Of all the people on the train, the one I wanted to talk to the most was the middle-aged man with the graying goatee, traveling with wife and two children. He and his son were wearing Chelsea jerseys. It’s not rare to see folks around Chicago in soccer gear, but considering this train and most of its occupants were heading toward Soldier Field, where Manchester United were to take on the Chicago Fire, those two 
bold blue shirts stuck out. I tried to catch up with them as we disembarked, but couldn’t weave through the crowd quickly enough without them or someone else.
What I wanted to ask them was simply, why? Why pay dearly to see one of the chief rivals of the team you appear to prefer? Of course, they could have been Fire fans – they wouldn’t have been the only ones – but then, why wear the gear of a third party? I’m not being snarky. I genuinely wanted to know. It looked like an act of open contrarianism, and I wanted to hear the story.
Whatever their particular reasons, though, the Family Chelsea weren’t alone. Soldier Field is a mile’s walk from the nearest subway stop, and as I hiked it I saw Barcelona and AC Milan tops, in addition to both Man United and the Fire of course. There was a souvenir trailer selling more Chelsea gear, England shirts and Chicago Cubs purses, and I passed Cesc Fabregas walking down Roosevelt Rd. There was a young man in an Abby Wambach US Womens National Team top. In the parking lot outside the stadium, there were even more of all of those (except Fabregas – he was not tailgating apparently) as well as kids in Arsenal shirts and adults in Mexico ones.
That last isn’t so surprising, I suppose, considering that Chicharito has become a national hero in short order, but the rest were a curiosity. If I were a better writer, I would have asked someone about it, but really, the answer was obvious. For those people, the ones who had no real stake in either of the two teams competing, this was all about the spectacle. One of the biggest names in sports was playing in one of the biggest markets in the country. There would be international stars, and there would be famous people, and there would be hotdogs. President Obama was rumored to have been in attendance. To my eyes, though – which are admittedly critical and cynical and a mottled green that hints at some deeper, darker power – the presence of so many conflicting interests pointed to something else.
In an unintended coincidence of history, Major League Soccer launched just as the information revolution was gaining steam. 15 years later, fans of the game can watch a match on the dark side of the planet more easily than they can get out to see the local team. All those kids playing in AYSO and church leagues, the mythical Generation That Grew Up With MLS – they didn’t become FC Dallas fans or New England Revolutions fans. They became Manchester United and Barca and Real Madrid fans. The local outfits are losing out to international super brands.
There’s a word for this.
We usually think of globalization in corporate terms: Coca-Cola in Costa Rica, Starbucks in Shanghai. It’s difficult to think of the spread of a game in the same way. It’s bad when Shell Oil lays waste to the Nigerian coast, but the spread of football from its roots in England to every continent seems much more benign. The export of baseball to Japan and Korea, the Caribbean and Central America seems like a phenomenon that would unite humankind, not destroy it. Philosophers and FIFA like to talk about soccer’s ability to transcend borders and cultures, and indeed, the universality of the game can do just that. It’s an international language, to borrow a cliché.
But it’s 2011, and the language of the day isn’t a sport at all. It’s money. If the Cubs purses aren’t proof enough, take the private, catered and tableclothed “tailgate” areas for Harp Lager and Aon (the very globalized mega-super-insurance company that currently adorns Manchester United kits), or the designated entrance for Aon brass. Inside the stadium, everything, and I mean everything, was sponsored.
Every inch of concrete and LED board surrounding the field was covered in one corporate logo or another. Advertisements adorn even the most modest sports venues, I know, but here they were stacked one upon the other, like rows of branded shark teeth. Before kick off, a handful of lucky kids dragged a yellow DHL tarp over the center circle. At half time, it was Herbalife. The whole damn tournament was Herbalife, as in “The Herbalife World Football Challenge.” You could practically see the money changing bank accounts in the air above the field, like poor Mike Teevee in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
It’s no surprise that there’s money to be made here. I’m not going to bemoan the capitalization of sports (I’d be right, but it’s too late for all of that). What I will bemoan is where all that capital goes. There were some 61,000 spectators that day, the largest crowd to ever witness a Chicago Fire game. It’s hard to estimate how many were actually there to witness the Fire, but it’s fair to say it was not the majority. Fire home games at Toyota Park draw a quarter as many people on a good day. Capacity there is just over 20,000, and hasn’t been sold out yet this year. The disparity is glaring, and troubling.
