America to World: We Do NOT Want Soccer Here!

Another World Cup has come and gone, and yet another statement has been made by Americans, that resounding emphatic statement that we've been silently screaming for decades: “We Do NOT Want soccer here.”

They’ve been trying hard to push it down our throats since the early 90s.  With the World cup in the US in 1994, Soccer hopefuls celebrated with glee of trick or treaters on Halloween night that their time has arrived. 

This is the turnaround. This is the moment of truth where Americans will celebrate soccer.  Ahhhh, they were so excited it was almost cute.

Soccer, AKA Football, will never be popular in America.  I’ll explain why:

To us, Soccer is painfully slow and boring.  But why?  Why is it boring to us and not to others?

• Lack of controlled possession.  This is the single biggest reason why we cannot get into soccer/European football.

We want to see generals, field marshals, scouts, recon teams, signal exchanging/stealing, play/shot clocks, communication, a cohesive unit of men driving forward.  What we don’t want to see is 11 guys running around on crack.

Hypothetically, let’s examine a soccer match between  team 1 vs, team 2:  Black jerseys vs. White Jerseys will serve as a representation of every soccer game ever played:

Team 1 has it, team 2 has it, ooops wait, back to team 1, no wait, team 2. sorry. Team 1 with ball again.   No matter, how much you engineer an attack, 90 percent of the time, it’s thwarted by a kick that is essentially creating a turn-over.

In Basketball and American-football, Turnover are costly mistakes.  In soccer, that’s all there is.  It’s a miracle when you don’t see a turnover after 10 seconds. Allow me to elaborate on what I mean by a “CONTROLLED ATTACK.”

•  Basketball:

A Definitive controlled attack.  24 seconds, 5 men orchestrate a scheme......  Fisher throws ball into the post to Gasol, Gasol is double teamed, passes back out to Fisher, who fakes a three, passes to Kobe who drives to the basket.

Meanwhile, On the weak-side,  Artest has set an off-the-ball screen for Odom who is now making a backdoor baseline cut to the hoop, Kobe who is now halfway in the paint driving to the basket, throws him a lob.  Ally-oop layup for Odom!  

A very methodical attack that you can enjoy as you watch off the ball movement. If you’re a fan of basketball, you’re not surprised by that exchange above (except for maybe the fact that Kobe passed the ball!)

•  American Football, NFL: 

Seems slow and nonsensical to foreigners.  Once they understand it, they normally become fans.   A very orchestrated methodical attack with a control possession where the Quarterback acts as field general marching his troops down the field. 

American football more than any other sport represents a military strategy, from grunts and infantry men to aerial attacks and the commanders directing it.

The defense is a military strategy on every single play. Blitz, cover 2, Nickel package, what are you bringing on each down?

Everyone from linemen to receivers to fullbacks play a role and you keep getting down until they stop you where you have to punt.  Still, there is a lot of clock stoppage, which makes the game tough for newcomers, but you have very controlled possessions.  Timely Interceptions and fumbles can be very costly in this game.

• Baseball: 

Right off the bat, I’ll concede: If you didn’t grow up with baseball as a teenager in America, you’re likely never going to like it.  That’s it.  Having said that, baseball is a slow strategy game where your pitcher has to get three outs, and while batting, you get to keep swinging until you have 3 outs.  This is still a controlled possession game.

Again, you don’t witness turnovers every three to five seconds.  While watching World-Cup highlights, I actually saw a stat on "Time of Possession".   Seriously, I saw this.

That's like trying to calculate how long a fly flew in a straight line.

How do you calculate time of possession in Soccer?

Let’s see: Ball is up in the air, your player does a header which throws the ball into the opponent's chest. The opponent kicks it back to your team, who then takes a shot on goal, but then a defender intercepts it and kicks it out of bounds for a corner kick.

I count 4 turnovers in 5 seconds.  Who do you give of time of possession to?  1 second each? Just divvy it up, ball park guess? Seriously? How?


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• The 2nd Biggest Reason Why Soccer Will Never Be Popular:

Soccer is a conditioned cultural force in other places.

If it’s boring and slow with no real controlled possessions, then why is it so popular ?

Because you are FORCED into it.  People have to at least be aware of it the same way high school kids keep track of football in Texas.

If you’re a high school teen in Germany or England, you’re forced to at least pretend to care about soccer through peer pressure.   You have to keep track of games to be somewhat accepted by the cool crowd in that school. This tradition carries over.

You can’t be that cool in school if you've completely disregarded soccer.  Heck, let's be honest: If anyone of us took an office job in Germany or England for a couple of years, we’d have to pretend to care somewhat about Soccer.  No one likes being the outcast in any society.

We want to be with the in-crowd.  The in-crowd watches soccer.  Do the math. It’s simple.  So, we’d have to at least keep ourselves updated. 

If you’ve seen the crowd shots of a 100,000 people standing in Spain or Netherland’s capital cities, you can guess how much soccer matters.  It's tough to be the outcast who yells it's boring.

If you want to belong, you ought to pretend to care a little bit. 

America thrives on individualism.  You can even proclaim you can't stand the Super Bowl.  There won't be any lynch mobs or drunk hooligans trying to burn down your house.

As Americans, we instinctively know there is nothing cool about soccer in our high school life, so we don’t watch it.  You really have to love the sport to watch it, and we don’t love it that much regardless of how much they try to force it down our throats.

