LSC Lecture Series | Ben Chappell (Kansas) Could the USA Win the World Cup? Commerce and Culture in American Sports

This talk is part of the LSC Lecture Series on Sport, Politics, Conflict, which is organized by the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World. The talks are open to all staff at UR and IOS, as well as the general public. UR students can sign up for the course and receive credits.

Lecture hall H5 is in the lower Central Lecture Theatre Building (Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude - ZH) located near the Audimax. UR Campus-Plan 

Abstract | The United States is co-hosting the FIFA World Cup this summer, 96 years after the best-ever finish of its men’s team in the tournament, reaching the semifinals in the first championship, in Uruguay. For the U.S. to host the most prominent sporting event in the world under an administration that has wrecked U.S. international relations and practiced violent hostility to foreigners within its jurisdiction presents a very specific kind of spectacle. Beyond these current circumstances, the tournament brings into relief a perennial question: will the most powerful nation-state in the world ever compete at the top level of the world’s game? For women, the matter is settled, with the U.S having won four world cups and only once failing to appear in a semifinal since the women’s tournament began in 1991. But in men’s competition, the relative exceptionalism of U.S. soccer appears to be buttressed by an approach to the sport that is “commerce first”: a monopolistic organization of the top league, “pay to play” youth development, and broadcasting driven by the profit motive of specific platforms.

Though it appears a simple explanation to say that association football is commerce before culture in the United States, this talk will explore how that relationship is not inherent to U.S. national character, but a choice that is one part of a spectrum of different relationships to sport that pervade U.S. society. To understand this by contrast, I will present original research on the cultural importance of sport that is decidedly not profitable: a community tradition of softball played by the descendants of Mexican immigrants. This example of vernacular sport demonstrates how marginalized communities have worked both within and against dominant social structures to wrest resources of survival and identity out of sport. I will argue that despite tendencies in public discourse to essentialize and naturalize the characteristics and appeal of certain sports, it is in fact public priorities, often expressed in investment and contested in politics, that structure the uneven landscape of sporting cultures that people navigate in order to play.

Bio | Ben Chappell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he also serves as Undergraduate Director. Trained as both a musician and anthropologist, his scholarship centers on Mexican American studies, vernacular cultural production, ethnography, and the cultural dynamics of neoliberalism and resistance. He earned his B.A. in Music and Peace Studies from Bethel College (1993), followed by an M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. (2003) in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Chappell is the author of several influential works in cultural and ethnic studies, including Mexican American Fastpitch: Identity at Play in Vernacular Sport (2021), Mexican American Baseball in Kansas City (2018, co-authored), and Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars (2012). His articles and chapters—on topics such as urban space, lowrider culture, and transnational American studies—have appeared in major edited volumes and journals, contributing significantly to scholarship on race, space, and everyday cultural practice.