How Soccer is Ruining America: A Jeremiad

Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return.

What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.) The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.

For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.

1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.

2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.

Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, “Hey batter batter!” as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.

3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.

4) And then there is the question of gender. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.

Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.

Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and relevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.

I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me! Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. “Why not,” she asked? “Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? “Not at all,” I replied, “I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end.” That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.

Your problem comes in with the “defeated”. See to defeat all comers they have to play everybody and beat them. It’s rare in sports for anybody to play the whole league (though the NBA and NHL do it, but with very few games across to the other conference), but you make the not just play the whole league but BEAT everybody. That’s just not gonna happen. And of course in the tournament section, the playoff tree part of the schedule, as you point out, comers will be eliminated before your world champion gets to face them. So therefore your world champion will NOT have “defeated all comers” and therefore NOT, by your definition, be a World Champion.

Maybe there’s no argument in most sports. But boxing proves that international organizations are just as unilateral in deciding they hand out World Championships. There are four organizations (IBF, WBA, WBC and WBO) that hand out World Championships in boxing. Unilateral decision making by international bodies.

FIFA’s first “World Cup” was 1930, FIFA’s first competition was 1906, 3 years before non-Europeans were in.

They’re ALL hollow titles. They’re sports titles, none of them mean a damn thing. And pro-boxing proves that even when you have your precious international body there “world champion” title means nothing. It’s no different if there’s one participating country or a hundred, it’s all silly sports titles. You’re right in one thing, intergalactic champion is just as meaningless as world champion. What you don’t understand is that ALL world champion titles that have EVER been given out by ANY organization in ANY sport are JUST AS MEANINGLESS. FIFA is no different than the NFL, just a silly sports organization that unilaterally decided they were going to crown world champions.

Your semantics are ridiculous. Defeating the rest of the field means winning the competition according to the previously agreed rules.

If it's a race, then 1st place defeats everyone else.

If it's a series of races, then it's the best combination of results that wins.

If it's a league, it's the best league points total.

If it's a sudden death knockout competition it's the last team undefeated (but they don't play everyone, just one other team per elimination round.)

You are making up ridiculous criteria and applying them to things I never said to justify your indefensible position.

Have you ever actually competed in any kind of competition? just wondering..

You can label all sports titles as trivial if you so choose, but there are millions of people who make a living from those sports and their income is affected by their success, or lack of it, based on those titles.

And just what is your point about FIFA? It was founded in 1906 to administer the international game, it oversaw the soccer in the 1908 Olympics and added members from beyond Europe shortly after that. Argentina, Chile, The USA and South Africa all joined before the First World War. By the time they put together the World Cup it was a worldwide organization. It now has over 200 member countries. So I don't understand your beef. The World Cup is a Global competition, and even from the outset had robust international participation.

Talk about ridiculous semantics. You said to be a world champion you need to defeat all comers. Again if you want to change that go ahead but admit what you said. You’re the one that made up ridiculous criteria, I’m pointing it out, and now you want to weasel away and pretend you didn’t say it. “Defeat all comers” means defeat all comers, if you don’t like what it means retract, but don’t pretend it doesn’t mean it. Funny for a guy so picky about the high and important meaning of “World Champion” you sure are quick to want to make up new and lesser meanings for “defeat all comers”.

I’m not going to answer your well poisoning question because it’s immaterial.

People make money on trivial things. There’s many trivial industry, tourism, TV entertainment, movies, crafts, out door hobbies, and yes sports. It’s all still trivial. Fun, but trivial.

My point about FIFA, which has been plainly stated multiple times, is that they’re just another organization that unilaterally decided they got to declare national champions. Just like the NFL. You complain about the NFL making that decision all by themselves but ignore the fact that every organization that has ever handed out any title, which include FIFA and ISAF and all your other pet groups, made the exact same unilateral decision. All world champions are the result of a unilateral decision, by somebody wanting to make money on trivial things.

I’m not “weaseling my way out” of anything.

“All Comers” means everyone that comes to compete, as in all who enter to compete in the World Championship.

As you correctly state, there are almost no competition formats where a winner has to individually vanquish every other opponent, so why would you think I would mean that in my definition? You make no sense!

If you win the competition, you defeat all the other opponents according to the rules of the competition, how hard is that for you to understand?

Clearly it IS pretty hard for you, because it appears that you’ve never actually competed in anything but somehow from your vast experience and intellect you are able to tell those who have done so just what the rules are and how their achievements, if any, count for nothing.

You clearly don’t know what you are talking about.

BTW, FIFA didn’t “declare ANY National Champions”, the respective National associations did that based on their own National Domestic competitions, such as The Premier League (England), the Bundesliga (Germany), the Serie A Italy) or the Apertura (Argentina), - The winners of which DON’T call themselves WORLD Champions like the NFL does....LOL!

So, once again you are talking out of your ass..

And all the World Organizations I cited set the rules and administer the respective sports on a global basis and by global consent, and the entire world operates under those rules. So it is not “Unilateral” as you incorrectly claim, the only thing that is unilateral is the NATIONAL Football League (of the USA) staging a SINGLE COUNTRY “World Championship” excluding all teams from the other 49 countries that are affiliated to the World governing body for the sport.

How pathetic is that?

That is my last word, you are wasting my time.

But you still have the problem that everyone in the league isn’t necessarily everyone that WANTS TO or CAN compete. All leagues are artificially limited, so you never do face “all comers”.

Which is all part of my point. Once you start thinking “world champion” matters, that it actually has a set definition involving a particular level of competition, you’ve opened the door for increased silliness. Silliness like saying that a world champion must “defeat all comers” and then having to add all kinds of tweaks to the definition of “defeat all comers” to mean not truly defeating not really all but merely rising to the top of a preset heap constructed through artificial means by a group that unilaterally decided they get to hand out world championships.

The problem for you is the more tweaks you add to your definition of “defeat all comers” the closer you get to saying the NFL hands out World Championships.

Tehre you go with the well poisoning and ad hominems again. Shame shame shame. Stick to logic, needing fallacies just proves you wrong.

Brain fart, here’s the sentence I meant: My point about FIFA, which has been plainly stated multiple times, is that they’re just another organization that unilaterally decided they got to declare world champions. See how easy it is to admit a mistake. You should try it.

I doubt that’s your last word. And you’re wasting your own time. Don’t blame other people for the fact that you can’t put sports in perspective.

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