Do you have to be in phenomenal cardio shape to play soccer? Yes.
Do you have to be a skilled athlete with fantastic footwork? Absolutely.
Do we want to waste two hours of our time watching a 0-0 game?  No way, man!

I played soccer as a kid. I played til I was 11, then discovered basketball, and never looked back.  I’ve seen the Rainman of soccer, Alexi Lalas, doing his postgame shows on ESPN regarding the World Cup.  I’ve seen him breaking down strategy, midfielder’s defense, and such. I still don’t want to watch the sport.

I have enough European friends who love the sport and I indulge them.  Hey, I'm a polite dude.  Luckily, none of them really read articles about sports.  (And I just ask you don't show them my rant here.)

By the way, as a side note, does Alexi Lalas have Asperger’s syndrome?  It’s amazing to watch him be unable to relate to any human life form sitting besides him. He makes the stiff German guy look like Chris Rock. 
   
The above are the two biggest reasons as to why we don’t support soccer. 

1.    Lack of controlled possession makes it boring
2.    No cultural peer pressure to watching a boring 0-0 game.


While I’m ranting, there are other issues that we have as Americans. These are lesser issues but since I am on my tirade, here it goes :

•  Fluke goal/play wins games.

In the three major American sports, the best that played better on that day normally wins.  In NBA and MLB, you have “Best of 7” series which determine the best team.  In the NFL, not so much.  The better team could lose in the NFL with a single bad game.

Two Super Bowl examples both involving the Patriots: Pats vs. Rams and Pats vs. Giants.

In a best out of 7, the Rams win that series, as do the Pat against the Giants!  In a 1 game series, the giants pulled it out.

Nevertheless, the Giants played well!  No one would say that this was a fluke victory or a fluke touchdown.  The giants played better on that particular day. 

In Soccer/European football, team 1 can dominate the game as far as putting pressure on the goalie and taking shots on goal.  All that can change with 1 fluke goal in a 1-0 game.

As Americans, we can stand for this nonsense.   Fluke-goal win are non-American.  We believe in hard work.  We want "Truth, justice, and the American Way."  Hey, Superman wouldn’t stand for flukes either!

And if Superman wouldn't approve of soccer, why should we?  Think about that one! (Maybe this should have been my number one reason.)

•    Frustrating game to make comebacks: 

Some of our most revered sports stories are comebacks and the dramatic plots that unfold as a result. No guts, no glory.   Being down in the hole!  Gut check time ! Coming through in the clutch. These are clichés we've long associated with these situations.

Soccer robs us of that. Rarely do you see fantastic comebacks. 

Basketball: Come to the 4th quarter down 10 points in the NBA, and an easily conceived 6-0 run cuts it down to a 4-point game. Anyone’s game at that point.

NFL:  Down 10 points in the 4th quarter, a touch down (on offense or a pick-6) cuts it to a 3 point game.  Anyone’s game to be had.

Baseball: Down 2-0, guy on 1st, hit a two-rum homer and Vin Scully will tell you, “And going into the 7th inning stretch, we got a tie game everybody.”

In soccer, if you’re down 2 goals with 15 minutes left, the opposing fans might as well pull it out giant dildos with your teams logo on it, because you’re most likely screwed.    It’s tough to mount comebacks and overcome a 2-0 deficit in the last 20 minutes of a game.

No chance for drama, no gut check time.  Just more cracked out players running about.

So why should the average American turn to watch this sport of perpetual infinite turnovers, where one fluke goal beats his team, not to mention that his team can’t really make a valiant comeback and give us dramatic close games that we’ll watch on ESPN classics for years to come?

There is NO reason, and since we are not peer-pressured into it, we choose not to watch.

Team USA is out of the World Cup once again, and while it’s a shame, we’ll soon forget about it.  It’ll be all over, and we can go back

Let the world have its turnover infested 1-0 games.  Not wanting soccer is as unique as Apple pie.   While Basketball and NFL football will probably never replace soccer in the rest of the world, they’re catching on. 

At the very least, Basketball is growing at a rapid pace with popularity in places like the former Yugoslavian states, Spain, and now China (home to over a billion people). In fact, basketball is growing at a much more rapid pace than is soccer in the United States. 

 If there is a growing sport in America, it’s Mixed Martial Arts .  In the last 10 years, it has grown far more rapidly than Soccer has in the last 100.  

Amazingly enough, while ESPN tries to push soccer down our throats, they vastly ignore and shun MMA.  Yet, despite sports media's dismissal, MMA grows and guys like me write tirades about how we don’t want soccer.

We have four major spectator sports (throw in hockey), and people choose the ones they enjoy the most.  You can add Boxing and MMA to that as well. 

Other sports, wrestling as well as Track & Field foster tremendous athletes, but they’re not great spectator sports. For Americans, neither is soccer.

Lacking the European social peer pressure of having to fit, we choose to watch NBA Classics over live soccer games that give 0-0 games where the score was settled by penalty shots with a Russian Roulette playing goalie guessing where the ball might go.

Bring on the Classics.  I’ll watch any 80s Finals games between the Celtics and the Lakers. It’s some of the best basketball ever played. I’ll re-watch John Elway’s “The Drive ” just as I’ll re-watch Ali-Frazier and GSP destroying Matt Hughes. 

I’ll watch those on Classics before I watch a painstakingly boring 0-0 game live.  And if you choose to watch a 0-0 soccer game on a classic network, you should just have a Samurai dagger handy and take the honorable way out.

Soccer will never be that popular here, and “WE THE PEOPLE ” like it that way.   It's what we want.