The World Cup
The USA lost to Belgium and we exit another World Cup empty handed, just like always. America caught Soccer Fever, but thankfully it was easily remedied with a few antibiotics and the symptoms should clear up if they haven’t already. There may be some lingering Tim Howard infatuation, but it will pass. The worst of the symptoms have passed, such as scarf wearing bros with bad haircuts littering our parks with pickup games of soccer pretending like they know what they are doing and the terrible bandwagoners plastering soccer memes all over social media despite few of them even being able to name a player on the team. By the time the finals hit America will be back to normal, chattering about football news and complaining about that Obama guy. Hey Obama, your presidency has so far been below my expectations, pick it up you bum.
Also, as a side note…does the World Cup trophy creep anyone else out? The weird almost organic design of the bottom half makes me think it looks like an H.R.Geiger designed Alien Egg.
‘murica got knocked out? Thanks, Obama.
Nah don’t worry. We’ll always have “real” football fans that wear Messi jerseys everywhere even though La Liga ended two months ago.
Duh, they’re just being ahead of the curve for next season!
I dealt with a minor infection thanks to a soccer obsessed coworker and a good friend that lives in Chile. Still not a fan, but I think I have more appreciation for the game of soccer now. Still sucks next to football and baseball. Plus now I can go back to boycotting the world cup.
The world cup is awesome. No other major sport with true world champ/competition.
If we ever want American football to be popular or even relevant outside of America,
we need to stop being bitter, narrow-minded douchecakes about the world’s most popular
sport (among other things). We’re the greatest country in the world, and as far as sports are concerned, we sure don’t act like it. Too many people make us look like an english speaking North Korea
and it’s shameful. Let’s accept the wonder that is worldwide organized sports and unite for it.
“No other major sport with true world champ/competition.” Baseball? World baseball classic? It was in the Olympics before 2008 when they suspended it because of PEDs. Also in the Olympics: basketball and hockey. How many international players do we seem to see nowadays in the mlb and nba? There are probably more Canadians, Russians, and eastern Europeans in the NHL than Americans.
I’m all for a more international society, but most American sports fans aren’t, and they’re the market you need to convince. You don’t convince Texans to like soccer by trying to imitate premier League style and Brazilian soccer culture. America is a weird country that’s a completely different kind of market than the rest of the world. If you want to make Americans care, you have to appeal to the way they like their sports, not try to make them like how other countries like their sports.
Also I refuse to praise the world cup because FIFA is so goddamn corrupt they make congress look like a bunch of choir boys.
Baseball got kicked from the olympics because it was boring. It was a summer olympic sport that took place during the MLB/NPB/KBO seasons, so all of the players were either minor leaguers or independent leaguers looking for a big break. Therefore, it was boring because all of the big-name, exciting players were off playing in the MLB/NPB/KBO, while all of the olympic guys were little-known.
By the way,
NPB=Nippon Professional Baseball (Japan)
KBO=Korean Baseball Organization (South Korea)
You don’t convince Texans to like soccer because we have such a large immigrant population many Texans already like it. Try convincing Alabama or Kentucky
soccer sucks
americans won’t jump on the soccer train until they come up with a way to make the score 32-14.
gone are the days of the defensive minded teams in football, baseball is all about home runs and not the pitchers duel, even hockey scoring has gone up with the rule changes there.
most people don’t care about the strategy, technique or careful coaching to win a tight evenly matched game.
look at how everyone jumped on the Denver offensive jugger-naught last year and barely paid any attention to the seahawks who had the most well balanced team in the NFL and SLAUGHTERED the Broncos beginning to end.
and like i said at the beginning… soccer sucks
Except the World cup isn’t truly a “World” cup. It’s really just a “South American/European” cup. Australia, North America, Asia, and Africa almost never adequately compete in the World cup due to lack of interest. The World Cup is very much a eurocentric theme that shows the double standard. When we call ourselves “World Champions” in the NFL, we get criticized, but when a European/South American team becomes the World Champion of soccer (football), nobody complains because they shouldn’t.
lolwut?
Just like weak divisions send their division champ into the playoffs, the “weaker” continents send their best teams to the world cup.
And the big difference: EVERY country in the world is allowed to participate in the qualification round. Only the host is preselected! In the end you get a true World Champion.
In the NFL you have 32 preselected teams, from 31 cities, ftom 1 country. There is no chance for an other team to participate, no promotion/relegation (you can lose all 16 games in one season without any consequences for the next season?). Yea, that is the right formula to create a world champion.
I am the 100 metres world champion by the way. The fact that only a few friends of mine were allowed to compete is not relevant!
I hate this “world champion” argument. Seriously.
There is a case to be made about it in baseball and maybe in hockey, where there are other notable leagues that are on reasonable par (KHL, NPB, KBO — and I’d love to see legitimate champions tournaments between winners too) (a discussion with regards to the term in those sports is outside the scope of this comments section) — but this just isn’t the case for football. Take the top team in Europe/Asia/Latin America and they will lose 9 out of 10 to your average college team in the US. The CFL *might* be legitimate to only lose 4 out of 10 (again, to the college team, not the NFL team) but Canadian football is arguably a different sport. If you want to really “start something” then actually build a league that would have a chance.
