Why do so many Americans actually hate soccer?

The Game Room
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Your criticism is fair - but it’s 25 years too late. 1980s Italian catenaccio football has some of the hallmarks of what you’re talking about, but it’s not widely played anymore, the game has moved on and over time has become more conducive to being offensive as strategies evolve. Your criticism does not acknowledge that football is played in many different styles at all times and that those styles and strategies shift over time.

As has been mentioned, average scoring is higher than just one or maybe two goals per game in most competitions. And 0-0 games can be the result of great defenses pitted against each other as much as they can be the result of hapless offensive players - why you acknowledge for “classic pitchers’ duels” but reject this possibility is unclear to me. To address some of your other points in turn:

This is false. Blasting the ball down the field is a move of desperation, seen as the hallmark of poor defending and a clear sign that a team is in over its head. It carries a very obvious penalty in that you immediately lose possession and also fail to move some of your players to the opponent’s end of the pitch. It allows the attacking team to keep pressure on the defense. It is a last resort strategy, but not one that has any reward beyond the immediate term.

IMHO, Also false. Even in dynamic game play situations, professional players have the talent to head or kick a ball with far greater precision than people think is the case. A lot of times commentators will comment on something that might have seemed like an outside chance by saying “at this level, that really should go in” - and players will generally agree in post-game analysis. Their more critical analysis conveys my point that players are capable of a lot more than you (or people in general) give them credit for. It also means that the defense is not as strong as you seem to think; good attackers only need a small gap to score.

Again, false. Actually, one of the developments that modern football has seen is an increased importance of points when the game is dead - corner kicks, but more importantly free kicks. Some players have developed a specialty to the point where given the right location, a free kick is almost as good as a penalty. A large and increasing percentage of goals scored comes out of these dead points, when the game has been stopped, and giving away a free kick is a very risky move on the part of defense, especially within maybe 60-80 feet from the goal. For a while, this was criticized by some who regretted the increasing importance of these moments at the cost of goals coming out of actual live game play. I suppose it’s all relative, but the actual fans of the game say that if anything free kicks have become too effective, and you’re complaining that they’re toothless!

It’s possible, I suppose, but honestly I don’t think a lot of people that make that criticism have actually talked to any serious number of football fans. Also, it’s not as though the only fans in the States are people that went to Europe - for one thing, Europe is only one of many places where football is played. The game is huge in Mexico, and the number of Mexicans in the States far exceeds the number of douchebags that went to Europe. So again I don’t think this alleged crowd actually exists, nor do I think that Hail Ants or **Bremidon **actually know what they’re talking about and have any idea about actual fans of the game.

Meh. All sports have diving, and it’s not true that soccer encourages it in anyway beyond making it an offense to endanger or injure other players, which other sports do as well. Of course, a major difference here as compared to Hockey or NFL players is that other than shinpads, soccer players wear zero protective gear. So yeah, sometimes they take a second to catch their breath, bfd.

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In response to the people that are complaining about diving in soccer as compared to other sports - I remembered and found a longish post I composed some time ago commenting on this issue. I thought it could be worth reposting here.

[QUOTE=Švejk]
Meh. Sure, some players dive, and it’s not part of the game that fans are drawn too, but at the same time it’s not a big deal and I don’t think it calls for the boo hoo hoo that the OP and many other Americans that don’t like football often display.

It’s a shame, I think, that so many of the threads here that are about football end up being some stupid dispute between people who don’t know too much about the game and don’t like it but like to complain about it on one side, and fans defending the game on the other.

I don’t think that American athletes in any sport attain levels of sportsmanship that are necessarily higher than football players do. There’s some horrible examples of cheating and deceit, but also great examples of people going back onto the pitch with broken bones (which is part dedication, part stupidity). On the whole, it’s all about the incentives and conditions that people are placed under.

For one thing, in contrast to american football and hockey, football players wear next to no padding - only some shin protection, but nothing other than that. That means that the impact of any charge is going to be much bigger in football than it would be in american football.

