I follow the World Cup as well as Olympic soccer. I’ll watch MLS from time to time, but don’t really follow it. That season drags on forever. I will also watch the Mexican and European leagues if they’re on FSC.
I forgot something else I don’t like about soccer – the sense of smug superiority I’ve frequently encountered in soccer fans. If I say I don’t like it, it couldn’t possibly be because tastes differ, different strokes and all that. No, it’s because I “don’t get it.”
You like soccer. I think it’s dull. Why that warrants a deprecatory rolleyes from you is beyond me.
That isn’t what warrants a deprecatory rolleyes and you damn well know it. Did you read what he quoted?
You know what I forgot? The way that people who are soccer haters in this country 1) overstate their case with incorrect factual assertions and 2) dismiss criticism of their position without any attempt to view it with anything like a logical or critical eye.
Your position is that huge numbers of games end 0 - 0 or 1 - 0. I believe you quoted 50%, “> 75% maybe?” And you were picking up on HeyHomie’s assertion that 1 - 0 is the “norm.” Yet this season in the English Premier League, after roughly 80 games played, only 17 have finished 1 - 0 and only twice has there been a dreaded nil - nil draw. That’s a combined 25% of the games. A scoreline quite frequent this season is 2 - 2, which appeared twice the last Saturday of play alone, once when Manchester United rescued a point in the dying moments of the game. You know, that part of the game where everyone who is paying attention and caring is filled with the “tension of not knowing the outcome.”
In short, your position that soccer is boring because the games are all 0 - 0 or 1 - 0 snooze fests is not supported by facts. It’s another example of a dismissive attitude towards a sport you haven’t bothered to really try to understand, because to you, any sport not filled with multiple successful efforts at scoring isn’t worth watching.
As for why I rolled my eyes, it is because you totally failed to understand the meaning of my statement about tension. I’ve given you another clue in this post, which hopefully helps you understand what I’m talking about. No doubt you will dismiss this attempt at enlightenment as well, since the bottom line is that you don’t like soccer, you don’t want to like soccer, and you’ll cling to your incorrect, uninformed opinions about soccer with your last dying breath rather than run the risk of finding out that maybe, just maybe you were a bit hasty in your conclusions.
I understand completely where you are coming from. I used to feel the same way myself. I’m not quite sure what changed. I guess I grew to appreciate the things that happen in game in and of themselves and not just when they directly lead to a goal.
Another way to describe it, I guess, is like when a team gets the ball deep in its own territory in football. It’s going to be tough to score and, barring a broken play, going to take a series of things going right to even get within scoring range. Each possession in soccer is something like that.
I think the big problem is just that there are already enough major sports in the US for people to follow. You have NBA, NFL, NHL, baseball, NASCAR, and college FB and BB. That’s 7 major sports. Plus there is MMA, golf, tennis, etc.
I agree baseball is boring , not sure why so many people are into it. Most Americans really like offense and soccer simply does not have much. Hockey is low scoring but there is also a lot of action and hitting/checking.
I like World Cup matches and the qualifiers leading up to it. What I don’t like is all the acting trying to draw a foul. I also have a hard time with teams having an insurmountable 1-0 lead. Question for the soccer fans- what % of the time does the team scoring first win the game? In other words, how rare are comebacks?
The other thing I don’t like is the shootout. I also detest it in hockey. I say let them play till someone scores and if it takes 12 hours, so be it.
The shootout is a result of it being so hard to score. If they want to get rid of the shootout they need to figure out a way to generate more offense and shots on goal.
The hockey shootout is OK because it’s not used in the playoffs and the losing team still gets a point. And some goals or saves show great moves by the shooter or goalie.
Team sports? Meh.
Soccer? MEh.
When I was in high school, they tried out a different shoot-out type approach. Instead of altenating PK’s they did alternating corner kicks. The offense’s object is to score and the defense’s object is to merely clear the ball (past, I’m not sure, 30 yards or something).
It was a pretty unique solution, I thought. I can’t remember it ever coming up in an actual game, but I remember practicing it.
It is not much of a spectator sport, especially on TV . Lots of running back and forth while the ball gets kicked away and the process restarts. The nuances of how the ball is taken from the attacker is beyond me. I played when I was a kid but it fell off my radar a long time ago.
