann, Gaming the World, 17-24.
2. We use the concept of core-semi-periphery-periphery as the crux of our presentation by following this
framework developed by authors of the so-called ‘dependencia’ school of political economy best represented
by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank, Ernesto Laclau and, of course Immanuel Wallerstein.
3. Strutner et al. ‘Making Soccer “Major League” in the USA and Beyond’, 23–36.
4. Esser, ‘Take 2: Why Soccer Is Un-American and 10 Ways to Fix It.’
5. Guttmann, A Whole New Ball Game, 51-62.
6. Thorn, ‘History Awakens: 2 February 1876 and the Founding of the National League.’
7. Spirn, A Scientific Sport Fit for Gentlemen, 49-58.
8. Gorn et al. A Brief History of American Sports, 169-174.
9. Thus, for example, the federation was called United State Football Association (USFA) from its founding in
1913 until 1945 blithely ignoring the fact that the term ‘football’ had come to mean a different game in the
United States. In 1945, the federation renamed itself United States Soccer Football Association (USSFA) still
refusing to surrender the name ‘football’ to reality in the American sports space. Not until 1974 did the
federation surrender the word ‘football’ in its appellation calling itself United States Soccer Federation (USSF)
the name it continues to bear.
10. ‘What Was the Soccer War?’
11. Markovits, Tomlinson and Young, ‘Introduction: Mapping Sports Space’.
12. Markovits and Rensmann, Gaming the World, 95.
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 245

13. Norman, ‘Football Still Americans’ Favorite Sport to Watch.’

14. Borchers, ‘Analysis | The NFL Has the Most Protests. It Is Also the Most American Sports League.’
15. ‘NHL Totals by Nationality - 2018-2019 Stats.’
16. March 7, 20,182:45PM ESTMLS CommunicationsFollow@ mls_pr. ‘MLS Retains Status as Youngest, Most
Diverse League in North America.’
17. ‘Global Club Soccer Rankings.’
18. Harris, ‘MLS TV Ratings Slump 19% during Regular Season; Playoffs Take a Nosedive.’
19. Comcast Corporation. ‘Premier League Pushing Huge Viewership Gains for NBC Sports Group.’
20. Harris, ‘MLS Fails to Close TV Ratings Gap with Premier League and Liga MX.’
21. Webb, ‘Why Soccer Is Un-American.’
22. Gough, ‘U.S. Major Sports: Average Attendance 2019.’
23. Werner, ‘Most-Watched Soccer Games on US TV for June 25-3 July 2018.’
24. Werner, ‘Most-Watched Soccer Games on US TV for June 24-7 July 2019.’
25. Lukas, ‘NFL vs MLS: Revenue, Salaries, Viewership and Ratings.’
26. Adgate, ‘Hockey’s Big Pay Day Is Coming.’
27. Seifert, ‘CFL Commissioner Jeffrey Orridge Wants a Piece of American Sports.’
28. Smith, ‘Major League Soccer’s Most Valuable Teams 2019.’
29. ‘Forbes Releases 21st Annual NHL Team Valuations.’
30. The International Football Association Board. ‘Laws 1-17.’ Laws, Chapter 4, IFAB
31. ‘Clash and Burn: MLS: Back to Square One’, 275.
32. Sibor, ‘An Oral History of Major League Soccer’s Frenzied First Season.’
33. ‘Clash and Burn: MLS: Back to Square One’, 273.
34. ‘An Oral History of Major League Soccer’s Frenzied First Season.’
35. Marthaler, ‘Goofy Soccer Rule Era for MLS Is, Hopefully, Gone for Good.’
36. Abnos, ‘All of MLS’s Crazy Roster Rules, in One Flowchart.’
37. March 2, 20,186:00PM ESTMLS CommunicationsFollow@ mls_pr. ‘MLS Roster Rules and Regulations 2019.’
MLSsoccer.com, Major League Soccer, 9 March 2019
38. Joe Devine and Kristen Heneage. ‘MLS Salary Cap Explained.’ YouTube, Tifo Football
39. ‘List of Competitions.’ FBref.com
40. ‘Major League Soccer – Champions.’ Worldfootball.net
41. Fleming, ‘Is MLS Really Just An Early Retirement Home?’
42. Jolly, ‘Football’s Working-Class Roots.’
43. ‘Europe: Football Fans by Country and Gender 2016 I Statistic.’
44. Nadeau, ‘Fascism and Football.’
45. https://news.gallup.com/poll/224,864/football-americans-favourite-sport-watch.aspx?
g_source=Politics&g_medium=newsfeed&g_campaign=tiles
46. https://www.bustle.com/articles/28282-does-america-even-like-soccer-a-state-by-state-breakdown-of-soccer-
fandom
47. Data Access and Dissemination Systems (DADS). ‘American FactFinder – Results.’ American FactFinder –
Results, 5 October 2010
48. ‘Historical Presidential Election Information by State.’ 270toWin.Com.
49. Lindner and Hawkins, Globalization, Culture Wars, and Attitudes towards Soccer in America.”
50. Pallien, ‘Soccer Scores Big In The U.S.’
51. ‘r/Cringe – FIGHT AND WIN! Seattle Sounders Fan Leading the Crowd with an Impressively Bad Chant.’ Reddit.
52. ‘Clash and Burn: MLS: Back to Square One’, 276.
53. John Wall Street. ‘MLS “Masquerading as Authentic Soccer”, Growth in Major Markets Stunted.’
54. Rosenberg, ‘There Is an Anti-Fascist Rebellion Brewing in the Pacific Northwest. And Soccer Is at the Center of It.’
55. ‘Timbers Soccer History.’
56. Leitch, ‘It’s Good That MLS Has Finally Accepted That It’s a Second-Tier Soccer League.’
57. Strutner et al. ‘Making Soccer “Major League” in the USA and Beyond: Major League Soccer’s First Decade.’
58. Bondy, ‘Soccer Will Soon Be America’s Third-Favorite Spectator Sport.’
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
246 Z. BLUMBERG AND A. S. MARKOVITS

ORCID
Zack Blumberg http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7641-606X

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