Canadians play football as well, because Canadians are intelligent, refined people who don’t usually enjoy a vicious riot after every sporting event.
In English, the name of the sport that involves teams of eleven men kicking a ball around a grass field for ninety minutes is soccer. Yes, I know that in England they call it “football,” but in England they also refer to apartments as “flats,” the hood of a car as a “bonnet,” and don’t clean their goddamned bathrooms more than once a decade, if that. If you want to call it football, start speaking Spanish and call it “futbol.”
The problem with soccer isn’t the simplicity of the game, the problem is that the manner in which it is played is designed for the express purpose of being so boring that the fans go insane and start a riot.
HOW SOCCER IS PLAYED: Two unnecessarily large teams are placed on an unnecessarily large field and play an amazingly dull sport in which a team scores, on average, three goals a year. Teams are given ridiculous names like “AC Milan” and “Manchester United” and “Buttwrangler G.S.” rather than proper team names with a proper place name and a plural nickname, a la “Dallas Cowboys” or “San Francisco Giants.” Each game lasts ninety minutes, except they last longer than that because there’s no one game clock; the referee just sorts of adds a few minutes onto the end. All the rules of the game are designed to minimize the chance of a goal being scored, but maximize the opportunity for greasy-looking guys to throw themselves to the ground as if they had been hit with a rocket launcher every time a referee looks their way. Then they leap to their feet and act as if they are the victims of the greatest injustice since the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, the fans have usually gone insane and begun stabbing each other by about the “fifty-third minute,” unless knives were not allowed into the stadium, in which case they merely trample one another to death. On special occasions, the stadium is set on fire.
The “match” is usually played in the context of a hideously complicated and bizarre league structure in which teams shift from league to league and every player belongs to two or three different teams in different leagues. No European actually understands any of it, and many of the playoff placements are actuallty determined by Lotto. Each season lasts a random number of months.
The truth is, of course, that there are less than fifteen people in all of Great Britain and Europe who know anything about soccer. People go to soccer games because they secretly want to stab, trample, burn or just out-and-out invade someone; that last one is especially true in Germany. A soccer game is an excuse to wear gang colours, drink booze, and then rush out and riot, loot, burn and destroy. League matches are merely practice for the soccer Show, which are international matches where you can riot against foreign opposition.
I’m not even a big fan of football (real football, not soccer) but even I can see that soccer is a ridiculous joke; soccer is to baseball as Tic-Tac-Toe is to chess.