It reminds me of the womans pro basketball league. I decided to watch carefully and see if I liked it. It just feels like something is missing.
I love hockey. I played a lot growing up. It too does not translate to TV very well. Go to a pro game and you can appreciate it. Grow up playing it and you will love it. But looking at it and never having laced up a pair of skates in your life, and it would be impossible to understand.
No answer for me on your list. BORING. Maybe not quite as boring as golf, but I don’t watch golf either.
Some quite unusual statistics emerge from the season so far.
As at 3 October, there had been just 4 draws in total in the EPL. The average per season is normally something like 25%. Furthermore, the average goals per game in the Premiership for the current season is running at 2.95, this figure being the highest of any European league. This is also the highest average in the history of the EPL.
Also, apropos of nothing in particular, of the 192 goals scored in the Premiership this season, the cutoff being 29 September, 90 have been scored by players wearing Nike boots, whereas only 1 player equipped with Reeboks has managed to find the back of the net.
Therefore, in order to increase the 2.95 average per game to something over 3 per game, it’s pretty obvious to me that the dude wearing Reeboks should switch over to Nike without further delay.
I love watching soccer and don’t understand the criticism that it’s boring. For comparison, I cannot watch NFL football anymore because so much of the game is dead time. Soccer, on the otherhand, is virtually non-stop, with the only break in a 90-minute match coming at a halftime.
And there’s lots more to get excited about than scoring. An especially good shot or save, or even a pass (or series of passes) can stir up the emotions just as much as a score
I enjoy the English Premier League the most, but will also watch the lower English leagues when available, as well as matches from Scotland, France, Spain, Italy and Germany and the MLS. And that’s not even counting the national teams, which I enjoy as well. And I love going to matches in person when I can.
The World Cup is fantastic, but I also enjoy the UEFA Champions League. There’s just so much to love about the sport that I genuinely don’t understand the hate some people have for it. (Though I do despise the diving and other antics that you’ll occasionally see in a match. Thankfully, thoseare the exceptions and not the rule.)
If you define running back and forth in mid field as non stop action, good for you. i do not. It is equivalent to saying the time running from one end of the basketball court to another after a rebound is action.
I think that baseball and soccer are in the same boat. They’re old favorites, but clearly of another era, when all the fops and ladies thought nothing of spending an entire afternoon watching the game and having tea, or something. (Or in soccer’s case, an excuse for a bunch of layabout alcoholics to fight)
The problem with soccer is that the field is way too big, so there’s a lot of time wasted on kicks gone awry and the fact that trying to get anywhere near the goal on that large of a field is just going to result in more time wasted on kicks gone awry. People harsh on how in American football, there’s always clock stoppages, but really, should the clock be running when some ref has to retrieve the ball from the back 40 because, hey, the field’s the size of a wheat field?
It’s really no different than having to watch a baseball manager screwing up his face as though telling his pitcher what to throw on one lousy pitch was as important as splitting atoms, or something. It’s all bullshit, and the morons who announce it make it a hundred times worse.
Indoor soccer is very fast and it has one big advantage - the ball goes out of bounds way less than outdoor soccer. Around here many of the best kids play indoor soccer when it’s cold so they can stay in shape and work on some skills.
I think there’s several reason why soccer hasn’t and won’t catch on in the US, at least not anytime soon.
- It’s boring. Others have said this, but I don’t think anyone really nailed exactly how soccer’s boringness is different from other sports. In football, for instance, even if it’s a low scoring game, there’s still big hits, big plays, big stops; in soccer, it just isn’t the same because “almost scoring” doesn’t net you anything, where non-scoring big plays in football at least give you something, like field position. Similarly, field position means almost nothing in soccer. I’ll see a team have it on their opponent’s side of the field for a while, then one random person just boots it back to the other side.
I’m not much of a baseball fan at all either, I have some slight interest during playoffs, but that’s about it. And even if people say baseball is boring, and it is, it still has more moments of interest. Again, even in a low scoring game, you probably have some nice defensive plays. Also, there’s some non-scoring plays that give a team a sense of progress, like a base hit or a triple to improve your position of scoring.
