The World Cup is in full swing and it is, without a doubt, the biggest event on the planet. Billions of people will watch the international soccer (or football as most of the world calls it) tournament over the course of the next month. In the United States soccer is considered a second tier sport behind American football, basketball, and baseball. For years I have tried to explain to my students that while we in the US have paid little attention to soccer for most of our history, in the rest of the world it is far and away the most popular sport. For me personally, I was exposed to soccer at an early age, growing up in a Hispanic household ignoring soccer wasn’t really an option.
The question I get asked most often, why is soccer so popular in the rest of the world? It is simultaneously a complicated and simple question to answer. To better understand the question one must understand the origin of soccer as a folk tradition in England. Hundreds of years ago while excavating a historical site the head of a Danish soldier was discovered, what does one do when discovering the head of an invading soldier? They decided to kick the thing around, it later morphed into a game as two villages took turns kicking the head back and forth to each other. Thankfully, they eventually stopped kicking the head around and played the game with a ball, over the years rules and a playing field were established and soccer took on the form we are much more familiar with now. Continue reading The World Cup: From Folk Culture to Globalization