World looks to Japan and South Korea. Not because of the two countries, but because King football before there once ruled the world. Even the German Chancellor followed media coverage of the World Cup, interrupting even his party preparations. And Senegal, there was a state of emergency after the victory of David against Goliath football France - led by the president himself. The most powerful man in the world, the American President George W. Bush, however, hardly cares. He attended West Point during the World Cup start to the Military Academy. At world event, the only remaining superpower USA Football played with only in passing. This special position in football is now the well-known sociologist Andrei Markovits investigated. He knows why the Americans are on

the sidelines: "The United States played a minor role, because they are not a world power in football," he says. "The U.S. is in football, a developing country. The U.S. is in football, the political Gabon or Senegal." And therefore viewed the Americans, when they set up the sports pages, just for baseball, basketball or hockey, but not for the football World Cup. The hated British tradition The U.S. is a football diaspora. Soccer takes up in the American sports culture is an outside position. Markovits also draws conclusions for the different social systems of Europe and the United States. After all, sport is a phenomenon of culture, more precisely, the mass culture. The critical time for the establishment of modern sports cultures took place between 1860 and 1920. At that time, was played in America at the elite universities like Harvard or a mixture of soccer and football, both of British origin. The Harvard students felt the hard rugby sport as attractive. Later, other elite universities went-to. Thus, the gymnasium of the United States through other mainstream sports such as American football has been busy - the football went out of the air. What's more, this time the hated British football culture and represented the United States is seen as a kind of counter-model to Europe. Today the global mass culture is American dominated, has not only athletic reasons. "The United States had no bourgeois revolution, they have emerged as a bourgeois society," says Markovits. "They had the right to vote if you were white and a man in Europe had won the Social Democrats over civil rights." Football was in the U.S. as a sport for the proletarians and the working class. Like socialism, it Markovits, failed to soccer in the U.S. can gain a foothold because it ran counter to the bourgeois mentality and the American dream of unlimited possibilities.