The Charm of Soccer
by NIH sports correspondent Duff "Twilley" Wilmott
Originally published following the 2002 World CupLike many Canadians, I have just spent a month trying unsuccessfully to figure out why the World Cup engenders so much excitement and fanaticism among followers of soccer. Now, though, thanks to groundbreaking research conducted at the Greater Freelton Area College of Applied Arts and Technology, I finally understand why.
The answer lies in a concept which has been referred to before on this site – equilibrium. "In general," says Gareth B. Lapsang, who headed the team of researchers conducting this important study, "there are two sources of reward in sport. The first is what we call intrinsic interest, or the interest inherent in the game itself. The second is extrinsic interest, or interest derived from activities associated with the game. The crucial assumption in our theory is that if a sport lacks intrinsic interest, its followers will compensate by adding extrinsic sources of interest."
Lapsang points out that the most complex of sports, chess, arouses no fanaticism whatever. "A chess match simply gives fans enough to think about that they don't have to create interest by painting their faces, dressing in funny costumes, or marauding through the streets looting, pillaging, and doing grievous bodily harm or worse to people wearing the wrong colours in their scarves."
Similarly, baseball and curling crowds are highly restrained, bursting into enthusiasm only when an exceptional play is made. While not as restrained as chess fans, the fans of these and most other sports are still more like chess fans than they are like soccer fans.
Soccer, Lapsang says, is simply the odd sport out. "Let's face it," he says, "soccer occurs pretty early in the evolutionary chain of sport. The first code of rules for the game even called it The Simplest Game rather than football. In the evolution of sport it occupies a spot equivalent to the amoeba's." Lapsang notes parenthetically that to Canadians, whose national sport is a more complex evolutionary descendant of soccer, soccer is so simple as to be maddening. "They don't even have forechecking and backchecking," he says. "Simple or what?"
Given the simplicity of soccer, Lapsang and his colleagues reasoned that the intrinsic sources of interest in it should be few. They confirmed this analysis with an extensive study of the effects of various sports on measures of arousal – heart rate, galvanic skin response, and so on..When subjects were required to watch the games while sitting still and without talking, their responses to soccer were the weakest of their responses to any sport. "By itself," Lapsang says, "without any other sources of arousal around, soccer produced a state of arousal roughly equivalent to that you'd be in after being hit in the head really hard with an iron pipe."
However, when subjects watched in groups and were able to communicate with each other, suddenly all sports produced the same levels of arousal. Spectators at all types of sport tended to augment their arousal by using extrinsic sources, but the people who watched soccer used the most. "We even had to curtail the soccer sessions," Lapsang says, "after participants in each of the first three were arrested and two innocent bystanders were attacked."
So there you have it. Sports fans seek a standard level of arousal. If the intrinsic character of their sport fails to deliver it then they compensate by engaging in extrinsic activities which bring their arousal up to the desired level. That is, they establish what Lapsang calls an arousal equilibrium. The lower the intrinsic interest of a game, the greater the extrinsic activity engaged in. Since soccer is so low in intrinsic interest, its fans have to compensate by going to extremes – frequent criminal activity and nationalistic orgies uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies.
Lapsang's results are interesting in themselves, but in the modern academic world that is not enough. Lapsang and his team intend to make a profit from their findings. Realizing that they have hit on a way to make any sport popular, they have incorporated the National Tic-Tac-Toe League (NTTTL). "We expect every match to end in a draw," he says, "so we will be providing even more sources of extrinsic interest than those required to interest soccer fans." He won't say what they are, advising us to wait for the press conference, but he does believe there is an urgent need for Canada to increase the size of its armed forces before the season begins.
The Charm of Soccer © Coolth, 2002
