Soccer Surge

By Brian Beutler

Last night, Matt mused that soccer owes its ascendance among intellectuals to its statistical simplicity vis-a-vis other often-complex sports like baseball: "I've been puzzling recently over the apparent upsurge in intellectuals' interest in soccer. I don't think I really understood it, though, until I read this Frank Foer post noting that "[s]occer is largely immune from sabermatrics and other instantiations of mathematical nerdiness."

Perhaps. But if we make the I think not-unlikely assumption that by "upsurge in intellectuals' interest in soccer" Matt means "my and other bloggers' upsurging interest in soccer," I think it's pretty clear what's actually going on. After all, there was plenty of soccer going on around the world, say, three weeks ago, but way back then, in the heady days of May, there was nary a high-falutin' word to be read about it. Then suddenly this funny international event called the World Cup came around after four years of hibernation and started putting obscure countries into athletic competition with each other, and--as the past four years has brought on a media revolution--pundits and other elites found they had near-infinite copy space to devote to it. In 2002, there were probably 45 issues of the New Republic and probably 11 issues of the American Prospect and each might have been able to squeeze in one article about the tournament each. Now they can (and TNR does) devote an entire blog to the topic.

There's just no new soccer-mad zeitgeist here. And after July, it'll fizzle off the blogosphere and we'll hear almost nothing about the game for another long and sad four years.