- To Americans, it's soccer.

To most of the rest of the world, it's football.

But today's guest traces the evolution of the game played with our feet from a 19th century British pastime to today's glittering World Cup.

He's Nick Greene this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to as "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Nick Greene, an author whose new book is "How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius."

He's joining us today from Berkeley, California.

Nick, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- So I really enjoyed this book.

I was telling you just before we got started, I learned a ton and I wanna get into that in some depth.

But I think we need to start with the obvious, why soccer and not football?

- (laughs) Why soccer, not football?

That's a good question.

Well, soccer was on the top of my mind.

It's probably my favorite sport.

I had written a book about basketball, on the history and the evolution of that game.

And you know, that's also one of my favorite sports, and soccer just seemed like a natural extension.

I wanted to tackle the quote unquote "world's game."

- But why use the more American, I think, expression, soccer rather than the European context for football?

- I get that, now I get that.

Well, as an American author, I would feel like a phony for saying football, even though I do think it's perfectly acceptable for Americans to say football.

It's funny, I sort of have to start my book out with an explanation of why it's soccer, which happens to be a very British term.

It was probably invented in Oxford 'cause it's association football, you take the soc from association, put an ER at the end of it, 'cause they would use that for a kind of a jocular term for things, like a nickname, and it became soccer and it was a widely used term in the UK.

And then when it kind of picked up in America in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the British stopped using it as much and we kind of colonized the term soccer for ourselves.

- Well, that was just one of the things that I learned in reading this book that I didn't know before.

Another though was that the game was not ancient.

I thought for some reason, like, I don't know if there were like, you know, indigenous people on some part of some forgotten continent who had developed the game.

But this is a late, mid to late 19th century phenomena.

Give us that quick history of how the game actually comes to be, to be recognized.

- Yeah.

The game, as we know it, is relatively recent.

There have been kicking games throughout recorded and prehistoric history.

We know that.

They've all evolved in their sort of different offshoots.

But the game that became soccer, modern soccer, evolved in the United Kingdom.

It was developed on the fields of sort of posh, tony public schools.

They had adapted folk games for themselves.

These schools were some of the only places in England that had large swaths of private land.

Land was being bought up.

So I guess the commoners had fewer opportunities and less space to play their games.

And so they started playing, and then in about 1863, a group in London got together and they essentially were like a networking group for young professionals.

They called themselves the Football Association.

They worked very sloppily and sort of haphazardly on making a set of rules that were not very good rules.

A lot of process of elimination, culling, injuries followed, and eventually we got the relatively simple, and not ancient, but somewhat modern game of soccer.

- So if we had a time machine and we flew back to 1865 and we stumbled upon this game being played in a field in England, would we recognize it?

- No.

The guys would probably be using their hands a bit.

So that would be a big tell that something was amiss.

It was totally different.

It was a mess.

But you gotta give them some grace because they were dealing with something new and these guys were just doing it for, as I said, networking.

It was a social pursuit.

- So even as a child on a playground, like, the greatest offense you could commit in a soccer game was to touch the ball with your hand if you're not the goalie.

What you're saying is that in the origins of the game, that was just part of the game.

You handled the ball.

- Yeah.

Some schools played with handling allowed.

Some it was verboten.

But because these were all young men who were graduating from these schools and sort of playing together, they were playing by different rules.

And so you'd have some guys knocking the ball out of the air with their hand, and it took a while, a surprisingly long time, for that to sort of be settled.

- So one of the things that, one of the hallmarks of both your book about basketball and this is that you engage with experts from a variety of different fields.

And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit in a minute.

But one of the sort of interesting developments with soccer is because we play it with our feet, actual, the physiology, the anatomy of the foot, actually plays a role in how the game is played.

Would you explain that a little bit?

- Yeah, I mean, the feet are weird.

(Jim laughs) I talked to a podiatrist who also happens to be a paleo anthropologist who knows a lot about the evolution of the foot.

And he pointed out to me that kicking is not a natural human motion.

Our feet are for, you know, standing upright, walking, moving, they're not for kicking.

So they're not, you know, watching professional soccer players, you can marvel at how deft and dare I say supple the control with their feet are.

But for example, our insteps, the way our feet are curved, if you, I mean, people who have played soccer even casually will know that when you hit a ball, depending on the foot you hit it with, it will bend a certain way.

