The World’s Sport

Ya know I haven’t written about sports in a while for some reason. I have a ton of sports opinions (well if I’m being honest my actual sports knowledge doesn’t extend beyond football and basketball), but I rarely share them because I don’t think anyone really cares what anyone else thinks about sports, they just want to share their own opinion. Well I’m gonna share my opinion right now anyway. Soccer is a garbage sport. See that is on one hand a controversial opinion and on the other hand an extremely common one as well. The way that plays out is that soccer fans paint the opinion giver as a dumb American who doesn’t understand nuance or something and writes them off as a guy that can only enjoy a sport if there’s a million points. See I’m not that. But yea, soccer still sucks.

Now I’m a firm believer in ‘do you’. What floats my boat doesn’t have to move yours. Even when it comes to things that I completely believe are black and white, if you believe something else then hey, do you. So for the soccer heads out there, enjoy! Who am I to tell you what sport to gain pleasure from taking in. I simply want to explain to anyone who will listen why this particular sport is hot trash. Here goes:

• There’s not enough scoring: Ha! Thought I wouldn’t go here, didn’t ya? Well guess what, son? I did. Any sport where you play 90 minutes and regularly finish 1–0 or 2–1 is hot garbage. Different games have different goals. In track you have to cross a finish line before someone else. In diving you have to receive a higher score from a judge than your opponent. But if the goal of the game is to score as many points as possible OR at least outscore your opponent, having a game in which the actual scoring is so hard is just counterproductive. If scoring was hard because of some entertaining reason, well then we’d be talking. If there were alligators every 15 yards (meters? Who knows how those weirdos measure distance) or so and had to be navigated, cool. If you went Running Man and had a guy with a chainsaw attacking ball handlers, I’d get it. Even if the defense was drop kicking guys and throwing each other at opponents Streets of Rage style I’d be down. But scoring is hard in soccer just because there’s a bunch of dudes in the way and their trying to take the ball but even if they get it they… won’t really do anything with it most of the time. That’s not all that interesting, guys.
• Offsides is a stupid, estupido, stupide rule: Lets recap. An offensive player can’t be closer to an opponents goal than the ball and any of the opponents players (other than the goalie) at any point unless the ball is in the air being passed. Supposedly this stops cherry picking. That’s dumb. Is there a rule in basketball that all 5 defenders have to be across half court? Is there a rule in football that says a receiver can’t be further than the DBs? What’s the point? If teams want to leave a guy to cherry pick then hey that’s one less defender to worry about. Plus if it starts to be a problem ya know what teams could do? Leave an offensive player back there to prevent it. Know what that would do? Remove two players from the mass of players in each others way and open things up more. Its a silly rule that prevents whatever the soccer equivalent would be of long touchdown passes and home runs. It’s counter fun!
• Too many players on the field: Why is soccer 11 on 11? Why not make it 9 on 9? That would be 10 times more fun because it would be slightly easier for offenses to operate. That’s it. That’s the only reason. It seems like soccer does everything in it’s power to make things hard which in turn bores me to tears.
• The fun parts of soccer happen like once a game: Contrary to popular belief, scoring a goal isn’t inherently exciting. People get excited about them in large part because they happen so rarely and announcers lose their mind and players celebrate wildly. So sure, you can say that is the exciting part of soccer but that’s the peripheral stuff like liking college football because of the fight songs. Sure there are a few cool moves or goals but those things rarely happen. Most of the game is boredom on boredom on boredom

So yea, soccer sucks. To me at least. And I’m right. For me. I only have about half a billion people that disagree with me but hey, a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things. They probably think golf is a sport too….