Secondly, football is predominantly a technical sport which means that it attracts a lot of athletes that are smaller and weaker, and comparatively fewer goons with a lot of physical strength. Take a look at the Barcelona players, for instance - all tiny scraggly little dudes, but horribly talented nimble fuckers at the same time. But yeah, when someone body checks them, it’ll hit them harder than some 6’6" 270 lbs American Football Player, and they don’t get up right away. Still, it’s them we want to see play, and it’s that type of players that need to be protected from suffering career ending injuries at the hands of ruthless defenders. Think of Marco van Basten - great player, but he pretty much spent the last few years of his career in an out of surgery trying to fix his ankle, retiring at age thirty after having been sidelined for the good part of the three or four years prior to that.

So thirdly: the rules tend to favor the attackers and stifle heavy-handed defending - because of cases like Van Basten’s. It’s things like this that are the reason that a lot of charges are often heavily penalized and defenders easily get punished even when they did not mean any harm but were unlucky in starting a sliding just a fraction of a second too late. And yeah - a lot of players take advantage of the rules being that way. This is not right, but there’s good reasons that the rules are the way they are.

All of this to say - whenever I see people on this board and elsewhere whining and moaning over diving in football, I pretty much just think ‘you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’.

[/QUOTE]

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You call those videos I linked to a “big fucking deal” sarcastically, are you serious? How often does someone “take a dive” in baseball, and how often is it a game-changer? Also isn’t the purpose of diving to trick the ref into ejecting strong players from the other team, not “catching their breath”?

This kind of attitude is completely alien to me. How can you have any respect for these people? They are the antithesis of sportsmen and athletes.

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Take a look at this photo of Victor Cruz. You’ll note that he isn’t wearing a single pad (except perhaps a cup) below the sternum. He’s no mountain man, he’s 6 foot 200 pounds, and gets clobbered multiple times a game. He, and other football players, get up when they are able to, because there is no game benefit to rolling around on the field in pain. Note, for the record, when there IS a game benefit to rolling around in pain (generally having to do with clock stoppage), American Footballers will engage in that unsavory activity as well.

Soccer unfortunately encourages this nonsense because the game benefit to getting a penalty shot, or getting a player sent off is potentially huge. It has nothing to do with how hard they’re getting hit, or how tough they are or are not. If there was no benefit to fooling the referee into thinking another player hurt you, they would magically be back in action after hits that previously sent them rolling in “agony”.

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Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there.

I’m a Texas A&M fan*, and I generally am only concerned about SEC teams, and/or teams that we may play in a bowl game. My interest in the Big12 has waned drastically, with only a bemused interest in the antics in Austin keeping me watching the news about UT. Other conferences like the Big10, ACC, Pac-12, etc… exist, and I occasionally see games on TV and even watch a quarter or two, but I don’t know what’s going on, what the implications are, and nor do I care for the most part.

Sports fans of any kind are notoriously provincial; I’d bet that most hardcore Southampton Saints supporters don’t give a crap about Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga or Ligue 1, and may only tangentially hear about the Scottish League because it’s on the BBC from time to time. Same goes for UT fans, Aggie fans, Nebraska fans, Dallas Cowboy fans, Vancouver Canucks fans, etc…

*Not a bandwagon recent one either; grew up in an Aggie family and have watched them since the SWC days in the 1980s.

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Tell that to this bunch of soccer aficionados. What is it with soccer fans and beheading, anyway?

I’d be tempted to postulate a direct correlation between dullness of a spectator sport and associated violence, which is contradicted by the lack of mass riots and bloodshed at curling matches.

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Diving in Englad was broadly ulturally unacceptable until the big money from Sky tv brought in players from every culture - and in some of those cultures diving was a lot more acceptable.

10-15 years later diving was the norm.

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Well, curling is really a Canadian sport. And when was the last time you met a really violent Canadian?

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I pretty much agree with what you’re saying here. I just think the trend is moving in the opposite direction because of the wealth of options available to fans now. On an October Saturday afternoon, I can pretty much plunk myself in the recliner at noon eastern and watch the day – and college football games – travel across the country. Before you know it, it’s halftime of the last Pac 10 game and time to go to bed.

There are more and more of us who aren’t very closely affiliated with any one team and are able to follow games and sports all over the globe but there are probably even more who are passionate fans of Team A but will watch Teams B-Z with almost equal intensity.

The European soccer leagues have some serious structural problems of their own, IMHO, but promotion/relegation isn’t one of them. It’s a tough subject to discuss in this country sometimes because we have no tradition of it and it’s really hard for a lot of people to let go of their established structural concepts.