All the capital whizzing about above Soldier Field didn’t go to the Fire. They had to pay Manchester United a handsome sum (in the millions) for the privilege of losing to them in their own city. The sponsorship deals festooning the stadium were no doubt intended to offset that cost, but it’s still seems a risky proposition. Manchester United, you can be sure, made money on the trip. Beyond the fee paid by the Fire, they must have moved a metric ton of merchandise on the day, and probably shared in ticket sales and sponsorship revenue. They were the big draw after all.
The Fire, on the other hand, would have been hoping to break even on the day, and catch a windfall of a few more butts in Toyota Park seats in the second half of the season. Considering that the Fire was the only team to score against United on the tour, and played more handsomely than the MLS All Star team, it might actually work. But the potential monetary gain is relatively small, and the term long. There may be less tangible benefits, but it was an awfully expensive way to get the team’s name in the news for a week. That the local club should have to go to such lengths to get attention from supposed fans of the game, well, there’s the thing.
A particularly loathed symptom of globalization is the removal of money from local economies into multinationals. Historically, that flow has moved out of Africa, say, or Latin America, and into the United States and Western Europe. But in the case of soccer, it’s the American interests that lose out. Every time someone forgoes the hometown MLS team for one of the European superclubs, it’s money drained away from the local outposts of the game. It’s money not spent in American stadiums and American shops; it’s money that leaves.
It’s a little bit ironic that America globalized the world, and the world’s game is now returning the favor – bitterly ironic, if your local club is out-drawn in their own home by one sporting Exxon or another (later this summer, Chicago will host CD Guadalajara at Toyota Park, and if past friendlies against popular Mexican teams are anything to go by, that too will be an inverted crowd). It would be unoriginal of me to comment that if only those 60,000 spectators came to Chicago Fire games on a regular basis, then there’d be money to spend and validation to be had. It’s not going to happen – not soon anyway. There is something about the American psyche that demands access to the best. Our exceptionalism looks outward, not inward. Having the best, being near the best, means you are the best. The appearance of wealth trumps the presence of stable, modest economics, whether in the home, on Capitol Hill, or in our sporting allegiances.
A few days after the Manchester United circus, I drove from Chicago to Ohio to see another friendly between an MLS team and an English Premier League side. Newcastle United played the Columbus Crew on a Tuesday evening, and it couldn’t have been a more dissimilar affair. The mid-week scheduling didn’t help much, nor did the market. The Columbus metropolitan area is approximately 1/8th the size of Chicago’s and, despite the presence of a large university, is considerably less cosmopolitan. The result: an announced attendance of 11,224, perhaps a thousand of which were fans of the visiting Magpies.
There were no extra sponsorships or ads in the stadium, no extra fanfare. The in-stadium announcer from the English team’s home stadium didn’t do a guest spot during halftime, as had happened at Soldier Field. The meager crowd was largely tame. Columbus’ supporters section began to lose steam as the game wore on and a Newcastle victory became imminent. The away fans were mostly Americans who have lost out in the sweepstakes of arbitrary long-distance fandom, and as such, were disorganized and had a limited repertoire. It was a failed attempt at mimicking the Habits of Highly Successful Clubs.
It was an unspectacular affair, and will pass from my memory even though the team I was ostensibly there to see won (I never said I was immune to the lure of Big Show). The game at Soldier Field, though, that was a doozy. If we’re fortunate enough to have a Chicago Fire Soccer Club in 50 years, I’ll tell my grandchildren about it as the Fire take the field in their new Aon-sponsored kits. I’ll tell them about how Cory Gibbs scored against the greatest team in the world back before the UK was an archipelago flooded out by rising seas. It was a goal scored in the face of the easy commodification of fandom, a goal scored for the little guys, the mom and pops, the village farmers. And my grandkids, they’ll tell me I’m full of shit. That I’m delusional and nostalgic. That MLS had been striving to be everything Manchester United was from the very beginning. But I’ll turn down the volume on my hearing aid and remember the good old days, back when the Fire’s jerseys just said “Fire.”
