Soccer is excruciatingly boring, and the players are a bunch of drama queens.
Strange, a person who decides to leave his country and live in another telling a third country what their sports should be.
Soon thereafter, a soccer pitch was put up in the outfield. I don't think a baseball game was ever played there.
I have long been convinced that this is the primary reason it's popular. Most of the rest of the world is too poor to avoid sports equipment.
The reason it's not popular here is that one wonders why anyone would find constant motion (and low scores) interesting.
I do not have a dog in this hunt, as I like sports, but watching NFL fans say that soccer is gay never fails to crack me up. So go ahead NFL fans, continue watching your sport: skin-tight, manhood-enhancing uniforms; players “presenting” their rumps to the cameras; all interspersed with ads for erectile dysfunction. LOL
I prefer flicking slugs with a sharpened stick, much more entertaining than soccer.
And the fact that most the world plays it is reason enough to ignore it!
Many of us want nothing to do with the international mainstream, sports included.
If soccer had ROUTINE scores of 40-37, I’d probably watch. Make the goal area 25% bigger.
Forger it.
Embrace this.
Three reasons Americans should shun soccer: 1) It can end in a tie; 2)there are more fake injuries in soccer than in pro wrestling; 3)waching a game in person is more dangerous in the stands than on the field since there is no “hooligan list” of American football, baseball or basketball fans.
Well, thanks to Obamacare, it’s becoming much harder to get Ambien.
A niche could be opening.
My attitude started to change when my daughter started playing, around 7 or 8 years of age. Based on an impressive sample size of one, I will offer a theory about people's responses to this thread: it all depends on what you grew up with. Soccer cynics will be folks, like me, who were never exposed to the game as youngsters; they remain focused on the big traditional U.S. sports. Then there will be a scattering of people who actually played themselves or, as a reasonable proxy, watched their kids play, which is the next best thing. The point is, all the big team sports are kids' games, and you need to be able to see it through the eyes of a child. If you didn't grow up with it, that's hard.
Not having played myself, I will never understand all the intracacies of soccer, but my appreciation has grown as my daughter has developed. She's now a reasonalby competitive travel player, certainly not an elite player, and I can kinda, sorta appreciate what the team is trying to do. It has become fun, which just goes to prove that even old dogs can learn new sports.
It helps that I've always been a fan of defense, and I'm disgusted with what the TV dollar has done to football, baseball, and especially basketball, which has become a nearly unwatchable parody of what used to be the greatest game ever invented. The shot clock and three point shot have ruined offensive basketball; the playoffs and interleague play have turned baseball's regular season into a fraud; football has turned into an aerial circus. I respect soccer for not selling out to television. If the people who ran the NBA or NFL were in charge of marketing soccer, the typical score would be 17-15, the Olympic women's teams would dress like beach volleyball players, and there would be an artificial play stoppage every three minutes for commercials. Good for soccer for holding out.
That said, too many high-stakes, major tournament soccer games end in PK shootouts, and calls/non-calls involving potential penalty kicks loom far too large. There are debatable calls in every sport. They loom excessively large in soccer because there is so little scoring. A bit more scoring would benefit the game, at the expense of reducing the number of upsets. That's a price I would pay; soccer purists would probably disagree.
All it would take is making the net a foot wider or six inches higher.
Space is more costly than a couple of baskets in an urban area, basketball is rising.
I’m British, but I’m not into football (or ‘soccer’) at all, which makes me something of a deviant over here. But then, I’m not really into spectator sports at all. Watching other people playing a game and then trying to bathe in the reflected glory of ‘your’ team winning never really appealed to me and I’ve never really understood why people care so much about this silly nonsense.
This Mitchell and Webb sketch sums it up really:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1WN0YMWZU
So, since the whole world seems to love soccer, we must embrace it?
No thank you, I don’t care what the rest of the world likes, I like what I like and the rest of the world can enjoy whatever they please.