I hope you have your magnifying glass ready, there is ONE terrifyingly teeny dick here who will be not watching the World Cup Final but will still feel like he is hung like a horse.
Soccer would be much more interesting if they incorporated some aspects of American baseball into it.
For example: let’s give two players on each team a baseball bat. And they can swing at the ball anywhere, anytime. 
bar graph! pah!
what sort of a graphical analysis tool is that? no confidence intervals or nothing. poor, poor, poor.
You might as well just scratch your ill formed opinion in crayon and have done with it. Real men use multiple logistic regression.
Clothahump, I think you’ll find that Leeds United F.C. have already play-tested such a tactic circa 1970-73. it was brutal but effective.have a look
(and that’s my team lest anyone think I’m being snarky)
Hey, I’m aware that Rysdad is trying to be all outrageous and tough and all that, but he does make some deserving points.
A few small changes in the archaic rules of football could make for a more entertaing and fair game to watch (from referees being allowed to use technology to slightly bigger goals)-- and yet that never happens just out of tradition or whatever.
What fucks me off is that in American Football half the cunts playing it can’t even catch the ball. CATCH THE BALL. They’re dropping it all the time. I could do that when I was five.
I hate soccer but I also hate all sports, so I don’t watch them.
I would much rather do a penis size analysis based on statistical regression arguments than I would based on sports arguments, so if you could develop these thoughts further and maybe throw in a few offensive slurs at people who use Bayesian analysis, that would be just super.
The thing I’ve never understood is how a free-moving offside line in soccer is better than a fixed offside line in hockey. They both prevent cherry-picking, but with a fixed line there’s no question about whether or not the player was past the line. Is it the potential difficulty of dribbling the ball past the line, compared with handling the puck?
It isn’t necessarily better. It just is what it is.
yeah! what are the chances of that hapening eh? 
I tried to watch the World Cup, but I couldn’t. I saw lots of games that were played almost all in the mid field. The ball being passed back and forth, a defender kicking it OB, followed by a pass back in. After a few minutes of that ,I gave up. I played soccer when I was a kid and I appreciate the skill the players demonstrate. I hate the diving though. The reffing was bad and the games did not grab me.
And people say baseball is boring?
No you really didn’t try to watch the world cup.
By your own admission you watched a few minutes of uninteresting play. So how can you say that games were played “almost all in the mid-field” you didn’t watch it all so forgive me if I don’t trust your judgement.
Football doesn’t lend itself to immediate gratification. There will be periods of tense build up with not much penetration. There will also be periods of incredible end to end flowing moves with chances coming thick and fast. Problem is, that could all happen in the same game. Quitting after a few minutes means you probably missed out.
(Uraquay v Ghana, Spain v Paraguay, Man U v Bayern Munich 1999 etc etc etc etc etc etc)
And I think you’ll find only SOME people people find baseball boring, as is the case with America football and any other sport you care to mention. If you don’t get it…fine.
No one will force you but weak criticisms like yours sound ridiculous regardless of the sport targeted.
Your problem is that you watch too much basket ball. You like to be constantly stimulated with low value thrills. (baskets).
Soccer fans are so defensive. This was not my first go around with soccer. I have watched it for many years and it just never struck a cord. Every Olympics and World Cup, I gave it a try. It is a bad spectator sport but fun to play.
Eh, there’s plenty of problems with soccer. And as a fan, i’d have to say that a lot of the matches haven’t been particularly exciting; the results have been exciting, especially with France and Italy out so badly, but you have to care beforehand to care about that.
If you don’t like soccer, hey, fair enough. We all have likes and dislikes. Suggesting that there’s zero skill or strategy to the game is silly, though. You can rephrase any sport to make it sound easy. I could drive round a course in a car, but I couldn’t compete in NASCAR or F1. I can run, but I couldn’t compete in a sprint or a marathon. I can move pieces around on a board, but that doesn’t mean i’m a chessmaster.
I’m sorry our interests are infecting your bars. Don’t worry, it’s almost over now anyway. Try the tennis!
I don’t know why I’m bothering to respond, but I’ll sort of defend it. I love soccer; it’s become my favorite sport, though the Miami Hurricanes are my favorite team overall, and I’ll watch them play a game any time before a World Cup match, etc. I also really like football (American), but it’s become extremely boring to watch the NFL for me. That could be due to the commercials (TD, extra point, commercial, kickoff, commercial, 3 and out, punt, commercial, and so on), but the game is hyped up so much and it really just doesn’t live up to the billing (do you start threads when there are shitty NFL/NHL/NBA playoff games, when the best of the best are nearing their respective championships?). Sixty percent of the plays are pass plays, and only 60% are completed, so a measly 36% of the plays go for naught (OMG, just 36%!!! Talk about inept!!! /Rysdad). Then maybe half the running plays go for more than a couple yards (22 players just run into each other for 5 seconds, and then fall down?! What a joke! /Rysdad). Lots of punts are just fair catches, so that’s a waste of watching. So, let’s face it, even in the 5-10 seconds of a play, there’s a great chance nothing of importance will occur. At least in soccer, you only get rewarded by actually scoring a goal. A team could fumble at their own 25, and the 2nd team could do nothing on offense, and then kick a 42-yard field goal, and they get rewarded 3 points for doing nothing. And baseball… The pitcher doesn’t have anything in his way, and he can’t throw a strike every time?! He’s only 60’ away! And if I’m batting, and I know where the pitch will be, then I GUARANTEE I could get a base hit!
But really, why do people subject themselves to things they know they don’t like? If you go to a bar where 90% of the tvs were showing the World Cup, why not watch one of the 10% of the tvs that weren’t showing it? Why not go to another bar? Why drink inside on a July Saturday afternoon when all you’re going to do is watch tv? Surely there are more interesting things to do with your life. The person upthread who mentioned it’s like hating vegetarians seems to have nailed it. Soccer/football/futbol viewing isn’t complusory. You don’t like it? Don’t watch it. I don’t like basketball very much. I don’t watch it. Maybe I’ll start a thread about my indifference.
Well, you are attacking something that people hold dear. You are belittling it and people will react to that. Particularly when the attacks of some are thinly veiled attacks on the fans themselves.
Saying it is a bad spectator sport is another weak argument one that only ever works if you get to define your own meaning for “bad” and “good”.
What you actually mean is that when you are a spectator (every couple of years for few minutes) you don’t find it interesting. Again, that is fine but when you state such individual opinions as global fact don’t be surprised when people treat them with disdain.
Soccer seems to have been more or less solved at this point, and the solution is defensive play, short passes and keeping the ball on the ground. Boring, boring boring and way overdue for a major rules revision to shake things up and give more advantages to exciting play.
That said, the OP is a clueless idiot.
How did I belittle it or attack the fans? I know some people don’t like baseball. I do. I don’t feel the sport is belittled when people say they don’t like it. They are entitled to their opinions no matter how ill founded.I tried to watch soccer. It just does not work for me.