Benjamin Kumming is a writer living in Chicago. He blogs at benjaminkumming.com about the art and science of books, soccer, food, and other good things.
Read More: Chicago Fire, Globalization, Manchester United
by Benjamin Kumming · August 15, 2011
@benjamin kumming
enjoyable read, if it makes you feel any better – and i’m guessing it might not – manchester united’s hedge fund loan providers are from nyc (citadel, och-ziff cm and perry capital) meaning that the profits made by the red devils pretty much end up back in the usa.
so in this particular case, globalization (even of british soccer) does actually benefit american corporations and shareholders more than pretty much anyone else – even the english!
in some ways, man utd are actually an american brand when one thinks about who owns them plus their sponsorship deals – they just happen to have their hq in the north of rainy old england.
now, the cross-town scum at manchester city on the other hand… =)
I was behind the goal with section 8. The fire completely dominated possesion and sogs in the first half. That whole 70 minutes with the scoreline reading Fire 1 – Man U 0. Was worth the price of admisson, which as a Fire season ticketholder was $10. For everyone else it was five to fifteen times as much.
A good read regarding the effects of globalization and its escalation in the internet age. I’ve been to many Fire games in the past, including friendlies against European clubs (Celtic and AC Milan) and it’s always good to see all the replica kits on display, even if I do grit my teeth a bit with annoyance that the Fire marketing department can only get a small portion of them to show up at their own matches.
However, I do have one disagreement, and that’s regarding the idea that Americans demand only the best, especially when it comes to sports. How would you explain the huge popularity of college sports, or high school sports in many parts of the country, or, extrapolating further, American cars? None of those are regarded as the best, and yet, there is a significant amount of provincialism involved in their importance. Americans may care about the best, but they also care about locality (hence the relatively decentralized structure of much of this country). Witness MLS’ recent success stories tied to the rivalry between Portland and Seattle.
The game needs leagues like MLS, and indeed other leagues that aren’t in England, Spain, or Italy. Whether those leagues can thrive or at least survive in an increasingly small world is going to be dependent on how they choose to operate and to market themselves, and of course on what sorts of actions FIFA may take to protect them.
The same thing happens when Manchester United (or Barcelona, or Real Madrid) play a friendly anywhere, whether it be the US, southeast Asia, or even Germany (Real Madrid’s friendly against Hertha Berlin drew about 30,000 more fans than their average home match last season). This has nothing to do with the relative popularity of the Fire or any other MLS team and everything to do with there being around eight superclubs in Europe who are head and shoulders above every one else in terms of name recognition.
The international friendly week in Philadelphia last month was a great example. A match against Everton (no slouch of a team) was played in PPL Park to the Union’s usual 18,000 sell out crowd, with maybe 10% of the crowd in Everton colors. A match against Real Madrid a few days later had to be held at Lincoln Financial Field to accommodate the 55,000 or so who showed up, with a sizable majority of them rooting for Madrid. The gap in name recognition and support between Everton and Real Madrid is a much more interesting story than the gap between Philadelphia and Real Madrid (or Chicago and Manchester United).
The crowds in Toronto are an interesting case, as many people frequently come out in international kits for regular MLS matches. I went to the MLS final last year, numerous TFC games this year and the Juventus v Sporting Lisbon friendly as part of the Herbalife tour this summer, and at all of them you would see lots of fans in replica kits of the teams actually playing but you’d also see tons of representation from teams in EPL (including Wolverhampton Wanderers, I’m not even kidding), La Liga, Serie A, etc. With the arrival of Torsten Frings the Bundesliga fans are starting to show up in full force; the German national team and Weder Bremen people make sense, but FC Koln and Hamburger SV fans are a surprising addition to the crowd.
I imagine at it’s most basic, though, this is all symptomatic of cheering for a European team as your first choice and wanting to wear something sport-specific when you attend local matches. Some people just like watching soccer regardless of whose playing and so don’t feel the need to commit to a kit for anyone other than their #1 team.
America didn’t *give* the world globalization. Would you care to elaborate?
Does anyone else get really annoyed at the presence of all those random kits at matches in the states? You’re a soccer fan, I get it, but I don’t want to see your Arsenal kit at an MLS game. You wouldn’t go to an Eagles-Giants game wearing a Chargers jersey, would you? Some of these matches have more people wearing kits of other teams than the teams that are actually on the field that day. I’m not trying to be the fashion police, but this has become somewhat of a pet peeve of mine.
