Soccer has become a passion of mine. I get up early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to watch two or three games live from England and the Barclay’s Premier League, considered the strongest professional soccer league in the world. I have become a fan of Everton, West Ham United, and Manchester City. I was all in for the World Cup in 2014, and last October I stayed up watching an incredibly thrilling U.S. vs. Mexico CONCACAF game to determine what national team would be playing in the 2017 Confederations Cup in Russia. While a bitter and disappointing loss for the U.S., it was truly an incredible game!
This has not become an overnight passion for me. Both of my kids played youth soccer and really enjoyed it. Given the opportunity I am certain both would have played in high school. As a fan I got the bug watching them and started watching games on television. But I am also a sports fan, and I love watching competition at the highest level, so I was watching the World Cup when the United States hosted back in 1994, and players like Alexi Lalas and Tab Ramos were becoming recognizable figures on the national sports scene. And of course, I watched a number of women’s games culminating with Brandi Chastain’s winning penalty shot to defeat China in the 1999 World Cup.
In the summer of 2015, I just happened into an opportunity I did not see coming. During a trip planned for Montreal, my wife and I attended the semi-final game of the Women’s World Cup between the United States and Germany. It was the first international sporting event that I attended, and it was an incredible experience to watch the American women defeat the Germans. I can’t describe the feeling of being in that stadium. It was incredible! And it only deepen my new-found love for the sport of futbol!
Yet it was at this World Cup game that my wife stated, “This is why I have a problem with soccer. The U.S. outplayed the Germans in the first half, dominating the game, and yet had not scored. All the Germans have to do is get lucky and get a goal and they win. It isn’t fair.” Perhaps there is a lot of truth to this, and maybe it is a reason that it has yet to become as popular in our country as other sports. The issue of scoring has a lot to do with it, but that isn’t much different from baseball. So maybe it is a matter of fairness.
Americans subscribe to the philosophy that if you work hard, you get rewarded. Some recognize that there is a little luck involved, but more often than not, we resent those people that get rewards without paying their dues. It goes back to the Puritan work ethic that shaped a lot of the early value systems in our nation. "Hard work has its rewards" has been professed for generations, and in the work place it has been rewarded with promotions and wage increases. Productivity is a goal and those that produce best are valued. In the sports world we often hear athletes and coaches say “no one will outwork us,” and there are instances where that has certainly been true. During the Iowa Hawkeye wrestling dynasty created by Dan Gable no other team of that era worked as hard, and the success of those great teams speaks to that effort. Work ethic has been the difference maker between people of equal talent, and the equalizer for the individual that does not have as much.
Giving more merit to this argument is my experience watching that U.S. vs. Mexico game. It was tied at the end of regulation and went to two 15 minute overtime periods. Had it remained tied, it would have gone to penalty kicks. However, it didn’t get to that point because the Mexicans scored the winner in overtime and prevented the U.S. from scoring the equalizing goal. And you know what, it would have been a shame if the Americans had tied it and somehow gone on to win. Why? Because the Mexican team totally dominated the game from start to finish and deserved to win. It wouldn’t have been fair!
So what about luck and opportunity? I guarantee that had the U.S. somehow won that game, American futbol fans would have gone crazy, celebrating like wild in the Rose Bowl and in bars all over the country where fans were gathered watching the game. But would they have deserved it, and does that matter? Hey, a win is a win, and with a few exceptions, there are no style points! The funny thing is that for many of us we want to know that we deserved the victory. Fairness implies that the game is played by rules and that the best prevails. To some real sportsmen victories are shallow when the opponent is less than 100%. They want to measure themselves against the best in order to have a satisfying victory. It’s kind of the same in terms of luck. How satisfying is it to win when a referee blatantly blows a call, or when something “unfair” happens that tilts the table? It’s not, at least to many who value hard work and the dividends that it provides. The question that I ponder and will leave you with is does hard work matter any more, or does luck, opportunity, and possibly even deceit matter just as much or more so? Is that the message behind the game of soccer? Work really hard for an entire game, fight the good fight, yet lose because of a fluke when a player mistakenly deflects the ball into his own net when trying to clear the ball. Hey, a wins a win, isn’t it?
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