Pro Soccer's Growing in a Way That's Reckless and Unsustainable - Just Like the Economy That Supports It

There’s one word that applies to almost every recent development in soccer: acceleration. The players themselves have become faster. Modern tactics are geared around speed. The best teams are those who can shift the ball around as quickly as possible. All this means that today’s young fans would hardly recognize the game as it used to be, with its lethargic build-up play and aimless backpasses. 

As the play on the field accelerates, so too does the game’s economic engine. Clubs are earning more money than ever before, and they’re determined to drive the trend as far as it can go. Competitions are expanding since every extra game brings the promise of additional revenue. Breaks are becoming shorter, and midweek matches are now the norm. When growth means money, the people in charge can't help but want more, more, more.

There are all sorts of problems with this approach. First, the obvious: The players are exhausted. Nobody can maintain their highest level while playing almost 100 games a year. The richest clubs survive by rotating their squads and playing the bench, but most teams aren't so lucky.

This dynamic only exacerbates the inequalities in most domestic leagues. Manchester City can buy 22 elite players and split the excessive game time between them. Smaller clubs can’t afford this type of depth, making a Leicester-like upset less probable with every passing year.

Then there’s the biggest problem of all: oversaturation. We fans love to watch the games, but we can’t tune in every single day of the year. We appreciate the sport’s breadth of competitions, with the combination of domestic leagues and international tournaments providing a variety that traditional American sports could never muster, but we’re not interested in yet another contest that doesn’t need to exist. When we hear about some new mini-league or cup competition, the response is no longer, “Oh, cool!” It’s, “Seriously? Another one?”

The poster child for the overexpansion trend is a proposal that hasn’t yet been implemented, but has the dollar signs flashing in FIFA’s greedy eyes: a biennial World Cup. For the moneymakers, it’s the obvious next step. The world’s most popular sporting event is wildly lucrative. Why make that money only every four years when you could make it twice as often?

But the response to the plan has been negative, with most criticism centering around an obvious point: The length of time between World Cups is what makes the tournament so special.

I distinctly remember each World Cup summer of my childhood. There was 2002, when I watched the underdog American team play Germany in the back of my father’s bait shop. Then there was 2006, when we watched local hero Clint Dempsey (he played for the New England Revolution at the time) score from our 6th-grade classroom. 2010 was an especially exciting tournament, with champions Spain employing a smooth, possession-based style that we tried our best to imitate in the backyard pick-up games that followed every match.

For moments to become lasting memories, they must be special, and a moment can only be special if it’s rare. When you take something special and multiply it, all you do is cheapen it. Hopefully FIFA gets the memo before it’s too late.

What’s striking about soccer’s excessive growth is that it seems like a metaphor for society at large. Faster, faster, faster. More, more, more. What hasn’t been going in that direction in the past two decades?

There’s plenty that’s good about growth. Economic growth lifts people out of extreme poverty. A more lucrative soccer landscape could see more investment in soccer programs for poor kids around the world (although one doubts the constant claims that this is where the money would go). Done right, growth is awesome. Done carelessly, it can prove fatal. 

Overextend the world of soccer and you’ll destroy the magic of the game. Overextend the global economy and you’ll destroy the planet.

The answer isn’t to develop an antigrowth strategy. We probably couldn’t check growth even if we tried. Today’s economy must expand to survive, and most thriving industries within that economy, soccer included, will expand right along with it. 

What we can do, on a societal level, is master that growth and demand that it remain sustainable — and that means making our voices heard.