Weather report.

As expected, the Americans rose below the occasion of the World Cup. For most o this year blase sports columnists had exhausted our patience with explanations of the country's immunity to soccer. As in two world wars, the Yanks had had to be wooed and coaxed into the fray, protesting all the while that American pluralism had evolved primarily to discard the antique baggage of tribalism borne along by institutions like the World Cup. American public consciousness had echoed with it-can't-happen-here memories of prior foreign threats--fascism socialism--associated with displays of mass participation and fanatical devotion. No surprise then that anxiety about spectators' aberrant behavior (extant in sport since the time of the Caesars) would run so high, and that a fully armed Pentagon-borrowed guard presence would be supplied at some World Cu stadia. Actually crowd trouble was negligible, the significant exception being "riots" of overexuberance in the L.A. barrios.

In the teeth of attempts to gentrify the game, and to control its fans to the point of infringing on their civil liberties (in Britain, for example, through Margaret Thatcher's Football Spectators Act of 1989), soccer has remained a fierce expression of male working-class culture. Indeed its rules of play were first elaborated by lower-class teachers at England's elite public schools, as way of containing the contempt shown them by their aristocratic students. (So much for the old saw that Britain's imperial wars were won on the playing field of Eton.) And if an Italian corporate baron like Silvio Berlusconi not only own a top club, AC Milan, but took a soccer chant--Forza Italia--for the name of hi political party (just as juntas in Argentina and Brazil had earlier adopted chants as their theme tunes), Italian football fans have shown just as much resistance to his ambitions as support for them.

The Federation Internationale de Football Associations, the world soccer body, had hoped that subjecting the game to American sports culture--hooligan free, co-ed, and saturated with commodity values--would defuse its class consciousness, and would exorcise the male aggressivity of fans whose "love" of a team functions like adulterous devotion to a mistress until late in life. Jus as attractive was the impatience of the American sports public--reared to expec large scores, a demand appropriate to an economic system structure for the punctual deliverance of consumer gratifications--with what Henry Kissinger (honorary chairman of the World Cup) described as "the Brazilian Disease": too much self-indulgence, too few goals. Of course Kissinger might just as well hav been disdaining the deficiencies in the work ethic of a Southern nation of samba-struck narcissists unable to meet their debt payments.

The Brazilian Disease, like the English Disease of "hooliganism," has roots in national history that is all too often reduced to the rhetoric of national stereotype. Brazil's Jogo Bonito--"Beautiful Game"--emerged in the course of th Afro-Brazilian appropriate of soccer from the amateur Anglo teams who dominated the fledgling sport in the country, and who favored an austere, Apollonian styl of play. (Indeed the advent of professional codes has gradually supplanted the founding English-liberal ideology of fair play and genteel amateurism all over the world.) In Brazil, a baroque style evolved--banana shots, scissors kicks, mesmerizing dribbles, body swerves from hell--that was considered foreign and thus undesirable by the European managers who had traditionally plundered the cream of Latin American talent.

The English still cleave to a national style harking back to Victorian ideas of manliness and Muscular Christianity--a cult of work rate, stamina, speed, physical contact, and aerial supremacy in which, it is assumed, fitness and "honest toil" will prevail. Intelligence is "foreign"; skills, strategy, and individual flair are fancy Continental indulgences. In England this summer ther was a storm of protest over the "overregulation" of World Cup matches; the virtual barring of physical confrontation was taken as further evidence of the takeover of the game by foreign technocrats/native upstarts, and of the decline of the English style (rarely very successful in World Cup competition). Not surprisingly, the U.S. team's performance was lauded as quite English--good athletes, no ideas! At the same time, Latin Americans claimed it as Latin American, and continental Europeans saw it as kin to their style of indirect soccer, based on possession, short passing, and territorial buildup (the Italia defensive game being a killjoy perversion).

Given that many of each nation's stars play for local clubs in other countries, what is the basis--other than the sloppy reportage that contrasts, say, the Teutonic precision of the Germans with the flamboyant verve of the Cameroons--for claiming a coherent national style for each team? How might that style relate to the characteristics of the national "temper"? In an age when resurgent nationalisms are echoing around the soundproofed atrium of transnational culture, these are interesting questions to pose. As corporate institutions of labor, business, and leisure take on a global face, while their local equivalents are artificially regressed by the different countries' heritage industries, the national sports team is one of the few entities explicitly representing the range of sentiments attached to nationality. No wonder that the British game (which, in a field of nation-states, is still allowed to field four stateless nations: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) is seen as long in decline, the German game as having emerged triumphant in the '80s, Italy's fortunes as inflated by new capital, North America as splendidly isolated, the (ex-) socialists as hamstrung by Stakhanovite worker-cults clashing with collectivist ideals, and the Southern and Third World teams as tragically handicapped by scant resources. These perceptions were obviously underpinned by geopolitical realities (or cliches); what did they have to do with the game itself, and to what extent were they projections onto the game?

In Scotland (one of the places, along with Paris, London, and New York, where I watched the Cup), the notoriously underperforming national team is virtually th only institution capable of representing the country on the international stage Scotland is the only nation-state to have voluntarily given up its sovereignty; in the early 18th century it entered an unpopular union with England that made its ruling class junior partners in the Empire's spoils. The result--self-colonization?--has made this small country behave like a world leader in schizophrenia, its violent oscillations between celebration and lament, pride and shame, talent and poverty, arrogance and modesty, and Catholi universality and Protestant patriotism feeding a paralyzing cultural condition that is said to pervade the inconsistent performance of the national football team. It is not enough, then, for such a team merely to win or lose. It must be seen to embody a preexisting set of cultural definitions and national aspirations.

All national teams pay lip-service to such aspirations, and to the identities that embody them. Only a few star players are equipped to do so as well: Pele (dazzling Afro-Brazilian artiste), Franz Beckenbauer (unflappable German industrialist), Bobby Charlton (sturdy English yeoman gent), Diego Maradona (tragicomic Argentine/Neapolitan urchin/swell), Johan Cruyff (liberal-democrati Dutch total footballer), Gheorge Hagi (gutsy East-European entrepreneur), Roberto Baggio (stylish Italian finisher). Many great players get short shrift in national memory because they cannot invoke the required characteristics. Emergent countries are compelled to borrow and meld national qualities; Prince Faisal, Saudi Minister of Sports, hired an Argentine coach to blend "Latin heritage with Arab fantasy."

This year's tournament put to rest at least one half of the enduring soccer/socialism question: why is there none of either in the U.S.? Perhaps it doesn't matter whether the cartel between the TV corporations and the baseball-basketball-football military-industrial complex ever fully relaxes its long-held resistance to soccer: no fan of the sport wants an Americanized game of stop-and-start, commercial-friendly play bombarded with the heavy statistica artillery of inane commentators. Outside the fashion world, where soccer inspired the sexiest styles of the year, the sport's more utopian possibilities lie in the field of gender. Like socialism, in most parts of the world soccer has taken on a lay religious form--as the real man's man's game. In most nation it is the chief cultural institution of virility-testing masculinity (not least because it allows men to love each other's bodies chastely, with passions ordinarily assigned to the destruction through international trade of other men's bodies). The proliferation of U.S. soccer as a female sport--the U.S. won the first women's World Cup--heralds a soccer culture with a different destiny, a different GOOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLL. After all, if you ask why socialism and soccer haven't existed in the U.S., you're assuming that they developed properl elsewhere.