Finagle007

Hilarious takedown of the world's most boring sport. It made me laugh out loud several times. I love @Quillette even more now. 😅 I don't think I've ever managed to sit through a soccer match while paying uninterrupted attention for more than ten minutes. I'm simply bored out of my skull. And the only thing more tedious than soccer is soccer commentary. Still, I'll give Belgium's next match against Spain another chance. (I slept like a baby while they were pummeling the US—it was 2 a.m. here.) That said, I'll happily concede one enormous point in soccer's favor: international football has probably done more to promote racial harmony and mutual understanding than all the NGO reports, political parties, diversity workshops, and media pundits combined. Now on to the indictment (with some hyperbole, but that's what makes it funny). Nothing ever happens in soccer: "Every four years the world gathers to remind Americans that soccer is boring. The World Cup arrives, a billion people weep with joy, and everyone who wasn't indoctrinated before the age of six sits there waiting for something…anything to happen. Then suddenly it almost does. Then just as quickly it doesn't. Then it almost does again. This is the rhythm of the world's most boring game." "Soccer just drones on—pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again—for ninety minutes, and almost nothing ever finishes. It’s all middle." "Put these statistics together and the incentives are perverse. Giving up a goal is catastrophic, and the chance of scoring isn’t worth the risk of getting caught upfield when the other team counterattacks. So from the opening whistle the smart play isn’t to attack—it’s to play not to lose. Hold your shape, keep everyone back, pass it sideways, and wait for a mistake." It's dumb luck: "One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favourite fails to win 45 per cent of the time." It bans the one thing humans excel at: "It’s not that dribbling, passing, and shooting with your feet is unimpressive. It’s that it’s impressive the way a dog walking on its hind legs is impressive: the miracle is that it can be done at all, not that this is the highest use of the organism. It would be like a version of basketball where you’re only allowed to dribble with your head. The best players would be some of the best athletes on earth—and they’d be demonstrating nothing except how much human talent can be squandered by arbitrarily banning the one thing we’re good at, provided you force enough children to practice." The intellectualism is insufferable: "The more a sport has to be intellectualised, the more boring it is to watch. And with the exception of baseball, the world’s second most boring sport, no sport is intellectualised like soccer. Tell a soccer fan how bored you are at 0-0 with five minutes left and you’ll be told you don’t understand the buildup, the spacing, the shape, the press, the movement off the ball. It’s a status move: the less obvious the entertainment, the more refined you get to feel for claiming to see it." Even the elite media implicitly admit it's boring: "Nobody bloviates for two thousand words about the hidden genius of a zero-zero tie. When a sport is genuinely thrilling, the writing is about the sport. When it isn’t, the writing gets very spiritual fast. Suddenly it’s about mortality and belonging and the human capacity for grace, the prose swelling to fill the silence where the excitement was supposed to be.⁠⁠" Conclusion: "But that's why it’s so tragic. Soccer takes the largest, most brutally filtered athletic talent pool on earth and wastes it by paying players millions of dollars to jog around in circles for ninety minutes and try to score once with their feet."