Football can be plenty boring (although I’ve never heard of a nil-nil tie). Plus there are cheerleaders.
But I don’t see Americans and American expatriates abroad obsessing constantly about how foreigners don’t appreciate the sport and NFL Europe should have been a huge success and what this says about their cultures.
My kind of sport. One with meal breaks.
Meal breaks? Hell, they break 4 times to go sleep!
I think a big part of it is the seeming effeteness of the sport’s players relative to the American sports archetypical player.
The archetypical soccer player in a lot of American’s minds seems to be some skinny Italian, Spaniard, Latin American or Brazilian guy with some sort of white-man jheri curl hairdo who flops on the ground in agony at the merest physical touch.
If you’re used to seeing your sports figures as looking like Tom Brady, Mickey Mantle, or LeBron James, guys like 1980s Maradona just look wrong.
Now I realize that the Euro soccer player with a greasy mullet isn’t really the case anymore, but I’m sure that’s in a lot of people’s minds as a reason they think soccer sucks.
Hate is pretty strong word, but yeah I hate the game because of all the semi-functional-alcoholics “bros” it attracts in US and also the game is stupid. I played it through high-school in intramural situations.
It’s like saying the Globetrotters are the best at spinning the ball on their index finger. Baseball, the number one indvidualized team sport goes beyond that. Might as well watch basketball or football.
Eh.
ETA cmon, just watching a few perfunctory passes and some striker getting his rocks off. Might as well be watching Magic for all I care.
Yeah, you can lay a lot of criticisms at soccer, but lack of gameplay action isn’t one of them. I grew up watching football (sorry, soccer), and trying to watch American football, say, or rugby, is just painful in the extreme because it seems like nobody can move more than 10 yards without the game being stopped for 30 seconds and then being restarted in some overelaborate manner.
Soccer flows. You can have a spell of three or four minutes or more with no interruptions from officials whatsoever. Other sports are stop start stop start stop start, ad nauseam. They sometimes show American football on the late-night channels here in the UK, and if you start watching one at 11pm it seems like the sun is coming up before the fucking thing’s finished. At least with soccer, 90 minutes means 90 minutes, more or less. We don’t stop the watch. (Basketball is really bad for this. 30 seconds left on the clock? You could be here for another 10 minutes!)
Whereas on this side of the Atlantic we regard American football players as big jessies because they won’t go out on the field without full-face helmets and half a mattress stuffed down their jerseys. Proper football players don’t need any of that crap, and they get hurt. (Warning: bloody pic)
Anyone complaining about vuvuzelas is basically revealing that their experience of soccer extends to watching maybe one game at the last World Cup, which took place in South Africa. Unless you actually live in South Africa, in which case, fair point.
My beef with soccer, which I loved to play and was quite good at as a keeper up until my early twenties, is that by the time you get to the professional level, all those guys are just so damn good that they kinda tend to cancel one another out and as a result not a lot happens in terms of scoring.
Soccer is a really fun game to play when you’re young, and I have a blast watching kids play it. But I can’t stand watching professionals play the game, and I can’t say the same about the other American sports I love to watch at a pro level, namely NFL football and MLB baseball.
Even though American football is slow on action, it’s still not popular for a game to end 0 to 0. Soccer has a term for that, it’s so common.
And, yes, I want scoring. It’s like having a class with no testing to see how the students are doing. I want to be able to tell by each game how well my team is doing. Sports are a competition, and the point of a competition is to see who is better. That’s what makes them exciting. Sure, I can watch the pure athleticism of my team, but I don’t know who did a better job in that game overall.
Granted, I’m not that big of a sports fan, anyways. But that does seem to be the consensus from people who are but don’t like soccer. And, yes, they change that to “hating” soccer because of people telling them that they should love it. I think it’s the same type of “hate” they feel for the other team. Sports people like their teams, and thus there becomes a rivalry.
I really would like to see a version of soccer that makes scoring easier, not because I’d necessarily want to watch, but so I could see if Americans still disliked it. I suspect some will, but others are just so committed to the anit-soccer team that nothing will work. And the pro-soccer team only has themselves to blame for that, making the whole thing a competition.
