Let us praise the soccer orca

On embracing the dumb stuff

Soccer in America and soccer in Europe are different. There are lots of reasons why this is the case, but on the whole one of the major consequences is that it seems to make many people on the internet very upset. 

One of the central tensions in American soccer is the extent to which soccer in America should attempt to be more like soccer in Europe. These tensions range from extremely serious and structural — “Can a real soccer country have a league structure with no promotion or relegation?”¹This is not a pro-rel blog post! It’s not something I feel particularly passionate about, and as a result come down as kind of centrist on the issue, so my thoughts are boring. There’s definitely a strong fairness argument for pro-rel, and I am also sympathetic to the idea that the lack of jeopardy late in the regular season means teams play fewer meaningful games, there’s less drama and lower stakes and as a result people aren’t as connected to their local teams as they could be. However, it’s 2023 and fielding a soccer team that is really good is super expensive! Is there anyone out there willing to put up that kind of money and accept the risk of relegation without the added safety blanket of a century-long connection with the local community? I don’t know! And more importantly, I don’t really feel like blogging about it! — to aesthetic and kind of frivolous — “Will we become legit in the eyes of world soccer and Americans who watch European soccer on TV if we adopt enough European trappings and traditions?”

To swerve the serious stuff for a moment, let’s focus on the frivolous end of the spectrum, because that second question — the idea that the United States is being held back by things like calling it soccer or by how our teams look — is where American soccer’s inferiority complex shows up in its most frustrating way.

There are valid arguments about whether or not the organization of European leagues and player development systems would be better for the overall health of the sport and the strength of the national teams, but American soccer is at its most embarrassing when it is trying too obviously hard to mimic Europe. More precisely, it is at its most embarrassing when it is trying to be England, which I guess is something that you have to delineate these days. 

One obvious place you can find the “let’s pretend to be European by default” attitude in the United States is in MLS team names. Particularly after the league’s near-collapse in the late ‘90s, Major League Soccer franchises have rarely strayed too far from Anglo-European naming conventions: FC Dallas, Los Angeles Football Club, New York City FC, Charlotte FC, Atlanta United, St. Louis City SC, Real Salt Lake, and so on and so forth.²There is a slightly more compelling justification to the St. Louis City name, which people discuss on this Reddit thread. As a former St. Louis resident, I support the stance, but the name is still part of the broader trend towards English naming conventions. All of these names are perfectly fine. Good even.³The name Real Salt Lake implies the existence of some kind of Mormon offshoot of the Spanish royal family, so there’s an argument to be made that it’s actually the best name in all of sports.  

But as all of these clubs are being created in the 21st century, doesn’t it feel a little bit corporate? Much like how every downtown in America spent the 2010s converging into the same two blocks of the same 12-15 chain restaurants, the naming in MLS betrays a certain consultant-ness: “After a longitudinal analysis of the most popular soccer clubs on the planet, we have identified  that your brand will be most appealing across four quadrants if you choose from City, United, or Football Club.”

This brings us to Sammy. 

Sammy is an orca whale, and the mascot for the Seattle Sounders. If you’re a non-American soccer fan, you perhaps know the Sounders from the infamous “fight and win” video. If you’re an American soccer fan, you likely know them from the time that Clint Dempsey ripped up a referee’s card in the US Open Cup, or from the fact that they invented soccer when they joined MLS as an expansion team in 2009. 

Late in September, Seattle announced a brand refresh, which is something soccer teams do from time to time. The main thing was modernizing their primary space needle-centric crest, which is frankly not my business. It seems fine to me and many people think it’s cool so that’s nice.

What I do care about is that as part of the rebrand, they codified Sammy as an official alternate logo for the team. And crucially, they did not make it a sleek, modernized orca whale. Nor did they try to do like a Victorian family crest orca whale, in the style of the lion on the Chelsea badge or something like that. 

What they made here is firmly a 20th century, Old American Soccer crest: Look at the mean mug! Look at the old-style soccer ball! 

American soccer teams should do more of this kind of thing, which is to say that they should lean into their local histories. And sure, Seattle has an advantage here — before the MLS iteration of the club helped to invent soccer in 2009, various iterations of the Sounders played in various leagues on and off since 1974. Not every club in the U.S. has a half-century of history to tap into. But almost every city does.

Look hard enough and you’ll see that people have been playing soccer here in some form for a very long time. In pretty much every city in America, there is some kind of tradition of semi-professional soccer going back well before the 1990s. ⁴And for what it’s worth, the 1990s are not that recent anymore! The original MLS have been playing for nearly 30 years. That’s long enough for lots of them to have developed dedicated fanbases with local mythologies and songs and traditions and all the rest of the stuff that soccer teams have. There was a brief period before the Depression when soccer was a major sport here, and the American league was poaching stars away from England and Western Europe. The NASL came and went, but in its wake there were regional leagues, a few attempts at national leagues and the glory that was (and still is) indoor soccer.

And that’s not even factoring women’s soccer, where the United States is by far the dominant force on the global stage. This includes the four World Cup wins, the lasting impact of the two earlier failed professional leagues, the ongoing growth of the NWSL, and the fact that the NCAA remains one of the largest amateur development pipelines for women from all over the world.⁵There was lots of internet talk this summer about whether or not the NCAA system has now been surpassed by the academies in Europe, which is maybe true I guess but also nearly one in five players at the 2023 World Cup played at least some college ball — including a few key members of the England squad. 

And yes much of that history is kind of goofy, but a) so are many European football traditions, even if they are performed by bald tattooed men who would do you bodily harm⁶My favorite English club, Everton, sings this goofy ass song after every home win. Which is a great tradition and sounds amazing when the whole stadium is together but also come on now.  and b) the big secret is that we’re not going to trick European people into caring about soccer outside of Europe — and we have even worse chances with the English.

As an experiment tune into TalkSport, England’s answer to WFAN, on a Champions League matchday. Even when the biggest teams in Europe are playing, the major English broadcasters will focus almost exclusively on the English teams in action. There’s no reason to try to earn legitimacy in the eyes of the general English soccer-following public. They simply will never care about soccer that is not happening on their island.

Anyways, all that to say that Sammy is an example of a team building something that is not based on market research around what soccer teams in general are popular, but actually connecting to their own region’s history. 

Sometimes that history might look a good deal like European traditions. But sometimes it might be a slightly corny soccer whale. And this whole thing would be more fun if we did a better job celebrating the slightly corny soccer whale part of our culture.