waauw wrote:Dukasaur wrote:Soccer is boring. If you called it "orgasm" you could probably get more people to play.
Do we need more people? It's already by far the most popular sport on the planet.
I've played soccer exactly 1 time in my life. I can tell you the year and month; that's how anomalous an event it is. It was September of 1981. If I worked hard, I could probably narrow it down to the exact day, but I don't want to spend that much effort.
I've played real football (all three variations, Canadian, American, and Australian) hundreds of times, starting while I was still in school probably circa 1973 or so, but continuing long into my adult life, at least until 1996.
I've intentionally watched soccer on TV exactly once. It was in 1984, and it was England's Milk Cup. I think it was probably in April but I could be wrong about the month. Fanatics can probably correct me here and say in what month the Milk Cup is played. I had just moved into a new apartment and my landlord invited me downstairs to watch the game. I was skeptical, but an offer of free beer sealed the deal. I resolved to give the sport a fair chance, to stay awake and pay attention to the entire game and try my best to enjoy it. I did succeed in that resolve and watched the entire game with some interest. Liverpool won, which was apparently just Things One Expects, all other clubs in the country, nay the world, perhaps the universe, being inferior to Liverpool in patriotism, courage, intelligence, virtue, and ancestry.
Sean (my landlord) was helpful to the newbie and gave detailed explanations of every maneouvre, trip, and fall, along with detailed essays upon the various players, even listing their political affiliations, sexual orientation, and ancestry. (I was surprised that many of the players could run on two legs at all, considering how many of them were the product of various copulations of dogs, pigs, goats and sheep.) Nevertheless, despite Sean's patient efforts I could not detect any form of strategy. The players seemed to run about in random directions, and if by random chance they came into the vicinity of the ball, to kick it in random directions. Maybe I was spoiled, having long been stewed in the juices of American football with its complicated rules and sophisticated plays, but soccer seemed to me to resemble nothing more than the movements of molecules undergoing Brownian motion.
I will grant one point to soccer. I do like how in soccer (at least in England; don't know how it goes in other countries) a team doesn't just buy its way into the league for cash the way it's done in Canadian and American football. In soccer, one has to start in a low-tier league and play their way into the higher tiers, which seems the right way to do things.
Needless to day, I've seen Australian football on TV several times, Canadian football a hundred, and American football possibly a thousand.
I went to a professional soccer game exactly once. That was also in 1984, soon after watching the Milk Cup game, while my soccer enthusiasm was at its fiery peak. I went to see the Toronto Blizzard. I must admit that the live game was more exciting than the televised version. I still did not detect any type of strategy, but from close up the random motions of the athletes were exciting in and of themselves. They ran so hard that you could hear their shoes hitting the sod, so it was exciting in the same sense that horse racing is exciting. Very fast, very powerful movements. I'm being as fair as I can here, and I can see how people get excited by soccer. Still, the lack of set plays left the intellectual side of me totally unsatisfied, and although I did toy with the idea of going to see the Blizzard again, the right time never came around, and later that year the Blizzard (indeed, the entire North American Soccer League) ceased to exist. Despite having a really good team that year (they went all the way to the League Championship, beating San Diego and narrowly losing to Chicago in the Final) the Blizzard were never capable of selling out the stadium.
I've been to professional football games four times. Once to see my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers crush, strangle, obliterate and humiliate some degenerate riff-raff from St. Louis. Three times to see the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. None of those games were completely sold out either, but they were a lot better attended than the Blizzard game I went to, and both those franchises continue to do well.
So, from my experience (and who else's experience should I go by?) soccer is somewhat dull and not played by many. I understand that in Europe millions of people go to the games to throw garbage and bottles at each other, and in Latin America they even have public executions of players who score on their own net, but I'm not sure if either of those qualifies as playing the game.