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asterion:

I read a lot of Wolverine comic books, does that count?

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Sort of a casual fan here, mostly follow the USMNT. I think that soccer, or footie, can be super exciting, but it can be laborious to watch at times. I think that the biggest reason why Americans hate soccer is because of the notion that they are told that they have to like it.
Diving is problematic, but unless FIFA or maybe some of the Euro leagues fight against it by fining players, there’s little chance of it’s going away. I see it all the time in the NBA, and I hate it.

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Where did they get this preposterous notion?

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From people.
But won’t soccer hating Americans gladly accept recommendations for other things like which movie to see, or restaurant to visit? Why is that?

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I think Scotland may disagree.

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It is not a recommendation to try out soccer, the criticism is that we’re the only country in the world that isn’t stark raving mad about soccer, followed by criticisms of our national sports (Baseball, Football, NASCAR etc) and usually a snide comment about how the “World Series” is only played by the USA so how can it be “World series” durhurhur :rolleyes: (Forget about the fact that there are Canadian teams and players from all over South America and asia in the league…)

We’re not suggested to try out soccer, we’re told there is something wrong with us for not liking soccer, for calling it soccer in the first place, and followed by a long string of stupid inane criticisms of the sports we like. So why WOULD we listen?

BTW I think Diving is why Soccer is stupid, but I also think it’s despicable in all sports, the fact that LeBron can be a hero to millions when he is a flagrant diver is disgusting. I’ve never once witnessed diving in the MLB and when it happens in MMA the fans boo and don’t make excuses for it, and there can be consequences for diving in MMA (like getting cut from the UFC). As displayed in this very thread, diving/cheating is “just trying to catch a breath” to some soccer fans, good luck trying to sell that to a manly culture like America where the real men are the ones who play on a broken femur and you guys aren’t doing a very good job of convincing us why soccer is so great.

Most American males who enjoy sports I have EVER met have a deep respect for Rugby as a macho sport, even though I have only met a small handful that play. We respect foreign sports when they aren’t sissy ones.

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The nice thing about baseball is that the only place where “diving” can have any possible benefit is in a batter claiming to have been hit by a pitch, or more commonly, deliberately letting a pitch hit them. And the rules of baseball specifically state that the batter has an obligation to try to get the hell out of the way if they think they’re going to get hit. If they get hit, and in the umpire’s opinion they didn’t make a reasonable effort to get out of the way, the umpire is within his rights to negate the hit-by-pitch. I do remember there being some criticism of certain very large power hitters who had a tendency to lean out over the plate and wear body armor, because it really looked like they were trying to get hit.

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Sounds familiar for hockey also. From Wikipedia:

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Diving was largely unnoticed everywhere, something that the other teams did but never “ours”, until hundreds of media outlets appeared and started devoting hours of analysis to any game, with all sorts of cameras and angles.

Funny that.

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Fair enough. This soccer fan has never engaged in that sort of dialogue, especially in the seemingly semi-annual threads here that we’ve seen.

Without derailing here, I don’t know that I’d agree with your assertion of LBJ being a flagrant diver - Tony Parker and Manu Ginobli, to name 2 players from just one team, are flagrant divers, light years of magnitude beyond the man who is the most versatile defensive player in the history of the game.

But there’s been plenty of cheating. What’s that axiom? If y ain’t cheatin’ ya ain’t tryin’?

Are you serious? The very first thing that I was taught about this great land of ours is that it’s a melting pot, and that it’s a blending of cultures. It’s a big country, one that can’t be painted with a single brush, no matter how broad it may be.

I do think that soccer will continue to grow in popularity, but it will be slow and gradual.

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Whenever I get to the UK I will probably check out a soccer game to experience the culture, but it won’t have anything to do with the anti-American online jerks about it. I’m actually not at all patriotic, but those people reinforce the tribalism even in a person like myself. :stuck_out_tongue:

^I will admit I’m not much of a basketball fan but some of these are pretty ridiculous.

Well then we aren’t allowed to talk about why so many Americans hate soccer if I can’t give reasons, any reason would be “painting with a single brush”, correct? It has nothing to do with melting pot culture or immigration.