Football, or rather, soccer: the beautifull game comes to America - Steven Malanga (City Journal)

STEVEN MALANGA

Grassroots Soccer Mania

American soccer skeptics are missing the big picture.

The City Journal, 30 June 2014

PHOTO BY TIM (AND JULIE) WILSON

Every four years, as World Cup fever grips the United States, Americans ask whether this will be the year that soccer begins to rival our major professional sports—basketball, baseball, and especially football—in popularity. Just as predictably, a host of voices quickly reject that notion, arguing that the game known to the rest of the world as football will never approach comparable popularity here. Soccer’s just not interesting enough for Americans, they say. It lacks the “individual beau geste that marks truly American games,” as one former sportswriter recently put it in the Wall Street Journal. Statisticians pipe in, comparing the TV ratings and merchandise sales of professional soccer with those of the NFL—as ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight.com did before the tournament—to remind us how far soccer still has to go. And late-night comics have their say, as when Conan O’Brien observed that he couldn’t wait for the World Cup to be over, so that Americans could go back to hating soccer.
All this, however, vastly underestimates how popular soccer has become in the United States. More broadly, it misunderstands how cultural trends emerge and reshape society. A sport doesn’t grab the public from the top down, reflected first in TV ratings for those playing at elite levels. Like a political movement, a game gathers adherents from the bottom up, as a grassroots crusade. And at the grassroots level, soccer has sown impressive seeds in the last few decades.
Measured by participation, soccer is already among the big four sports in America. Today, nearly 7 million kids under 18 are playing organized soccer in the United States, according to surveys by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. In this regard, soccer is running neck and neck with basketball as America’s most popular sport. Baseball, with its long and glorious history, trails, with about 5.6 million organized players. Football lags well behind these three, with 3 million participants.
Soccer and basketball do so well, in part, because both appeal to girls in great numbers. Soccer, in particular, benefits from being a latecomer. It didn’t begin to approach the participation rates of the other major American sports until the mid-1990s—just as youth programs began reaching out to girls. Nearly as many girls play organized soccer today as boys. Meanwhile, football suffers from the opposite problem—few girls play it and now, with the sport’s well-chronicled concussion problems, the NFL is struggling to stem a decline in boys’ participation, too. And while involvement in youth sports today has leveled out in the U.S. and is declining among many sports (thanks to the rise of computer games and a general dwindling in physical activity among kids), soccer can still boast some recent gains, including a more than 7 percent increase in high school participation over the last five years. The sport’s growth potential remains strong.
None of this should be surprising to anyone who gets out to have a look. On any given Saturday and Sunday morning in the fall or spring, you’ll have little trouble finding youth soccer matches, whether you’re wandering the lots of urban immigrant communities or the tailored green fields of well-to-do suburbs. Many communities boast both recreational leagues—where local boys and girls compete against one another—and more serious teams, where players take on rivals from other towns.
But the numbers, charted over the decades, also tell us why this participation hasn’t yet produced the blockbuster TV ratings we see for the NFL. We are essentially only one generation into the emergence of soccer as a significant participatory sport in America. How long does it take for that to translate into rich media contracts and endorsement deals for players? Well, for one thing, learning to be loyal to a professional sports franchise filled with players with whom you have no personal connection isn’t easy. American football, for instance, was popular at the college and inter-scholastic levels long before the NFL broke through. The league, formed in 1922 with 18 franchises, most of which have since disappeared, struggled for decades to gain a popular foothold. Today, the NFL’s Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio, is a reminder of the league’s unstable birth—Canton was the site of one of the early NFL’s failed franchises.
Major League Soccer teams face a similar challenge: staying afloat long enough to create a tradition that kids playing the game today will embrace as adults. Talk to a fan of a pro baseball or football franchise, and they will probably tell you how they developed their rooting interest when a relative introduced them to the game. Something similar happens with soccer around the world. Listen to the opening words of English writer Nick Hornsby’s famous soccer (football) novel, Fever Pitch, and you’ll hear a familiar story: “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically . . . just after my eleventh birthday, [when] my father asked me if I’d like to go with him to the FA Cup Final.” That generational dynamic hasn’t played out for soccer in the U.S.—not yet.
After several false starts at the professional level in the United States, soccer is making gains that reflect its grassroots popularity. Average match attendance in the MLS—founded in 1993 to fulfill an American commitment to create a professional league in exchange for hosting the 1994 World Cup—is now nearly 19,000, up from about 13,000 a decade ago. That might not sound like much compared with the NFL, but it’s more than the NBA and the NHL average per game and more than what a handful of major league baseball teams drew last year, too. The MLS Seattle Sounders, in fact, draw nearly twice as many fans per match as baseball’s Seattle Mariners. The MLS also sports a brand-new $600 million multiyear TV package with ESPN and Fox. Some 40 percent of MLS TV viewers are under 34, young by comparison with sports like baseball.
But charting soccer’s popularity by media deals and professional stadiums misses the point. The Nobel Prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek once wrote that man’s fatal conceit was to imagine he can discern and understand all the currents of society and organize them from the top down. But whether we’re talking policy, politics, or cultural trends, it’s still a bottom-up world—as the rise of soccer in America shows.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Protectionism, US style - Steven Malanga (The City Journal)