I really don’t mean to sound obnoxious with that last comment.
Is wearing the uniform of any team but the two you’re going to go see live now considered a faux pas? When did this happen? I must have missed that memo. Maybe I just enjoy watching the game, that is what we’re there to do right? Maybe I happen to like 3 or 4 different teams or players, who’s replica jerseys I happen to own and wear on occasion if I’m feeling especially saucy. Am I no longer allowed to wear them to related sporting events?
Seems silly to this equal opportunity soccer/football/kickballrun fan.
@RDM Haha, obviously you’re allowed to do whatever you want. I’m not usually one to tell people what to do (I certainly wouldn’t want to impede someone’s sauciness). I suppose all I’m saying is that if you’re going to a match between two teams, it seems to make sense to wear the colors of one of those two teams.
@Brouhaha I didn’t say America “gave” the world globalization, I said that America globalized the world, a figure of speech referring to the fact that the institutions most commonly associated with the phenomenon of globalization are predominantly American, and that it’s ironic that the tables are turned in the case of soccer. Although as Tony pointed out in the first comment, perhaps not as turned as one might think.
There’s a lot of talk these days about local economies, about the benefits of buying food from farmers markets or even small produce markets over one of the huge Safeway chains, or of shopping at local small merchants instead of Target, Walmart, Kmart. This applies to soccer as well, and not just here. The runaway success of the Premier League has sucked revenue away from lower league teams in the UK as well. As with big box stores like Target, the local merchants (in this case, local soccer teams) lose out when powerful organizations with increased buying power move into the market.
The MLS is 18 years old, has only 18 teams total and has already had 2 times cease operations (Miami and Tampa Bay) in that time. In contrast, European and English leagues are in most cases 100+ years old, have more than 100+ clubs spread out over many divisions and have rosters stacked with all the best players in the world. Why is it surprising that when a team as large as Manchester United come to a town that has only had a pro soccer team for 18 years, every soccer fan in the area shows up and decides to sport their team colors?
I highly doubt that if the Chicago Blackhawks went to play an exhibition game in Manchester against whatever local hockey team plays there it would be any different. You would see tons of money changing hands, tons of sponsorship, and, yes, there would be way more NHL jerseys in the audience than domestic British hockey jerseys.
The same is true for the Chicago Bulls, Chicago Bears, Chicago Cubs, or Chicago Whitesox playing in Manchester.
If the MLS had the same pedigree as the Premier League, La Liga or Serie A, I could understand the lack of Fire jerseys being annoying. But, for far too many people in the US there has been next to no quality soccer ever played within 100 miles of them. And any quality they have experienced has happened in the last couple years or for a few years in the 1970’s.
It is apples and oranges.
@Mike I think soccer is still enough of a niche sport in North America that partisan lines haven’t hardened to the same extent as in other sports. Wearing a soccer jersey of any sort to a match is simply an exercise in self-branding, a way of telling the world that, yes, I am a real soccer fan.
@Some guy Interesting comparison, although I’d prefer to think that American soccer is further along in its development than, say, British ice hockey. Soccer has been on America’s radar for much, much longer than MLS has existed, so it’s a bit misguided to think that Americans only started caring about the sport 18 years ago, or during the NASL’s brief heyday. @Little Fury You’re absolutely right, and I think that’s what bothers me. I want the partisan lines to harden, and I want people to care enough about their local clubs and have enough respect for American soccer to not wear a European jersey to an MLS match. When I see a guy in a Chelsea kit at a non-Chelsea match in the states, my reaction is not to think that that guy is a “real” soccer fan. Quite the opposite actually.
@Mike
If that guy in the Chelsea kit isn’t a real soccer fan, he’s doing a marvelous imitation by buying a ticket to see his local team.
A good piece and an enjoyable read. One thing that jumped out at me though was the assertion that local kids don’t “become FC Dallas fans or New England Revolutions fans.”
