The Aztexan

It’s just a few hours after the final whistle of the final game of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Spain’s players are still getting used to being Champions of the World. After a month full of soccer day and night, I’m not going through full withdrawal quite yet. Just a little bit of the shakes so far.

Inevitably, this feeling reminds me of the end of the 2006 World Cup, when I really fell in love with soccer. I’d gotten hooked on the daily dosage in the group stages, they were a gateway drug to the bigger and bigger games, and then: the end. It’s over, cold turkey. What now? Where’s my fix?!

I still remember heading to The Google with a question that seems absurd now, and will strike regular readers of this blog as silly, as well: “Do they play soccer in the U.S., too?”

If you wondered the same thing, and your search brought you here, I have good news: Indeed they do play soccer in the U.S. They play it at all levels, and in lots of cities across the country. They even play soccer right here in Austin!

Here’s a quick overview of what’s on offer here in Austin, elsewhere in Texas and elsewhere in America.

Major League Soccer (MLS) — This is the top level of U.S. soccer, the best of the best. Like any pro league, it features players from all over the world, not just Americans. David Beckham (LA Galaxy), for example; you might have heard of him. He’s on the injury list at the moment, but there are other relatively famous players plying their trade in MLS: Mexico’s Cuauhtémoc Blanco (Chicago Fire) and Sweden’s Freddie Ljungberg (Seattle Sounders) to name a couple. They’ll be joined later this month by France’s Thierry Henry (Red Bull New York).

Some of the guys you saw play for the U.S. men’s national team also play in MLS: Jonathan Bornstein (Chivas USA), Robbie Findley (Real Salt Lake), Edson Buddle (LA Galaxy) and — last but certainly not least — Landon Donovan (LA Galaxy).

There are 16 teams in MLS this year, with 2 more (Portland and Vancouver) next season. That includes 2 Texas teams: FC Dallas and the Houston Dynamo. Dallas is “my” MLS team, the one I landed on after my search four years ago. To this day that’s who I follow, including a trip or two per season to Dallas to see them in person.

Division 2 (USSF-D2) — As is pretty obvious from the name, this is the second level of soccer in the U.S. It was formerly called “USL-1″, but due to some ownership and league drama that I won’t go into here, it’s being run this year directly by the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF). Like MLS, it’s a league of paid professional athletes. The 12 teams are in smaller cities, and the players aren’t as famous (yet), but the play can still be very good.

This is where Austin comes in: the Austin Aztex are a USSF-D2 team. (In fact, so far this season, they’re the best USSF-D2 team.) The Aztex franchise launched here in 2008, and now I can go to a lot more games, and without road-tripping four hours up I-35 first.

Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS) — This is a new league, in just its second season. Despite some growing pains (two teams have been added, but two others have folded since last year), the quality of play from these 7 teams is also excellent. Some of the very best women players in the world play in WPS. These include U.S. national team stars like Hope Solo (Atlanta Beat), Abby Wambach (D.C.’s Washington Freedom) and Natasha Kai (New Jersey’s Sky Blue FC), as well as foreign stars like England’s Eniola Aluko (Atlanta), France’s Sonia Bompastor (Washington) and Brazil’s 4-time FIFA Women’s Player of the Year, Marta (San Jose’s FC Gold Pride).

Premier Development League (PDL) — Broadly speaking, most of the more than 70 teams that make up the PDL are college players getting game time on their summer break. So, their season is short (May to July), and many of the teams are amateur. The Aztex fielded a team at this level in 2008 and 2009 (the Aztex U-23s), but not this season.

There are other leagues, USL-2, PASL, MISL and W-League, not to mention college teams, but these are the ones I’m most familiar with. Hopefully this overview will get you started in your search for soccer closer to home than Johannesburg.

In addition to the jumping-off point that I hope this list of leagues, teams and players will give you, I’ll add this editorial, free of charge.

You may have heard, or will hear, that soccer in the U.S. isn’t as good as soccer in England. Or Mexico, or Italy, or Spain, or the 63rd moon of Jupiter, or wherever. In some cases that’s obviously true. The West Texas United Sockers are a decent PDL team, but they’ll never hold a candle to FC Barcelona. In other cases it’s less clear-cut: the LA Galaxy on a good day would give most Premier League teams a run for their money, at least.

But even supposing for a minute that it’s a fact that U.S. soccer is somehow inherently inferior than Fox Soccer Channel’s marquee match of the week, I still urge you to find a local team and go to a few games. (One game isn’t really enough. If you watched enough World Cup you already know that sometimes, matches between even the best teams can be less than thrilling.)

But if you can watch the top teams from across the world play all weekend long on ESPN, why bother? For one thing, for the sport to evolve here to the level of those other countries (and moons), there needs to be fan support, butts in seats, tickets sold, nachos bought, salaries paid, etc. It’s a whole supply-and-demand kind of thing. Or demand-and-supply, or something. Look, this isn’t an economics blog.

But completely aside from any “for the good of the sport” sermon, live soccer is different than — better than — soccer on TV. It’s a hi-def, surround-sound, panoramic view and you don’t need special glasses to see it in 3D. Get to know your team, your players, at your home ground. Feel the glory of the wins, the crush of the losses and the everything-in-between of the draws, right there in the stands with your fellow fans.

Also, you may not realize what you’re missing watching on TV, where the camera naturally follows the ball most of the time. There’s more going on than where the ball happens to be at any given moment. There’s the flow, the formation, the positioning of the players. Not to mention the tension and excitement of the crowd around you. When you’re sitting in the stands, you can take it all in.

It’s a beautiful game. See you there.

