David Beckham(C) poses for photos after holding a press conference at the Perez Art Museum Miami, in Miami, Florida on February 5, 2014. At left is Major League Soccer Commissioner, Don Garber(L) and Miami-Dade County Mayor, Carlos A. Gimenez is at right. PHOTO | ALEXIA FODERE  AFP
You can tell that Americans know very little about what they call soccer from the introduction David Beckham received from the mayor of Miami on Wednesday as he announced his plans to set up a team based in the city.
“We are happy to welcome Mr Beckman to Miami,” said Mayor Carlos Giménez. Beckham is perhaps one of the
most recognisable footballers of his age. If even he is relatively unknown in America, that illustrates how far football still has to go to win the hearts and minds of people in the US. Americans are a peculiar lot but when it comes to sport, they are more peculiar than in most other fields.
They choose to play their own versions of most popular games, which they then brand ‘world’ championships.
Cricket is very popular on multiple continents. The Americans prefer baseball. Their ‘world’ series is a closed club involving mainly two other countries which saw great American influence in the first half of the last century, Japan and Cuba.
The rugby World Cup commands the attention of the world every few years. The Americans play, instead, American football, a lengthy, bewildering affair which, for a few hours last weekend, brought the US to a halt. At least the other game for which the Americans are famous, basketball, has a fairly global spread in terms of the countries in which it is a major sport.
But as anyone who spent many years of their youth watching Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls side take on Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers all those years ago, the basketball was absolutely first rate but there was again that touch of American swagger about the marketing.
At stake in the NBA championship, was not who would be champion of America. The victor would be instantly branded the world champion. These thoughts crossed my mind as I went along to watch the Super Bowl, the finale of the American football season, deep into Sunday night.
EVERYTHING DONE IN MEGA TERMS
Say what you like about the Americans. But they can put on a show. They have a sense of confidence bordering on the comical. Everything is done in mega terms. The beer glasses they were drinking from in the establishment where we went to watch the match are the size that a flask carrying enough tea for a whole extended family in Kenya is poured into.
They were having huge cheeseburgers and chips and that great American favourite, chicken wings, in enormous quantities. That sort of behaviour is not something you see often in Europe and it is not appropriate for extending one’s lifespan. But it is the sort of risky, optimistic behaviour you associate with innovators and boundary pushers.
So according to CBS, the Americans consumed 1.25 billion chicken wings and 29 million slices of pizza? Well, the next day, they also popped millions of antacids, with pharmacies reporting a 20 per cent rise in sales in the morning. As you will have noticed, I spent the more than four hours in which the game – and the half-time show – dragged on watching anything but the football. It is a strange affair that is separated from rugby by the fact that the players wear helmets and spend a lot of time tackling other players that don’t have the ball.
You would need a quick crash course to understand it. But of course, in the best American fashion, there was plenty of entertainment for those that don’t know the ins and outs of the game.
The advertisements before, during and after the game are famously much sought after. Everything is eye-wateringly expensive. Half a second of airtime costs $4 million (Sh344 million). The brewer, Anheuser-Busch, has spent $145.9 million (Sh12.5 billion) on Super Bowl ads since 2009.
A ticket to the match costs on average $3,019 (Sh260,000). That’s a vast amount when you consider that for a non-season ticket holder to get into the much anticipated Arsenal vs Liverpool FA Cup clash next week, you will need around (Sh23,000). Anyway, the match concluded with a victory for the Seattle Seahwaks who routed the Denver Broncos. (READ: Seahawks rout Broncos to win first Super Bowl title)
Why do the Americans choose to play their own games and not compete with the rest of the world in anything major apart from individual sports such as tennis and swimming? I had always believed it was an effort to avoid competition and maintain the American greatness narrative.
But in Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, academics Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman argue that soccer attempted to gain traction in the US at a time when there was an extraordinary level of nativism and nationalism there. Anything foreign was seen as a sign of creeping socialism.  So they chose to celebrate their own sports and wanted nothing to do with ‘outsider’ pursuits. Which is an admirable thing in one sense.
So what might it take to get Americans to seriously take an interest in more widely followed games such as what they call soccer? Simple, the authors argue. The American national team just needs to start winning and everyone will join the bandwagon.
Nothing succeeds like success. If the US team performs consistently well, the Miami Mayor will certainly have an easier time knowing who the hell David Beckham is.