Obviously I’m not in a position to say whether or not this is actually the case but that’s not going to stop me questioning it. So: really? US kids are have been so wowed by foreign imports that they’re ignoring local teams? That seems strange, to say the least. What’s to stop someone being both a FC Dallas fan *and* a Chelsea fan? Or a New England Revolutions fan *and* a White Sox fan? No sport is by nature exclusive and it’s possible to follow different teams in different leagues or codes. It’s possible of course that the MLS has become completely dominated by the foreign game but that’s unlikely if Chicago Fire are drawing 15+ thousand per league game.
And if this is the case, ie if local loyalties are not being eroded, then what’s the big problem? Suddenly it’s possible to grow both Utd’s revenues and build support for the MLS. Yes, a famous English brand name gets to peddle its wares in a US stadium but then that’s been happening since The Beetles. What needs to be demonstrated is that this is to the detriment of the local game. Until then this might be, in a loose sense, globalisation but it’s hard to consider it exploitation or imperialism. Certainly not to a degree that warrants comparisons with Shell or Exxon.
To be pedantic, they’re not “subway stops” in Chicago. It’s either the el or the metra.
@Mike
Are you sure about that? I wasn’t even aware of soccer existing as a sport until I was about 12 or so (roughly 18 years ago). Admittedly, I grew up in rural Indiana, but at that point soccer was practically nonexistent at the youth level in some parts of the country. It is completely different now. I’m not sure how relevant this one data point is to the overall picture, but I think it is at least somewhat telling.
@Abby ‘L’ if you want to be especially pedantic.
@Mike, as a guy who wore his beloved Roma Totti jersey to the Herbalife game at LA Coliseum featuring, shockingly, NOT Roma, I must defend myself and my fellow fake football fans. I am a fan of the beautiful game, not of the blind tribal loyalties to local clubs. I think that is actually a major problem with world football right now; though it is not isolated to football (see LA Dodger fans pummelling a Giants fan earlier this year). I am a fan of the local underdog, to be sure, but when they lose their best players to the Superclubs every year, concentrating the talent at the very top (see La Liga), it no longer seems worth the pain and suffering. Perhaps I am not a loyal fan…I grew up in the USA, playing soccer my whole life. I love the game. I never had a hometown team til DC United was created out of thin air in 1993. It’s hard to cultivate passion for the MLS clubs, because 1. the level of play has only recently been worth watching, 2. there are no nostalgic elder statesmen hanging around in pubs droning on about the good old days…because there haven’t been any good old days. Someday, I will wax nostalgic to my kids about Etcheverry and Moreno and the glory days of DC United, but for now, I’ll watch the best play the beautiful game, whenever and wherever I can find it. It was far more fun to watch Real Madrid and Galaxy (my current local club) play attacking, entertaining football, while wearing my Totti jersey, proclaiming myself a neutral, than to watch Galaxy play Houston in a tight, dreary, midseason affair. Perhaps economically I should be supporting my local club…I’ll think on that. But for entertainment and appreciation for the game, watching the best leagues and the best teams around the world blows MLS out of the water.
@Mike Sadly, I do see people at American sporting events wearing random shirts. In fact, last night at Twins vs White Sox in Minneapolis I saw a guy in full Phillies gear, a Blue Jays hat and a bunch of assorted university attire (U of Minnesota, Ohio State, Notre Dame, UND, and on). It’s more prevalent at soccer games in the States, but hardly foreign to our sports scene.
Amongst the big news this week is the tidbit that Fox is leveraging its expensive Premier League broadcast rights by packaging 4 Prem games with NFL in front of an exponentially larger over-the-air audience. Expect more Chelsea and Man Utd jerseys in the average sports wardrobe sample, a lot more.
Bemoaning the “capitalization” or “consumerization” of sport is usually a bit of false nostalgia. Especially in America, advertising and corporate involvement have been around since the early days. The Green Bay Packers, celebrated as the paragon of sports tradition by being fan-owned and the smallest market NFL team, got their name from the company that originally supplied their jerseys. Liverpool FC was created because of a business dispute. Hell, Montgomery Ward department store got its namesake from a baseball player.
The pure economic reality of it is if people want the highest level of football professionalism, there needs to be enough money to pay players, coaches and other professionals to put that product on the field. Unless fans want to pay higher ticket prices (which we all know they don’t), they shouldn’t complain about advertising and corporate partnerships playing a big role in the sport.