And that bend, you know, leads to what's called an in swinging or out swinging cross.

We can get in the weeds here, but literally, which foot you prefer to kick on will determine often which side of the field you play on.

If you're left foot, right foot, it's the bend, which kind of bend you want on it, it all sort of contributes to the oddness of a game that is reduced to only the feet, or not only the feet, but towards the feet.

- So we're on the eve of the World Cup, right?

And there are traditional, almost stereotypical American criticisms of the game.

And I thought we might run through just a couple of them and see sort of how that sort of plays out in the context of your great book.

So one of the big American criticisms is that players flop or dive way too often.

Now, you know, I'm also a fan of basketball, like you, and I see a lot of flopping going on in basketball as well.

Are Americans just being hypocritical about that feature of soccer?

- No, and this is, you know, a cross-cultural complaint.

It has kind of a long history.

I spent an entire chapter trying to sort of contend with it, 'cause it's so fraught, I guess, and such a touchy subject.

You know, diving is .

.

.

I couldn't find the first diver.

I really wanted to find the first example of diving, but that didn't exist.

I couldn't find that.

For one reason, there weren't referees for decades.

Players called their own fouls.

And you can imagine how that went.

So diving is, I sort, with the help of a dance choreographer and an art curator who actually runs an art space, a gallery, for art based on soccer in England, I sort of got to appreciate diving as an art.

It's a way of, it's a performance art to be specific.

The divers know they're diving, they know that they're going to be judged for it.

They know that they're going to be now kind of zoomed closely with replays, yet they still do it because they think it's gonna help them win.

And I spoke with a philosopher and ethicist about that and sort of the blurred lines of is that ethical?

And, you know, when everyone, when both sides can do it, and there's a referee to adjudicate who is diving, who is not, there is so much gray area that I think if you want to look at it as an art, you're allowed to look at it as a sort of performance art, but you can also just be pissed off about it.

- It's part of the game, right?

- Yes, it's become- - That's the reality.

There's a saying, I think in NASCAR, that if you're not cheating, you're not trying.

I don't know maybe if diving is a little bit in that ballpark too, but the reality, the modern experience of players who feign injury or, you know, great assault on the field lies in sharp contrast to those early decades of the game when the violence was quite real.

- Yes, you know, they, or the early practitioners, thought of it as a sort of, a machismo, a man building exercise.

There were even people who refused to play on nice cricket fields, which looked closer to the sort of fields that you'd see soccer played on today because they thought it was too pristine and you needed rough and rocks.

You need to get gashes everywhere.

So that's how it started.

And there's still that sort of through line of, "Oh gosh, the game's kind getting too soft."

But people have been saying that for 150 years.

- Well, so one of the other criticisms that Americans level is that the game is too slow.

It's too slow.

It's just a lot of times it seems like it's kicking a ball back and forth and not a whole lot is going on.

When, I think that the term is that they're basically probing defenses.

When that's happening, what should audiences be looking for?

What are we watching in those moments, where the game seems like it's really slowed down?

- That's interesting.

So much is happening away from the ball.

Runs are being made that maybe aren't being picked up.

Defenses are moving like sort of a, you know, cloud pattern to adapt to the way the offense is trying to open things up.

You could look at it as almost like a lock picker, trying different routes, different avenues, to get things right.

And it requires patience.

Immediate gratification is not sort of the, the end all be all with soccer.

There's a lot of testing and probing and yeah, there's some patience in there, and if you think that's boring, fine.

But the more you watch, the more you sort of pick up on these movements and the sort of beauty of the back and forth and you can learn it.

You know, it's not slow.

It's just, again, patient.

And sometimes it's not.

Sometimes it's bringing a battering ram to knock the door down.

- Well, and sort of it, I think, speaks to the different relationship between the sport and time compared to American staples, like baseball, which even has a pitch clock now, a shot clock in basketball, or a play clock in American football.

What is the role that time and timekeeping plays in soccer today?

- Yeah, it's one of the only sport that grows, you know, the clock goes up, which is something you don't think about too much, but a little confounding.

You know, that's basically a holdover from those early days when the young professionals in London would schedule games, matches between each and basically say, "Okay, how much time do we have?

How much do you have for lunch?

Okay, we'll make it that long."

So they just have these blocks of time and count up towards that and then end it.