As to the “preselected” bit, the US franchise model is different from the Euro club model. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. But with the way the draft system works as well, the franchise model is definitely the best way to handle football in the US. The NFL is the most competitive league in all of sports worldwide, imho. Teams get better and worse way faster than in other sports, so the club model would be silly.
Well, the part of the “World Champion” argument in not only that you may be the best in your sport (which the NFL apparently is, no doubt about that) but that everybody gets a shot at at least trying to win or at lest “get closer than expected”.
About the original post in this thread: I think that’s what he meant. Soccer is the one sport most nations care about, it is the most popular sport in most of the countries of the world and in the top in almost every other. And those countries do care – in Africa the results may be even more important than in Europe. And it is way more competitive, on a grand world scale, than any other sport as a result. True, for the top nations you could say ice hockey is close, but there’s not many people interested in the equatorial regions. Other sports have similar issues and regions where they are developed.
And that is a special appeal of the World Cup to its fans that other competitions just do not have: almost everybody in the whole world cares. Of course more so if your own country is taking part.
But these three points, everybody can enter, everybody cares, and everybody knows the rules well enough to watch it, make the World Cup a special occasion in world sports that not even the olympics can match in mass appeal.
Of course, if you do not like soccer yourself, that is not of much help, and why should it be? It is perfectly fine not to care about an event (put those air quotes around avery “everybody” I used up to now) or anything else. But if you would try to understand what others see in it instead of somehow trying to convince them that they are wrong and why your sport should be considered better, that would be fine. (this last paragraph is not directed especially at mainstreet)
Us NFL guys can’t really complain about 1-1-1 being good enough to make the second round in soccer. In 2010 Seattle made the playoffs with a 7-9 record, over two 10-6 teams, two 9-7 teams, and two 8-8 team.
Those 8-8 teams were the Oakland Raiders and the Jacksonville Jaguars.
A team a full game worse than both Jacksonville and Oakland made it to the final 8 in the NFL. I can’t even fathom that.
What? Of course we can complain about it. How often does 7-9 happen? It’s happened exactly once, and if you remember, everyone was talking about how stupid it was that this was possible. We complained about it when it happened to us, and it’s only happened once! The reason we haven’t changed anything? because 99% of the time, it doesn’t happen like that. If we reached a point where losing teams were making the playoffs on a regular basis, the NFL would do something about it.
In soccer it happens all the time. These are different cases.
Well, you completely missed the Jaguars/Raiders joke (coming from a Browns fan, so three tiers of recent loserdom), but if you want to be serious about loser teams making the playoffs, the NFL’s push for more playoff teams, when it eventually goes through because money, is pretty close to being a lock for .500 teams in the playoffs. If one wild card spot was added to history, the last time the equivalent of 1-1-1 would have had no team in the playoffs would have been 2009.
Only like, five more spots until I get to see another Browns playoff game!
Your version of the World Cup trophy looks a lot like a gilded penis.
Well let’s be happy that we didn’t get shamed by Ghana for a third straight time.
why does the football have camel toe?
Okay, no offense, but what’s the deal with you hating soccer? C’mon man! It’s action packed.
Yes, it can be hard to follow, it’s like watching hockey game. Anything could happen in the 90 minute span. Literally, anything. Besides, it’s the only thing that bridges the gap between hockey season and football season during the summer….
Please do not equate soccer with hockey in any way, shape, or form.
Not a singular soccer player could SURVIVE a game of junior hockey, let alone professional hockey. The level of toughness is completely different, the skill set is different, the games move at different speeds so field/ice-vision in soccer would not translate to hockey, and that goofy thing soccer players do to let the ball go out of bounds would result in deaths in hockey. Also soccer players are a bunch of whining crybabies. They are not tough. Their toughness level is questionable. Any athlete in any other professional sport is tougher. Soccer players are wimpy, weak, feeble, fragile, little boys.
If your only way of comparing the two is that you get easily confused by both… that would be the only time to ever mention those two sports in the same sentence.
If you are looking for “Football Lite” – watch a CFL game or an Aussie Rules Game, not a game of fuuuttbol (or whatever greasy skids are calling it nowadays).
Oh wait, that might cause more confusion…
I always wonder about the logic behind this argument: why should a soccer player (or a baseball player) “survive” in hockey? It’s not what their sport is about. The qualities of chess players, racecar drivers and golfers are different to those of wrestlers. So saying your sport is superior because other players would suck at it is somewhat silly. Your hockey players wouldn’t hold much chance on a soccer field either. No, not even physically (unless you talk about winning brawls, but that’s not what either sport is about). They can adapt to a certain extent, but every sport has different types of condition it needs. In this case you can then not compare any two sports.
So the bottom line is: like hockey (and many more sports), but unlike gridiron or baseball, soccer has continuous play. Which is a different thing to adapt to.
You’ll never see an end to those symptoms because you live in Portland.
I was going to say… Dave might find the sport more enjoyable if he didn’t live in goddamn hipster central.
Not the biggest soccer fan in the world but will always cheer on the USA in anything. Hell, I’d root for them in a cricket tournament. Or whatever they call it.
“The entire world is wrong and America is right”
He mad.
Dave’s just jealous