To those who say soccer is boring, a question.
You come across a football game between two teams you don’t know about, with no players you’ve ever heard of, are you going to be excited watching it? Same goes for baseball, basketball, etc.
If you’ve never watched soccer, you’re not going to be familiar with players, or the history between the teams: all the things that create the drama in sports.
Up until a few years ago, I was not familiar at all with the professional European leagues. I knew of Liverpool back from their 70s heyday, but that was about it. But once I invested the time in learning about the teams, players and history, now I’m completely hooked on The Premier League.
Yes for football, I love football, also a yes for football variants rugby and Aussie Rules, not so much for Canadian or Arena League. Probably not for baseball, baseball only gets my interest when there’s a good narrative so if I don’t know the teams there can’t be a good narrative (at least not good for me). Basketball it depends, when the game is played well I find it enjoyable, but it really isn’t played well anymore, NBA is all dunk ball, and the one and done thing in college has really impacted the quality of play.
I’ve watched soccer. It tends to be not that exciting. Though with the fall of Spain the long ball defense style (which lets face it, that’s just a stunningly boring way to play the game, playing not to lose in any sport is dull) seems to be fading away. Everything I’m hearing says this is one of the highest scoring World Cup round robins ever, including lots of come from behind victories. Come from behind victories are a sign that a sport has interesting things happening. Look at the NHL after the lockout that cost the whole season, going into that the trap/ lock was popular and the sport suffered (playing not to lose), there were rules tweaks during the lockout and 3rd period scoring skyrocketed, and lead changing scoring went up astronomically, and the league just finished what was probably the most purely entertaining playoffs I’ve ever seen from the NHL.
The problem with your idea of familiarity being required for enjoyment is that if you can’t enjoy a sport before you know it you have no reason to get to know it. Sport I like I liked first then learned, they had a movement cycle I could be entertained by even if I didn’t understand it. Curling is like that, I watched curling for the first time during the ‘02 Olympics and something about it just grabbed me, but it took me 3 or 4 matches to start to really understand the scoring, and the implications of the scoring system fascinate my game theory mind. If the game was on TV more I’d watch it, but it entertained me BEFORE I understood it.
Something about soccer entertained you enough to get familiar with it. To me soccer still has too much time when all it seems to be doing is marking time, there’s a lot of fencing in it, two sides looking for the other to make a mistake. But where fencers will spend seconds tapping blades looking for the minute slip, soccer will spend 5 or 10 minutes bouncing it back and forth. It’s not a terrible sport to me, it’s just not that great, and in the modern world of options I no longer spend time on not that great.