And then you have things like stoppage time, which was invented to sort of add for all the time that was quote unquote "lost" during injuries or retrieving the ball in the early days from far away, 'cause maybe it got kicked out of the park or wherever.

And it's not an exact science.

It's funny, as soccer sort of goes on and the governing bodies add all these things, like video assistant review and things to get it completely kind of exact, soccer has always sort of resisted that sense of being an exact science.

It's vague and the time is a good example of that.

- So, when a referee says, when they post extra time, is that something that, is there like somebody up in a press box somewhere who's had a timer on?

Or is that just really the referee making that call?

- That responsibility is 100% to the referee on the field.

Some of them you'll notice might wear two watches to tabulate that.

And again, it's far from perfect, and there are ways that you make it perfect.

You could actually stop the clock.

Some people have recommended that.

Okay, if someone's down injured or if the ball's out of play, you stop the clock, we shorten the game, and then at 60 minutes or whatever, the game ends there.

But you know, there's something, (sighs) I don't know, I wanna say wonderfully fluid about just everything going on and watching that little ticker go up and up and up and up and it kind of messes with the way you watch and the way you interpret the game.

- It certainly introduces more uncertainty, I think, into the spectators' experience, right?

- Most definitely.

- So the last criticism that we'll talk about from the American perspective is that there's too little scoring.

Is that actually borne out by any analysis?

- I mean, all these criticisms have a kernel, or I don't know, what's larger than a kernel?

A big old pit.

(Jim laughs) There is less scoring in soccer.

There's fewer goals.

There's actually an astronomer who worked at NASA who was a huge soccer, oh wait, no, excuse me, he was not a soccer fan.

He got in an argument with his friends and he said, "Because there are so few goals, the outcomes of the matches are largely random.

There's not enough evidence, not enough data."

You know, he is someone who specializes in making telescopes to retrieve things like evidence of quasars, lots of, you know, small amounts of data in a large field of nonsense and nothingness, and he recognized soccer being similar.

And so he basically realized, yeah, the scarcity of goals makes the results relatively random.

And he did all these tests and found out that that's kind of true.

- That's remarkable.

This was, am I right, this was Dr.

Gerald Skinner, right?

- Yes, and I talked to him in the book and he's a very nice and funny and interesting guy and he did this very sound study on soccer tournaments, especially, being relatively random results.

- And it was- - (indistinct) random results.

- And it was published in a peer reviewed journal, if I'm not mistaken.

- Yes, yes.

A very respected one, yes.

- So you also described research that correlates passing to scoring.

- Yeah, there was sort of a, probably the first person to attribute or to apply what we'd call advanced analytics to soccer.

He was in the Royal Air Force, he had a desk job there.

He was I think an accountant or did some sort of work with that.

And he famously went to games and recorded how many passes there would be before a goal.

And he, in his data, discovered, "Okay, most goals come after three passes or fewer."

I might be getting the actual number wrong.

So he came with to the conclusion from all his data that passing is kind of counterproductive.

You wanna just get it up there, create chaos, and score as much as possible.

He was super influential, teams in England, professional teams, took his advice, started changing the way they played.

It became a big thing.

Decades later when people went back and looked at his data and found out he had made a mistake.

It's actually the opposite conclusion is true.

But he had been the first to collect all this data, so it contributed to sort of modern statistics and we have him to thank, even though his original conclusion was pretty wrong.

- What I found fascinating about that too though is that I think you described that in those early decades of the game, passing was not something people did.

It was basically get the ball and dribble down and try to shoot.

- This is maybe my favorite little fact and tidbit about early soccer is that passing had to be invented.

(Jim and Nick laugh) And because the first guys to play were these aristocratic, wealthy young men in England, and you know, in mid 19th century England, they weren't used to sharing.

Few of them had probably ever shared anything in their entire lives.

So when they played, they were playing as, a famous quote from one of 'em was, "For their own pleasure."

They wouldn't pass, they would put their head down and try to go as far as they could with the ball.

And it took the Scottish, whose national team was made up of, you know, people like butchers, joiners, et cetera, and they realized, "Hey, if we share the ball, it's makes the game more fun and we actually can probably win more games that way."

- You know, I told you I was gonna try to work Monty Python's soccer skit with the philosophers trying to figure out how to score.

And one of the great innovations that they made too was passing.

So, you know, there's some truth in all of that in comedy as well, I suppose.

