I am one of those who actually prefers a 2-1 pitchers’ duel, over a 10-9 slugfest.
And what about basketball, sure teams score a ton of points, but you could still tune into the last two minutes of most games without really missing much.
In soccer, if you blink, you could miss the important moment of a game. Plus you don’t have the constant stop/starts of the other sports, with TV Timeouts and all that nonsense.
Also soccer is about the drama over a long season, the best day of the season is the last week, not because of the teams battling for the title, but because of seeing which teams would avoid the drop......It was amazing on the last day of the EPL season last year, because the situation changed from minute-to-minute as teams scored goals, that made them safe, at the expense of other teams. It was hard to top that for pure drama. And avoiding the drop, in terms of financial impact, means even more than winning a title. It’s a huge drop in revenues between being in the EPL and the Championship (the 2nd Division).
Relegation is one of the most beautiful concepts in all of the wide, wide world of sports. I so wish it would catch on in some sport here.
You make some fair points, and let me clarify something that got lost in all the nuance of the rules, etc. I was not slamming soccer per se. I played it in little league in NC when that area of NC was one of the first areas in the entire nation to know what the sport was. The high school I attended was a pioneer in the sport in the Raleigh Durham area.
I do not dislike soccer per se. What I was making fun of is the soccer elite attitude. The fact that some folks took this ‘attack on soccer’ so personally proves my point that there is an elitism among soccer folks that is akin to the elitism among Prius drivers or folks with pink ribbons for breast cancer.
It is THAT and THAT ALONE that I am tweaking. I use some of the nuances of soccer and the bogus claim that it is the world’s most popular sport as a jumping off point - but the commentary was really a tweak on the similarities between the liberal mindset and the soccer elite mindset.
Yes, some folks prefer defensive oriented games in all sports, but not the majority of fans.