It just seems like there’s a higher amount of tension in popular American sports. I see a team in the red zone, or with runners in scoring position with one or no outs; there just isn’t a real equivalent in soccer. It just seems like the scoring in soccer comes a lot more at random, which is exciting too, but you still have that in Football with a break away run or deep pass, or in baseball with a home run.
So, I guess soccer just seems like it has all the lulls and highs of most other american sports, but it’s lacking a lot in the middle. I’ll gladly take a few sacks, some long plays, and field position battle as highlights over a few almost scores.
- We already have games that work somewhat similarly in Basketball and Hockey. Basketball replaces a few almost scores with a whole lot of mediocre shots and the sheer matter of being a high scoring game means there’s likely to be a lot more highlights for nice shots. Similarly, you see a progression. In basketball, a comeback often takes several minutes of excellent defense and great shot-making; you see a progression of momentum shifting.
I think hockey is probably the most similar in terms of mechanics, with it being relatively low scoring and a lot of almost shots make it as highlights, but there’s still generally more scoring. And c’mon, they’re doing it on skates and there’s a lot more violence involved; those two things alone add an extra level of entertainment
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Soccer doesn’t lend itself well to television viewing. Football has tons of built in commercial breaks between possessions and quarters. Baseball can do commercial breaks between half-innings. Basketball has quarters, lots of timeouts, fouls and clock stoppage at scores that it’s no problem weaving in commercials. Soccer just keeps going, so getting commercials in either means having random timeouts thrown in or missing action. Most Americans get their sports on TV, so that is going to make it a lot harder.
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Soccer is a kids game. That is, we just tend to view soccer as something the elementary school kids and high school kids do. This is largely a result of a vicious cycle in that MLS isn’t near the level of respectability that the other leagues are, so most people only really see kids playing it, so most athletes move on to something else at a higher level and we get fewer adults playing soccer, ad infinitem. Yes, this mold is breaking with the influx of hispanics, but it’s probably at least a generation away from shaking off that stigma
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Elitism. Whenever I do talk to people who are soccer fans, like someone else pointed out upthread, most of the responses I get are either about how I don’t get it, I don’t appreciate the athleticism, it’s just too sophisticated, or some rolled eyes along with an “…American” comment. I see the same thing with certain arts like independent films, or various musical genres and I’m turned off the same way. I don’t get the same response when talking to a hockey or baseball or basketball fan; they seem to appreciate that not every sport is for everyone. But no, somehow, not liking soccer is just unthinkable to a lot of soccer fans… the whole rest of the world likes it, so it must be the best sport, right?
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Americans have to be different. We’re the rogue country. We just don’t want to conform with the rest of the world. The more countries that do something, the more likely we are to not want to do it. The whole rest of the world has the metric system, the whole rest of the world has soccer, we want no part of either.
Now, all of that said, I do pay a bit more attention during International competitions like the World Cup and the Olympics. I don’t care if we win or lose, other than a slight bit of nationalism. So many of our best athletes go into Football, Basketball, and Baseball that I think, if it really was our top sport, like it is for so many other countries, we’d be a perenial contender. Instead, soccer doesn’t get the cream of the crop here, so instead, I just find it strangely amusing when we do well internationally despite missing out on our country’s best athletes and lacking fan support. So, I guess in a strange sort of schadenfreude, I’d be absolutely delighted if we won the World Cup while still being a notoriously anti-soccer country.
You might consider an MLSnet Match Center subscription. $20 for live video of every game of the season not shown on national TV, including playoff games, is a heck of a deal. Even now it’s only $10 for the rest of the season and, most importantly, the playoffs. I don’t have it so far this year, but it’s been a huge value in the past when many playoff games weren’t on national broadcasts.
Didn’t vote in your poll. The applicable choice would be “Not interested in the sport” but I didn’t check it because
a) I’m not very interested in any other sport either, especially not pro level sports.
b) I’m not interested in anything whatsoever being in any televised medium whatsoever either; I don’t have TV and I hardly watch news videos in the internet. Maybe election results or something but that’s about it.
c) To the limited extent I ever watch any sport LIVE (in person, I mean, not via TV), soccer is OK, if a bit hard to follow due to the speed at which the action switches to other parts of the field. Also true of hockey.