[This post is not really related to the original Hi, America. Welcome to Soccer post in anything but title. In fact, it's aimed at a completely opposite audience. Oh, well. I started with wanting to tell the legions of new soccer fans that I'm sure now exist in Austin about the Aztex, but it kind of spiraled out of control. I also wanted to make sure search sites know I'm in Austin, writing about pro soccer, specifically the Aztex soccer team. Soccer. Austin. Catch that, Google?]

Update, 7/12/10: This post by photographer AustinPixels gets to the point I was originally after. It manages to do it with far fewer words, and without straying to Jupiter or WPS. In defense of my wordiness, he used pictures, and those are worth a thousand words each.

SI.com’s Joe Posnanski: The Meaning of Garra

Before Uruguay, soccer apparently was a game of long passes and violence; the sport was direct, forceful, without guile, rugby without hands. In 1924 and 1928, Uruguay took its style to the Olympics — short passes, individual brilliance, something like dancing. Uruguay won, often by spectacular scores — 7-0 over Yugoslavia, 3-0 over the United States and Sweden, 4-1 over Germany. The beauty was what struck people. This was art.

A link to this Sports Illustrated blog post about the history and current state of the Uruguay national team is a little outside the scope of what I usually cover here. But I have more than one reason to share it with you:

1. I have a more or less random but nonetheless keen fascination, almost obsession, with Uruguay. (I don’t know why; blame Bajofondo. And Wikipedia.) So I would have been interested in this anyway. And I also hope that publishing it here somehow gets me introduced to some Uruguayan expats who wind up inviting my family and me to stay for a week or two at their summer place in Montevideo.
2. Uruguay vs Ghana in the quarterfinals, and after Ghana sent the U.S. home from South Africa, we’ll all be Uruguayans on Friday, right?
3. It’s just really an excellent article. It’s a perfect capsule of everything I love most about the World Cup. Soccer, of course, but served with generous helpings of history, geography and philosophy. Fantastic!

One more excerpt, because I can’t resist (though you should really read it all).

But to get to the point, Uruguay had competed in two World Cups… and won them both. When the final ended, Jules Rimet — one of the founders of the World Cup and the man whose name is on the trophy — offered his definition of Garra Charrua, that spirit which had driven Uruguayan soccer. He said:

“In football, playing well is not sufficient. You also need to feel it profoundly as does Uruguay.”

Check out that picture. That’s a flyer that was left on the windshield of my car during Wednesday night’s Aztex-Timbers game. The significance, if you’ll allow me: scant months after my fellow Aztex fans and I wondered whether there were any bars other than Cuatro’s where we wouldn’t be treated like second-class citizens, here is this (baseball-named!) chain of sports bars actually spamming me with paper flyers about how soccer-friendly they are.

That, my friends, is the World Cup for you.

It can’t help but make me think of the question that comes up so often in American soccer. It comes in different forms, but it boils down to: will soccer “make it” in the U.S., and if so, when? I like how Steve Davis put it in this post last summer, Stupid questions about soccer:

This business of “Has soccer arrived?” and “What’s it gonna take … ” they represent the laziest of cliched, journalist default questions. Seriously, what do those questions mean?

I mean, has Thai food “arrived?” Has yoga “arrived?” Has Gabriel Garcia Marquez “arrived?”

See what I mean? It’s a silly question. Things are what they are.

Soccer? As a professional enterprise, it’s clearly not as popular in the United States in 2009 as football, baseball and basketball. It’s more popular than hockey (no matter what anybody wants you to believe.) As a participant sport, it’s widely accepted and unquestionably popular. And that’s it. Why does everyone always want to explore where soccer will go? What’s with the obsession over where soccer will land on the pop culture continuum?

From my perspective as a fan of a still-new team in a league that’s had some amount of turmoil since, well, forever, I can’t be quite that blithe about the question. To continue Davis’ Thai food analogy, I’m a big fan of this new Thai restaurant in town, and I want it to do well enough to stay in business. I want Thai food to have “arrived”, especially here in Austin, at least that much.

Now, back to the World Cup. I personally could hardly be more excited for it. I’ll be watching as many games as I can get away with without getting fired or divorced. And seeing soccer here, soccer there, soccer everywhere; having coworkers who usually couldn’t care less tell me to Google for “world cup” and look at the bottom of the page; all of that stuff, it just adds to the fun.

But at the same time, I’m sure there will be plenty of jokes at soccer’s expense, too. Like the Onion story about “the nation’s soccer fan” (note the singular, “fan”). I’m not saying that’s not funny; I love The Onion, and that is funny. But it’s based on the kind of tired old junk that U.S. soccer fans have put up with for years, so it also kind of touches a nerve. And there’s bound to be plenty more backlash where that came from, between now and July 11.

In anticipation of that negativity, here’s my resolution: I won’t care, and I won’t fight.

I love soccer. And for the next month, I’m going to unapologetically geek out on it, and have an absolute blast, and nothing anyone says will be able to put a dent in that. I’m not going to get into goofy defensive arguments, or lecture anyone about how the World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, blah blah blah. For the next 30 days, everyone’s going to have more than enough exposure to the game. Let them fall in love with it like I have — or not — on the game’s own merits. It has plenty of ‘em.

I’m sure my local Thai restaurant, er, soccer team (which thankfully seems to be doing good business this year already) will pick up some new fans this summer, which will be fantastic. But some people will try what’s on the menu and not care for it; others, who decided long ago that they hate it, won’t even taste it (but will keep on hating it). That’s okay, too. To each their own.

As for me, I’ll be pigging out.