Gameplay in soccer may go on for four minutes or but often nothing important will happen during that time. It’s possible to break away for a few minutes and not miss anything. In contrast, you can miss a lot in a basketball game once the clock starts running. (The example you cited (30 seconds played in ten minutes) usually arises during the closing minutes of an intensely tight game between two teams with a lot at stake. You won’t see it in a game where one team has a 20 point-or-more lead over the other at the two-minute mark.)
Incidentally, I’m rather indifferent toward soccer. As for why so many Americans hate it, I think many of them have the same feelings toward the sport as they do toward metric system (which was also heavily hyped and promoted in the U.S. during the 1970s but never really caught on). Also, the incidents of fan violence and general boorishness turns off many more.
I still like fatboyz football but after almost 50 years of watching I’m about burned out on the clock stopping all the time. Football and basketball could borrow a little something from soccer by extending the time between periods in return for fewer clock stoppages during them. Flow matters and I’m a little tired of waiting for players to actually, you know, play.
I must add, by the way, that it’s not that there haven’t been more than a few ugly instances of American fan violence and misbehavior related to football, baseball, hockey, or basketball games. For starters, just Google “fan violence” & “Oakland Raiders” or “Philadelphia”.
This. Almost every soccer fan I’ve met (on the internet, admittedly) hates and mocks everything American, to the point of thinking their stupid insulting names for us and our sports are somehow proof of their intellectual superiority.
Not gonna win us over that way, guys.
This is really really wrong.
Nobody thinks this.
Yes. Sometimes the teams perform relatively equally. A tie (or draw) is an accurate reflection of this.
I’ve watched lots and lots of soccer. I hate vuvuzelas.
Which is?
Sure, but as bad as they’ve been at times, I’m not aware of any case where they’ve crushed dozens of people against barriers.
And really, while I intellectually know that things have changed quite a bit in fandom, but what comes to mind when I think of a British soccer fan is some skinheaded thug more interested in bashing in the skull of anyone wearing opposing team colors.
Which is one reason talks about “intricate strategy” of the game probably makes people laugh–those guys are the ones enjoying the subtlety?
The other type of fan I think of is the one there to constantly jump up and down, bang their drum and chant, maybe occasionally looking at the field. I live in the suburb that the FC Dallas team plays in and there’s nothing more fun than getting seats next to an entire section that is banging drums for the entire fucking 90 minutes. And it’s Dallas in Summer so its about 105F while they’re doing it.
But I do think that the basketball comparisons are more apt than american football. A lot of the strategy is away from the actual person with the ball, people maneuvering around and getting open and in a position to score. But 99% of the time in soccer, it’s all for nothing, often without even being able to take a shot, whereas in basketball, there’s usually at least a shot taken.
And while flopping is an increasing problem in basketball, if a player there does flop, maybe they get 2 points out of the 100 out of it. When a soccer player flops, they’re trying to get possibly the only score in the game out of it (and really, when I do watch soccer, all too often teams seem to mainly be trying to go for set pieces).
And I think for anyone trying to get into soccer, there is a lot of strangeness that has to be overcome as well. Relegation, eh, I can see why some like it, but it’s kind of odd. Then there are all these leagues–I can watch a team in the Premier league, but then I might watch the same team in a Champion’s league match, and I can kind of get that, but then I see the same team yet again in something called, I think, the FA Cup? And then other teams are in something called the Eurpoa league, which I think is some sort of consolation prize for teams not good enough to get into the Champion’s league?
And then for half of the matches, it’s not even a matter of winning or losing–you can lose a game 1-0 and celebrate wildly because you played the same team a month ago and won 0-2 so you advance on aggregate or something.
It’s not so much that soccer players don’t score too often, but that they so seldom even try to kick it in the goal. Would it really be so bad to take a shot at the goal now and then?
It’s hard to respect players who fake injuries and are afraid to try to score.
