Americans Forget Soccer Exists

Five minutes after the Spanish national team won the 2010 World Cup thanks to Andres Iniesta’s late goal in extra time and Iker Casillas’ stellar play in goal throughout the game, the hosts of SportsCenter ran into an interesting problem. While reporting on the game, they received numerous confused calls from viewers.

It seemed as though Americans had completely and utterly forgotten what soccer was. Andre Deware was one of those calling to complain. According to Deware, “The highlights from that game just didn’t make sense. Why were all the players on the field kicking a ball with their feet? All of our American games primarily involve our hands.” Other viewers expressed confusion about the yellow card-like objects that the referees would seemingly just show to players.

But the biggest two points of contention were why SportsCenter would be telling Americans about a game between Spain and the Netherlands that had no significance to anyone in the USA and why anyone would care about a game so boring that in 120 minutes of play only one point was scored. Sarah Lipps complained to ESPN that the highlights of the World Cup final were “completely and totally irrelevant to sports fans throughout this country. No one cares about two European nations playing some weird sport, if you can even call it that. Also, how the hell can you call these video clips highlights when there was only one point scored in the entire game?”

Now remember that these events occurred just minutes after the conclusion of the match. Roughly five hours later, during ESPN’s broadcast of the final game of the first half of the baseball season, an epic clash between Vicente Padilla’s Los Angeles Dodgers and Carlos Silva’s Chicago Cubs, American soccer star Landon Donovan was brought into the broadcasting booth for an interview.

The station ran videos of Donovan kicking around a soccer ball with the baseball players prior to the game, a decision that was lambasted by viewers as nonsensical. “Why would anyone kick a ball around for no reason? Pick up the ball and throw the damn thing!” viewer David Lamorf yelled to ESPN producers. The studio also received many calls questioning why ESPN would interview “some random guy off the streets” instead of an established sports star.

Finally, throughout the country over the last day and a half, sports fans have reported struggling to remember certain two-hour gaps in their memory dating back through the last month. Most claim to have been watching a sporting event, but no one has been able to figure out exactly what kind yet.