So you wanna watch the World Cup, but you don’t know anything about soccer?
We here at SPR News have you covered.
Welcome to Soccer Saturday, a special weekend edition of SPR News Today.
Leading up to the World Cup this June, we’re talking to all types of soccer experts who want to help you understand—and love—the beautiful game.
So if you want to join the bandwagon this summer but you’ve never heard of Lionel Messi, you’re in the right place.
And even if you’re a die hard Premier League fan, you might like to hear what these guests have to say, too.
This week, we're leveling up our game.
If you want to get really, really good at watching soccer, Bay-area journalist Nick Greene just released his book “How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius.”
In it, Greene talks to people from NASA scientists to landscape architects for their unique insight on one of the world’s most popular sports.
He chatted with SPR’s Eliza Billingham the day the book hit the shelves.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Pretty early on in your book, you say that soccer is one of the only things that the U.S. feels completely comfortable having nothing to do with. Why do you think that is?
NICK GREENE: Well, it's one of the few things that we concede is a huge, massive global deal that we basically have no role or part in its growth or acceptance or what have you.
And I guess an exaggeration, but it really does seem like this sort of you get the sense is a kind of foreign phenomenon, this miracle occurring just over the horizon that is just outside our reach, but it's not.
I mean, soccer is a very American sport, too. American football evolved from the very same games that soccer evolved from. It just happened to do so in a different timeline and a different path.
So there's a lot of the things we love in soccer or from sports in soccer.
I mean, the league format was inspired in part by cricket, but also people say baseball. So there's a lot of American sports in soccer that we just don't really know yet.
EB: A lot of people also compare soccer to chess, but you compare it to dominoes. What is that all about?
NG: Yeah, well, I compare a couple aspects of it to dominoes.
One is just the passing sequences themselves. Basically, a pass is a move that's made in good faith. You trust that your opponent, your teammate, excuse me, is going to do better with the ball than you.
It's a movement of trust. And every single pass, every pass creates a chain. And the hope, of course, is that, well, that chain eventually ends up with a goal.
As anyone who doesn't watch soccer or watch soccer can tell you that that's not always the case. But nonetheless, there are these intricate patterns and chains being built. And so to learn more about that, I talked to a man who invented the art of domino toppling.
Something like soccer, I assumed was an ancient art, but it actually can be traced to more recent times. It's a man in Pennsylvania named Robert Speca. And he went on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson as a teenager and had a magnificent pattern of dominoes.
And I kind of talked to him to learn about patterns, tempo, because he messes with the tempo in his domino art, and why certain things spread and where breakdowns occur. And so that can happen on the pitch and passing or with the spread of the popularity of the game itself, why it took off in some countries and not in others.
If you think about why the places where soccer is not huge, places like the United States, India, Australia, you'll notice a common theme there that these were all former British colonies.
And there is some truth to the idea that as former colonies, these countries wanted to pursue their own sort of versions, their own sports, to sort of set themselves apart. So that's just one of the many reasons why there are spaces and breaks in the chain in different parts of the chain. But it's something that happens, as I said, on the pitch and off it.
EB: You mentioned that soccer is famous for draws. There's not always a winner. It's also, you say, uniquely collaborative. Do you think soccer is at its core anti-American?
NG: No, I don't think it's anti-American. I feel like any game can be perceived as anti-whatever, because there's, you know, there's winners and losers, and you can read so much into that.
I think, with the idea of ties and draws, that's kind of a funny story.
The only reason that there are ties in soccer is because, again, it used to be a social enterprise between young working professionals in England, and they kind of just did it when they had time and would schedule it. And when they started a league play for the first time, they figured, okay, if there's a tie, we'll just reschedule the games and figure that out later.
But the fixture calendar got so congested, they realized they can't just replay games. And so they had about four months worth of games with a bunch of ties in there. And they had to get together and go, what the heck are we going to do with all these times? So they decided to assign one point for a tie.
And this has insane repercussions. I mean, the idea of playing defensively to, you know, play for a point, all comes from this one little sort of, you know, decision made because of poor planning, and it has these crazy reverberations.
And, you know, I know Americans often talk about their disdain for ties, but it is fascinating. It adds a little texture to each result. There are good ties, there are bad ties. If you're supposed to win and you tie, that feels like a loss. The same for the opposite.
So there's all this sort of texture and nuance that I don't think has anything to do with nationality. It's something that does take some getting used to, but once you get used to it, I think you might appreciate it.
