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.
Still the question remains unanswered, how does a local tradition that started with kicking around a dead guy’s head, create the largest following on the planet? The answer is hierarchical diffusion, the spread of something from a position of authority. England had established itself as the dominant power on Earth at the same time that all of the European powers were claiming empires throughout the world. As the English established themselves as the top imperial power, it was introducing its new subjects to their culture. While there was some resistance amongst the conquered populations to adopting the English language and Christianity, there was nearly universal and immediate acceptance of soccer, for one incredibly simple reason, it was fun. Soccer is the most popular institution in the world because of a universal lesson, if you can make something enjoyable, people will want more of it.
Being able to understand the multiple factors that caused soccer to grow from a local tradition in England to a global event is precisely how you must program your brain to achieve success on the AP® Human Geography Exam.