Beautiful Game Is Worth A Viewing

With my makeshift apartment this past summer located a quick 10-minute walk from Camp Nou, the home of FC Barcelona, it’s no surprise that soccer was a defining feature of my study abroad experience in Spain.

Although my trip coincided exactly with the two-month summer offseason of Champions League soccer, there was no shortage of “fútbol” to behold. The Pedralbes area is full of life, and pickup soccer games are almost always being played in parks near the city’s center.

But it wasn’t until a few days before I left Spain for the comforts of Cambridge—and the nearly forgotten pleasures of the hamburger and reading signs in English—that I finally went to tour the stadium and hall full of trophies at Camp Nou and take in the history of the club, which effectively parallels the history of the city itself.

After the man handing out audio guides at the museum entrance set the language on my headset to Castellano, I was ready to embark on a tour of another world.

The words “més que un club” (“more than a club”) imprinted on the stadium seats in a bold yellow took on new meaning when contextualized by Barça’s role in the maintenance of the Catalan identity of Barcelona, as the club retains the prefix “FC” (rather than permanently adopting the “CF”—club de fútbol—of so many other Spanish teams) among other subtle yet powerful messages.

The final exhibit in the museum tour is a mural-like video presentation in a long, ambling corridor depicting the greatest goals in Barça history. It’s a sort of history that’s foreign to United States.

Even though I was abroad during the offseason, some soccer related article appeared in the local newspaper every day, whether about a new, young player the club was thinking of signing or Messi’s recent hangout with LeBron James. Soccer is more than a sport in Barcelona; it’s an obsession.

It got me thinking: why don’t we watch soccer in the United States like they do over in Spain?

Despite falling in love with the beautiful game at age four, I grew up watching football, basketball and baseball. And I’m not complaining: March Madness is still my favorite thing on television, and I’d still watch an American football game over most any other sports contest.

I saw my fair share of Boston Breakers matches when I was little, watching in awe as Mia Hamm would dangle defenders down the sideline and Kristine Lilly attempted to counterattack the Washington Freedom’s star forward.

But the league went under in 2003, after playing just three seasons. And compared to my careful following of Boston’s major sports teams, I rarely watch the New England Revolution, opting instead to shift my focus onto European soccer.

The WPS, a second, more recent attempt at women’s pro soccer in the US, plays some games at none other than Harvard Stadium. And still, we ought to get more involved in the world’s most popular sport.

The oft-critiqued lack of scoring in soccer is one of the reasons I love to watch and play the game, because it adds intensity to the individual goal-scoring moment. If you’ve never watched a soccer game with a Spanish commentator, that needs to change: “GOOOOOAL” is one of the most perfect, universal phrases ever uttered on television, and the cry typically goes on for at least a few minutes.

Soccer is a game of moments, of the suspenseful second, because any play could be the one in which the game is won or lost.  Last Saturday, a quick, well-executed header in the first half put Yale up, 1-0, over Harvard men’s soccer, a deficit from which the team could not recover. A few minutes into overtime a couple hours earlier, a penalty kick in overtime had lifted the women’s team out of a stalemate with our Ivy rival. Last year, a whopping 43 out of 56 Ivy League soccer matchups were decided by a single goal or ended up tied after two overtimes.

Game-changing plays transpire in only seconds: the shot that just nicks the keeper’s hands and makes it over the crossbar, the free kick that sails just out of reach of an outstretched hand, the snipe from thirty yards out. And that single, glorifying shot or save is better for the other 89 minutes of palpable tension.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Coppinger can be reached at ccoppinger@college.harvard.edu.