It’s been a quarter century since the political theorist Andrei Markovits published his influential masterpiece, Offside: Soccer & American Exceptionalism. Now a Great Game Lab fellow, Professor Markovits joined Andrés Martinez to discuss the book’s core argument, how he came to write it, and assess whether the U.S. is still offside or not. Along the way, Martinez tells his “tocayo” that this is the book that gave us all license to treat the subject of America’s curious relationship with the global game as a serious academic inquiry.
Today, with soccer being part of the American vernacular, a sports vernacular, it is still not a ‘number five,’ I would argue, in terms of joining baseball, basketball, football, hockey, but it is in some ways completely present, above all by virtue of the English Premier League, but also by globalization…. Technology shapes everything. You can see every game; you follow it. Soccer has entered the American vernacular
Andrei Markovits University of Michigan professor emeritus and Great Game Lab fellow