But you mentioned data analytics and soccer is not like American baseball, where it just sort of lends itself, I think, really easily to data analytics.

What is the challenge with a sport like soccer to be able- - Gosh, well it's- - To build that sort of data set.

- Yes, I mean, that fluidity makes it a nightmare for statisticians and people who analyze the game.

If you look at baseball, all the innings, it becomes a spreadsheet.

Everything gets defined into its own little quadrant, its box.

Whereas soccer is sort of an amorphous, two 45 minute halves combined.

And just, there's few events, few goals, few defined sequences.

So much of it is improvised or, you know, it's not, it resists kind of, the thing I found most interesting about talking to people who do analytics for soccer is not their conclusions, but how do you figure out which questions to ask, what to look for?

And that, you know, a lot of it kind of opened up with movement science, movement studies, motion studies, trackers.

They could actually track the people on the field and use that data.

But before that it was almost impossible.

- And so this is, you mentioned some of this work, and I think it was Patrick Lucey, who's a chief scientist at an analytics company, who you described as using AI, artificial intelligence, to try to improve the game.

But what I was wondering, 'cause he also describes the movement in soccer as a language of its own.

And the question that I began to wonder was, was he improving soccer or was he improving artificial intelligence?

- Oof.

That's a good question.

You know, I don't think he, he wouldn't say he was trying to improve the game.

I think he would say he's trying to improve, make it easier to define certain things because it's very hard.

You know, teams switch positions, switch formations, in the middle of games and there are things that are hard to define that have different, in different countries will be called different things.

A back floor would be called something different somewhere else.

And he's using AI purely as a, I mean, in this one aspect, purely as a way to better understand it and sort of create almost like a database for viewers and coaches to make things easier to search.

You know, if a player passes the ball forward in this situation, how many times does that lead to a goal?

That kind of thing.

But again, soccer is stubbornly resistant to all sorts of things, and he'll admit that AI is sometimes no match for the odd game that is soccer.

- So when, in those early decades you describe soccer was not developed to play in front of an audience.

It was really intended for the enjoyment of the players themselves.

But here we are, the World Cup is about to kick off.

This is gonna have the biggest television audience in the world this year.

Billions of people are going to watch this game.

How did we go from this pastime for the British elite, 150 years ago, to now what is a global spectacle and the world's game?

- Gosh, that's the story, right?

There's a lot in there and a lot- - [Jim] We got about two and a half minutes.

(Jim laughs) - A lot of it's luck.

I mean, it's luck and timing.

You have this game get codified right when things like mass media are being developed, rail travel, you know, this was the first time, 1863 is when the Football Association began and started tinkering and everything.

This was basically the time people realized you could get people into a large room and have them pay for tickets and make a lot of money.

Really, this was sort of the dawn of the idea of an attended spectacle.

And so soccer being the cool new thing that people were playing got subjected to that treatment very early and it spread and it grew and it got codified relatively early on and different countries were playing it and the British were engaged in their sort of second industrial revolution and had their influence and sort of imprint on many different countries and were sending people to all the various outposts they were having, yada yada yada.

It just became a cool, neat thing that people figured out to do everywhere.

- But, you know, the thing that I, I don't know if there's an answer to this question, but I've often wondered, in the era of decolonization after the second World War, why more former European, former colonies, didn't reject soccer as part of its imperial legacy?

- It's interesting.

You know, you do look at the countries that soccer had the sort of slowest, slowest growth in would be a place like United States, India, Australia.

A lot of that's because they were colonies early on and got versions of soccer before they were codified as modern soccer and were allowed to kind of grow in their own way.

I mean, American football grew from the same sport that soccer grew from, the same that rugby did.

It just so happened that there was an ocean between 'em, between us and between what would evolve to be American football and would evolve to be soccer.

So we got football as our outcrop.

The Australians got Aussie Rules football.

In India, they preferred cricket.

But so much of it also is other countries getting the game of soccer and then sort of just simply closing themselves off from British influence and becoming better than the inventors at it.

That's the story in South America with Uruguay, Argentina, they got the kind of germ of a game and they grew it to something magnificent.

And when international play was debuted, the Europeans were shocked to learn that they were no longer the best at their own game.

- Nick Greene, the book is "How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius."

This was a great read.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you for spending some time with me this week.

I'm Jim Ludes and I hope you'll join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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