Apr 14 2007
How Did This Get on Television?
So I’m flipping through channels this afternoon, looking for something interesting to watch. There’s a replay of a Premier League match on Fox Soccer Channel. There’s NFL Europa action on NFL Network. There’s a Spanish Premier League match on GOL TV.
Then I flip over to Versus, home of the most marginalized sports on television. They’re showing a Major Indoor Soccer League playoff game between the Detroit Ignition and the Milwaukee Wave. There might be 2,000 people in the arena watching this game. Why they’re there is a mystery to me. This may be the most annoying sporting event I’ve ever seen.
For all those people who argue that soccer isn’t American enough, here’s what you get when you Americanize the game. You get indoor soccer played on a turf surrounded by hockey boards, where goals count for two points unless they’re scored from beyond the three point line. Hard fouls and handballs result in two-minute power plays for the other team. Loud, annoying music blares through the loudspeakers inside the arena. When the public address announcer isn’t yelling at the fans to get them to chant, he’s reading 15-second commercials every 4 minutes or so, usually while the game is still being played.
Never mind that the level of play here makes MLS look like the Champions League. The people behind MISL took the game of Association football and turned it into a big smelly hunk of cheese. Clearly, though, people like cheese, because there they are in the arena. I’m sure that mom who bought her son a Chelsea jersey — ants on a log for everyone! — figured he would watch any live pro soccer, and from the looks of things, she was right. The kid looks interested in this game. I try to enjoy all forms of football these days, but I’m clearly wired differently than these people are.
I switched back to the NFL Europa game. It ain’t all that great, either, but it’s a step up from Arena Football and miles ahead of the train wreck I just witnessed. Of course, if Arena Football is good enough for ESPN, I guess arena soccer is good enough for Versus. That might explain why Versus is having trouble staying on cable networks these days.
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FIFA only sanctions one indoor game, Futsal. I’ve seen videos of it and seen a pickup game while travelling in Honduras. It can be played on a court similar in size to a basketball court but there are no boards. Soccer is about touch and bashing the ball off the boards doesn’t help your outdoor game, it hurts it. Futsal is barely played in the US and far less popular than indoor soccer with boards but it’s very big around the world. It would be great if Futsal gained some ground in the U.S..
Here’s a sample video of Futsal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjQz5In70SY
Oh, I know all about futsal.
http://www.davesfootballblog.com/post/2007/03/15/an-open-letter-to-indoor-football-leagues/
What little I’ve seen of futsal was a lot more interesting than that smelly hunk of cheese I saw today. A pro futsal league would do a lot more for soccer in this country than MISL ever could.
Joejoejoe stole my thunder about futsal.
Not only is American indoor soccer not sanctioned by FIFA, it isn’t even the same kind of six-a-side indoor soccer played in other countries.
For instance, there is Masters Football in Britain, it has side boards, but the rules are different from MISL and for some reason the goals are inside the field of play rather than being buried into the boards the way it is done in American indoor soccer:
http://www.mastersfootball.com/
There are actually quite a few variations of five- or six-a-side indoor soccer, all over the world, but futsal is the only version governed by FIFA and thus the only hope we have of having any kind of standardized rules of play.
As to MISL, Dave, I agree with your comments. This isn’t even the same MISL that was fairly successful in the 1980’s but later went under. The current MISL is a joke; yet for some reason the CNN/Sports Illustrated website lists both MLS and MISL under their USA section of their website, but no mention of USL (the outdoor soccer “minor leagues” in North America). USL is easily more important and bigger than MISL, yet for some reason it gets ignored.
I have a bone to pick with the original MISL and with indoor soccer in general: it was one of the reasons why the NASL folded, and indoor soccer easily helped set soccer in the USA/Canada back at least a decade, maybe two decades. True the NASL was being run poorly in the early 1980’s, but the player salary bidding wars for star players wasn’t just between NASL clubs, but between the NASL and MISL as well. That killed the NASL and in fact when the league folded several NASL clubs jumped over to the MISL.
The NASL should never have experimented with doing both outdoor and indoor soccer. Indoor soccer was the “cuckoo bird” in the nest that killed off pro outdoor soccer in the USA from 1984-1996. It was justified with that slimy bromide that “Americans will never understand soccer, you have to dumb it down for them”. Supposedly indoor soccer was what the doctor ordered, and yet, indoor soccer failed, too.
The whole point of soccer in America was to finally have a sport played by the rest of the world become popular in the USA as well, and yet indoor soccer is not only not played in the rest of the world to any serious degree, we ended up with a version of indoor soccer that the rest of the world didn’t even play! It was a repeat of the cricket —> baseball and rugby —> gridiron transformation where Americans always insist that a game is no good unless it is “Americanized”, which is just a sporting version of the “not invented here syndrome”.
Surely we have enough Americanized sports now that we don’t need to keep on inventing new ones. Indoor soccer serves no rational purpose except to fill a few arenas when a local ice hockey or basketball team isn’t playing. That’s the same “justification” for arena football, and it shows just how meaningless these types of arena sports really are.
Just an FYI from someone close to this pathetic “sport” of MISL Soccer, I completely agree with you. I currently sell tickets for one of the six, that is right, six, teams in the league and I have never been so embarrased about putting a position on a resume as I am now. Just to throw it out there, I am using it as a stepping stone to get to something better, but the 7 long months I have had to put up with the 2 die-hard fans of this league bothering me about the team have left me wanting to blow my brains out just about every night. I will give this “sport” one thing, it is different, whether that is a good thing I will leave for you to decide but I am pretty sure you know the answer. On a positive note, the league may be expanding to a whole 8-9 teams next year, think of the competition!
Woah… some harsh words for this variation on soccer. Sorry you all are so detested by it, but as a player (& soccer player since age of 4) I have to say that the rule changes make sense to me, and are there for good reasons, and really indoor soccer has helped me to gain much better touch and overall benefited me when I would step on to a regulation soccer field. As for the professional side of it (MISL) you might be right, it’s not interesting to watch, but it’s a wonderful game that should be promoted everywhere, especially in the US because it’s more practical than outdoor soccer (takes up less space and offers opportunities in big cities for soccer year round). As americans we often forget why or how certain things can exist unless they bring in boatloads of cash… but hey that’s american culture - hypercapitalistic…