EB: You go deep into data analysis and statistics to back up a pretty common fan experience that winning or losing has very little to do with how a team plays…
NG: Well, I should say I didn't, as someone who can't even calculate a tip on a restaurant bill, I did not do this analyzing—That would be an astronomer who actually doesn't love soccer that much himself, but he was a NASA scientist.
And he did this incredible study and it's peer reviewed, it appeared at a very reputable journal that he basically, especially in tournaments like World Cup, that the best team doesn't always win and that the results are, for lack of a better term, random. That's because there's so many variables and so few goals.
And he, in a very sort of, I think, beautiful turn of phrase called soccer matches “poorly designed experiments,” which is something that he sort of contends with in the paper itself and in conversation with me is that, well, winning and losing and drawing isn't always everything. It's stuff that happens on the way to that result. That is where the emotion and the thrill and the despair really sort of brew.
So the numbers say, yeah, the results might be random, but the experience of watching a game and playing a game tells you something else.
EB: And let's say you're just watching just for the aesthetics of watching soccer. Can you talk about how watching soccer on TV is different than watching pretty much any other sport on TV?
NG: Soccer is a game—and I mean this as a huge compliment—that can never be invented today. There's no stoppages, except for halftime, for commercials. The second the ball gets kicked, you have at least the minimum of 45 minutes of action.
And what that means is you have uninterrupted 45 minutes of beautiful green grass and players arguing with each other and sprinting and referee getting involved. And you have all this sort of uninterrupted life and humanity transpiring that you don't have to worry about, ‘okay, we'll be back after a few messages from our sponsors.’
And just you know, I mentioned the grass again, but the entire first chapter of my book is all about the grass. And again, it's actually interesting. I know that might seem less interesting, but I think it's a very interesting chapter.
EB: It's very interesting!
NG: Because grass in soccer, they've at the highest levels played in a very specific sort of type of grass: 23 millimeters long is the ideal height and manicured and this is happening in places that that kind of grass doesn't grow—and so how do you get the grass to grow like that there?
It's yes, it's for the play because it's consistent and good sort of topography for a ball's bounce and whatnot. But it's mostly for the viewer.
The Premier League in the late 90s and the mid 90s realized that people like watching beautiful natural green grass more than they did tracks of mud and, and potholes. So that's why when you watch a game at the highest level, now it's real grass. And it's beautiful and it's pure.
And it's, again, you have 45 minutes of unbroken verdant green. As someone who grew up in a city, I grew up in downtown Chicago. It was the closest I got to nature, it felt like. And I still whenever I see it on a TV, I kind of bask in that green.
I spoke to a landscape architect to talk about the sort of significance, the repercussions of that. And she mentioned that the Romans, the ancient Romans who lived in cities and in places away from nature would sometimes keep jewels like a emerald on them.
And they can look at that and it would give them the same sensation of the beautiful green. And I think soccer, if you're, I don't know, if you're a little romantic, you kind of serve the same purpose.
EB: I'm going to bring one more accusation against soccer to you. And you validate it—well, actually a Brazilian novelist validates it when they talk about diving, which is this idea of pretending to be hurt.
And they say it's specifically offensive because of a willingness to cheat and, quote, “a demonstration or perhaps the celebration of physical weakness and self-pity.”
Can you make a case for how flopping or diving can make soccer more enjoyable to watch?
NG: I do make a case for that in the book and to sort of not give away too much, but I found myself in an art gallery in London and also speaking with a dance choreographer and scholar about, I guess, the difference between dance and choreography and the difference between art and sport. And I think in those sort of lines of differences where I found diving to sort of have its home.
It is something that, yes, is cheating, but we sort of—the game sort of allows it because it has to. It doesn't allow for it; it allows for the attempt to be made at this “cheating.”
But the stakes are so high. When the stakes get high, you know, you feel like, of course people will be taking advantage of this or trying to.
I speak to an ethicist and philosopher about that as well. He was far more permissible towards it than I would have imagined, although he's a Real Madrid fan, so that might explain some of that. But if you look at diving as a piece of spontaneous choreography, again, you might start, if not to appreciate it or like it, understand its place in the game.
EB: All right, Nick, is there anything that you are particularly excited for for this World Cup this summer?
NG: Gosh, I'm fascinated to see how it will go for lots of reasons, one being it's the biggest World Cup ever with 48 teams. So, you know, whether that will make for more lopsided results early on or for more surprising upsets, we will have to see. But more soccer is more better. Again, we'll have to find out.
EB: At the risk of pandering, Nick, I really loved your book. Thank you so much for writing it.
NG: Thank you for everything.
