Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week the World Cup has just begun, and Niall Ferguson takes on the age-old American question: Why does the rest of the world care so much about soccer? The answer, he writes, is encapsulated in Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch,’ a book that explains the addictive power of the game—and why it really all comes down to suffering.
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When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, indigenous populations had almost no resistance to the many pathogens that had sailed with them. The results were catastrophic. Half a millennium later, by contrast, the inhabitants of the United States and Canada believe they have developed powerful antibodies, ensuring that most of them are immune to the most contagious and debilitating pathogen of all: football.
The quadrennial World Cup began on Thursday, yet an impressive number of Americans could not care less about the event they are co-hosting with Canada and Mexico. It is not just that they insist on calling the game “soccer” (originally an English contraction of Association Football). It is more that their attention is elsewhere: specifically, on the NBA finals, where the Knicks are just one win away from making history—not to mention hockey’s Stanley Cup. Soccer, meanwhile, is the favorite spectator sport of just one in every 20 Americans, according to Gallup, an improvement on the 2 percent in polls between 1937 and 2004, but still lean pickings—and a rounding error compared to the 41 percent for the NFL and college football. Even among young Americans ages 18 to 29—many more of whom have played the game than their parents and grandparents—soccer is the favorite of just 8 percent, compared with 28 percent for football and 13 percent for basketball.
How, then, to explain to an American the addictive power of the game most people on Earth call football? Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life (1992) is surely the best book on the subject.
