The World Cup is over. Yay for Spain.
Does anyone who wasn't born in Spain care?
I tried to watch some of it. Games were on in the morning as I got ready for work. That's how I got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer years ago, watching morning reruns. But as I watched soccer, it didn't take long to figure out why americans don't care for it- nothing happens. They kick the ball around a huge grassy surface with nothing of interest happening until someone manages to get the ball within striking distance- and that doesn't happen very often.
I'll admit I know nothing about the rules and strategy of soccer. I never played as a child as many other children do. But I also know little about strategy of ice hockey, and that's enjoyable to watch. When you boil both games down to their base essentials, they're the same game. Two teams compete to move an object across a playing surface and deposit it in the opponent's goal area. The differences sprout from there. One game is on grass, the other on ice. One is played with feet and the other with sticks. One with a ball, other with a puck.
Those differences alone aren't big deals. The biggest difference I see is the size of the playing surface and the number of players. Hockey is much smaller and with fewer players on the ice at any given time. The soccer field is gigantic. This works against soccer because it takes an excruciatingly long time to get the ball down the field. It hangs up in the air too long, and it's too easily disrupted by defenders. In hockey, a team can move the puck down the ice and attempt to score in a matter of seconds, resulting in 25-50 shots-on-goal a game, several them exciting even if they don't go in. Soccer enjoys a fraction of that.
Hockey, like other sports americans enjoy, benefits from non-scoring plays that are actually exciting and entertaining to watch. There are big hits, nifty stick handling & passing that build the excitement before a shot is fired. Watching midfield soccer is naptime. Turnovers in soccer are non-events. They seem to happen all the time. In American Football a turnover is a big deal, and often determines who wins the game. Turnovers in basketball can also result in big momentum swings.
Some sports are just fantastic on TV. Soccer aint one of them. In order to cover enough of the playing surface, the camera has to be so far back that you can't tell one player from another. When you can't identify the star player, a team lacks marketable character. It may as well be a video game where all the sprites are identical.
Soccer is the most watched sport in the world. But cricket, field hockey and ping pong also rate highly on that list, so there's no accounting for taste, or entertainment value. Some non-american people enjoy soccer because they have been raised on soccer. Others simply have no alternative in their native country. One thing they certainly enjoy about soccer is that they're better at it than we americans are. At least once every four years they can kick our ass and feel great about it. But seriously now, if we actually cared... if we even tried to compete... does anyone think we couldn't win it all? Our women did it a while back, right? If we raised soccer stars from a young age the way we raise and cultivate football stars and backetball stars and baseball stars and even golf stars, we'd be a major soccer power in the world. But american children get bored with playing soccer, and american adults have more entertaining alternatives to watch. We simply have better things to do.
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