Storm of Protectionism
Steven Malanga
The City Journal, January 20. 2013

It’s time to repeal the Jones Act.

New York–area residents facing gasoline shortages in Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath must have wondered about the federal government’s announcement that it would suspend the Jones Act to ease long lines at the pump. Most of them had probably never heard of one of the most onerous pieces of protectionist legislation of the twentieth century. Still in force nearly 100 years after its passage, it exacts a significant toll on the economy.
Officially known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, the Jones Act requires that all goods and people moving by water from one American port to another travel on American-built, American-owned, American-manned ships. The act’s original proponents argued that it was essential to national security, since it helped preserve a maritime fleet that could support the country’s armed forces and supply the nation during wars. Over time, American shipping interests and powerful maritime unions also became fierce defenders of the act, believing that it protected American jobs. Their defense has largely succeeded. Only in emergencies like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy does the federal government occasionally suspend the Jones Act to get goods flowing more quickly and cheaply. Those brief pauses reveal how much better the market would work without the act.
Like most protectionist legislation, the act costs more than it generates in economic activity. In a 1996 article in the Canadian Journal of Economics, four researchers (including two economists at the U.S. International Trade Commission) wrote that the act allowed “domestic shippers to charge rates substantially above comparable world prices,” reducing shipping by water in the United States and increasing the annual cost of goods by about $6 billion (in today’s dollars). Older studies, they recalled, estimated the cost as high as $10 billion (again, in today’s dollars). The act might save 15,000 jobs in the American shipping industry, but at a price that reduced national income by hundreds of thousands of dollars per job saved. The only trade restrictions worse for the American economy, the authors concluded, were limitations on textile and garment imports. Those “multi-fiber agreements,” in effect at the time of the economists’ study, have since expired.
The Jones Act has also long outlived its national-security rationale. In a 1991 article in Regulation, Rob Quartel, a commissioner at the Federal Maritime Commission, described how U.S. armed forces in the Gulf War moved massive amounts of matériel and personnel using their own ships and those controlled by NATO allies. Only six of the 59 ships that the military employed were Jones Act–subsidized vessels. As Quartel noted, the country’s merchant-marine fleet has continued to shrink, largely because the Jones Act has made American shippers globally uncompetitive. With a monopoly at home, why get better?
Growing evidence of the act’s cost and ineffectiveness has led to calls to rescind it. In 2003, Hawaii congressman Ed Case introduced legislation to free his state from the Jones Act, saying that it so limited competition among shippers serving the state that it had produced a “crippling drag on an already-challenged economy and the very quality of life in Hawaii.” The protectionist legislation, Case argued, “is just an anachronism: most of the world’s shipping is by way of an international merchant marine functioning in an open, competitive market. And those few U.S. flag cargo lines that remain have maneuvered the Jones Act to develop virtual monopolies over domestic cargo shipping.” Similarly, in 2010, Arizona senator John McCain introduced legislation to repeal the act, observing that it “hinders free trade and favors labor unions over consumers.”
These efforts have failed, mostly because of the power of maritime unions and shipping interests, which would rather preserve their hold on a narrow but uncompetitive slice of the marketplace than compete more forcefully around the world. Over the years, both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have pledged their allegiance to the act in return for the support of the shipping cartel that benefits from it. The losers are American consumers and businesses. It shouldn’t take acts of God like Sandy to show us that the Jones Act should go.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.