National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer (review)

I must confess to initial disappointment with this fine volume from economists Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist. I teach at a prep school that has earned over a dozen state soccer championships, and my own children play on youth soccer leagues. I have seen hundreds of soccer games, but I still simply do not understand the game's appeal. In rural West Texas, I grew up playing baseball, while soccer was perceived during the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s as some type of dangerous foreign import. After all, soccer was played in communist nations. Szymanski and Zimbalist do not explain the appeal of soccer to a baseball purist, but after reading this volume I do have a better comprehension of why and how soccer evolved into the world's most popular sport.

Economists Szymanski and Zimbalist focus upon the histories of soccer and baseball as professional games and analyze the challenges confronting the two sports in the twenty-first century. Baseball scholars will be familiar with the arguments presented by Zimbalist in works such as Baseball and Billions and May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy. On the other hand, many readers of NINE may be less familiar with the scholarship of Szymanski, who teaches economics at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London and is the author of Winners and Losers: The Business Strategy of Football. His insights regarding soccer will expand the horizons of many baseball historians.

The authors argue that sport reflects culture and that the gulf between American and European values is most apparent in the histories of professional soccer and baseball. Both games developed during the nineteenth century. The model pioneered by the founders of baseball's National League provided for closed sports leagues. Ownership controls the number of franchises and territorial expansion. Strict limitations are placed on player rosters to keep costs down. In addition to baseball's antitrust exemption, public subsidies are often extracted for stadium construction. Essentially, this is a monopoly formula much at odds with the American rhetoric of free enterprise.

World soccer, on the other hand, is based upon the English model in which leagues are open. Depending upon a team's performance, it is possible to move up and down within league hierarchies. This more competitive model owes its origins, according to Szymanski and Zimbalist, to the conflict between amateurism and professionalism within English soccer. This division was papered over with a unified governing body (Football Association), which maintained that clubs were "foremost sporting entities, not profit centers" (p. 5). The competitive nature of soccer as a business and sport in which a team's status in the top leagues is fluid has made many clubs and cities reluctant to invest in stadium construction. Most deaths at soccer matches are due to antiquated stadiums rather than fan violence. The authors, attempting to ascertain what is best for the fans of both sports, conclude that the monopoly structure of baseball will inevitably lead to the exploitation of fans and taxpayers, while the more competitive nature of the soccer world results in financial pressures which threaten the future of clubs and leagues.

With an emphasis upon profits and the nation getting a late start in the imperialist game, baseball monopolists in the United States saw little market incentive for expanding their game internationally. The expansion of soccer was fostered by British imperialism, and the game was adopted by locals who relished in beating the colonialists at their own game. Today, the governing body of world soccer, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (fifa), is a community of nations with 204 members. Baseball, on the other hand, is the national sport only in Japan, the United States, and the Caribbean region. In fact, baseball has been dropped as a sport for the 2008 Olympics. Recognizing the need to seek broader financial...