I’m not a sports fan, but I enjoy a ‘forensic’ look at professional sports. To me soccer is fundamentally a child’s game. For two reasons:
[ol]
[li]It requires no equipment other than a ball[/li][li]It essentially only has one rule: You can’t use your hands.[/li][/ol]
This makes it a perfect rudimentary, introductory team sport for grade-school kids (and third world countries), but why any adult could possibly find it entertaining to watch is beyond me. It’s like watching professional dodge-ball or kickball, it is so NOT a professional spectator sport, it is an easy to learn, play & officiate kid’s game. I know that sounds (and is) snobbish, but prove me wrong. People sometimes call baseball boring but it’s actually very similar to (American) football in terms of game play:
[ul]
[li]There’s a definitive and decidedly different offense & defense routine.[/li][li]Offense & defense are rigidly defined, quite different from each other, and exchanged between teams on a fairly even, regular basis.[/li][li]Both games require a long set of complex, difficult & diverse series of ‘plays’ in order to score.[/li][li]The amount of time that the balls are actually ‘in play’ is decidedly short, well defined, and everything else is just a build-up to this (i.e. the exciting parts).[/li][li]Even though scoring is long term & difficult, a few mistakes or skillful plays can cause that to change suddenly & unexpectedly, and yet there’s still usually a sense of this rapid scoring still being ‘earned’ by the offensive team.[/li][li]They’re both played on fields with markings & equipment specifically designed for their sport.[/li][/ul]
Soccer has none of these things. It’s essentially a small group of players playing on an enormous, plain, empty field doing only a couple of different ‘plays’ over & over & over, with the ultimate aim being nothing more than kicking the ball across a line. And even that only happens *extremely *infrequently. Like once or twice an hour!
For all the above reasons I also find American basketball boring and pointless. It’s like soccer on a tiny little field, sped up 100 times. But it’s still a boring, monotonous back & forth drone of nearly identical activities.
I don’t care for them either, but I haven’t heard a vuvuzela since 2010, or before 2010 for that matter. Vuvuzelas are not an feature of soccer-watching, except in South Africa. Why single them out?
Anyway, these stupid threads are always full of people pointing out why soccer has no appeal, but they never go on to explain how it is nevertheless so popular elsewhere.
Obviously, almost by definition, no popular sport sucks. If it did, it wouldn’t be popular. People are just trying to rationalise their cultural biases. And it borders on xenophobia at times - I notice that a lot of the piss-takes of soccer, like post #44 above or that (admittedly pretty funny) Simpsons one, dwell on the ethnic make-up of what they see as typical soccer players. It’s a silly game played by… *foreign *looking guys.
I have no problem with people disliking soccer or offering valid criticisms like low scoring, players faking injuries, etc. But arguing that it or other sports are crap on some absolute, objective level just doesn’t make sense.
… and huge in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It’s not much played in Antarctica, and it’s only second ranking in Australasia. And obviously it’s not a North American sport.
This is why Ximenean hits the nail on the head. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m no soccer fan and find watching it about as exciting as watching paint dry. But you can throw in as many subjective views as you like, and try desperately to define what you are used to you, and your personal preferences as being faux objective evaluative criteria, but in the end you just can’t argue with the fact that objectively soccer is the most popular game in the world.
Blah, blah, frickin’ blah. It’s not possible to prove you wrong because as Wolfgang Pauli would have it, what you say “is not only not right, it is not even wrong”. Your method is simply to define what you are used to as adult (by which you mean “good”) and what you aren’t as “childish” (by which you mean bad).
Heck when I was a child we used to excel in making dumbass ridiculously complex games that needed a bazillion rules to make them work. We learnt any number of simple but good games off adults. You could think of counter examples no doubt but in the end my point is simply that what is childish and what is adult is not as simple as you kid yourself it is.
One can make out a valid argument that simplicity is good and complexity is bad. I’m certainly not going to advance that argument as such, or say that it is an argument that can’t be proven “wrong” but it’s at least as arguable as your “complexity is good” argument.
Your post is just equating your personal preferences and experiences to what is good. A common thing to do. In both senses of the word, speaking of being snobbish 
