Soccerball

by Jun 22, 2010Culture3 comments

Opinionator at NYT: Soccer is “a game that teaches you that life is unfair. Because goals are so scarce, it is possible for a team to be outplayed for 89 minutes and yet still score one fluke goal and win the game. Superior performance often does not translate into victory.”

Exactly. That’s why I like football and ultimate frisbee. I realize what this means, that I may never make it anywhere but the US and North Korea—the only other nation in the world known to dislike soccer (at least that’s one possible explanation for why they hired Chinese fans to cheer for their team). I just don’t get the draw of a game with such low scoring. I’m open to learning, however, and the World Cup has been a good opportunity whenever I’ve gotten to catch a few minutes of a game. I’m also all for Africa raising its profile in the world, and vuvuzela is the coolest vocabulary word I have picked up this year.

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3 Comments
  1. Luke Seelenbinder

    Ahh… you just have to be enlightened. No, seriously. Soccer is an amazing sport, full of crazy ball skills and magnificent flops. Can’t you see the glory of that? 🙂

    I just play it for the exercise. I play football (American) and Ultimate when fun (with exercise) is the goal.

    Go USA!

  2. David Lowry

    You’re right.

    Soccer (or football; but I don’t think that argument is worth pursuing) requires extreme physical endurance (no breaks between “plays” and few “timeouts”), extended concentration (45 minutes at one shot! you’ve got to be kidding! a football play can easily be less that 45 SECONDS), and does not lend itself to instant gratification (i.e. high score). On top of that, it doesn’t have a sufficient number of commercial breaks to adequately promote the American dream (aka materialism). Finally, it’s not patriotic to support a sport where Americans aren’t in at least the top 5.

    It’s no wonder there’s not a lot of draw for most Americans.

  3. Wesley

    The Chinese claimed that tickets were offered to Chinese groups and people were recruited to go but I didn’t see that anyone was hired. The guy interviewed said his group was not hired though they were hand-picked.

    And really Mark, you ought to give soccer a chance. The parallels to ultimate are many – space/angles/movement. The scoring is so low partly b/c the field is so big and it takes a while to run from one end to the other. Imagine what a low score American football would have it they only got 1 point per touchdown. Most of all the beautiful fluidity of it all…