Way back when the World Cup was in the States, I went to a bunch of the games. I even got to hang out with the Italian team for a short while when they got State-side. The first thing they did was stock up on Marlboros. Seeing a bunch of short swarthy guys chain smoking remains my main image of international soccer. That and how all of them were glaring at every piece of tail in sight. Little dogs and little men have no control of their sex drive.

That said, it was a good time and I had fun at the games. Soccer is a boring, dull and tedious sport on TV. The fake injuries are so absurd and embarrassing it is hard to tolerate. In person, the game is much better. When Raul collapses in a heap acting like he took a cannon ball to the knee, the crowd roars in unison, thus making it more like a play than a sporting event. You lose that interplay on TV and it comes off as absurd.

There are other aspects that make it better. You get to see the players not doing anything chat with one another like they are old friends bumping into one another on a stroll. On TV, the camera follows the ball and the players all look busy. Live, you get a better sense of what’s really happening. Since most of the games are fixed, it all makes more sense when you get to see all of the action and not just the group around the ball.

None of that turns me off of soccer. I just find it boring for the most part. World Cup soccer and Olympic soccer is fun because so much is at stake. The Little League World Series gets big TV rating for the same reason. People don’t watch little kids playing baseball, unless they are your children. Put the same kids in an international tournament and suddenly people get interested.

What turns me off of soccer is the cultural angle. When I was a boy, our betters were trying to force soccer and the metric system on us. The people doing it were all dickheads. Not a single one was anything but a loathsome snob. Worse yet, all of them were the children of working class people who knew better. But, Johnny and Betty went off to the state college and came back thinking they were better than everyone else.

Over time, those people have remained with us. When I think of soccer, I think of those smug assholes of my youth. I’ve probably heard “it is the most popular sport in the world” a million times in my life. That is the sort of thing stupid say when they want to sound sophisticated. In most of the world, soccer is the sport of the lower classes. That means out bourgeois bohemians are aping the mores of chavs. Good job.

A recent development, one that I find most irritating, is the fake passion of cosmopolitan men for Premiere League teams in Europe. They saw Bend It Like Beckham and now ape those characters, pretending to have had a lifelong passion for one soccer club or another. I have a friend who used to call soccer “fag ball” until about a decade ago. He became a vegan and started following soccer. He wears a Man U jersey and carries on about matches like the world depends on the outcome.

It is all a pose, of course. What’s odious about the poseur is he turns his self-loathing into your problem. The poseur apes the styles and attitude of others because he hates himself and cannot stand the sight of himself. His comical pretensions force the rest of us to be polite and accommodating to a fool, something no one enjoys. Unfair as it may seem, these people turn me off to soccer. Whatever those metrosexual fools are for, I’m against.

One other thing that turns me off is the “you just understand the complexity of the sport” line from people who probably don’t understand the sport at all. The reason people say this is to shift the focus from their misplaced and irrational love for a foreign sport, onto their critics. In other words, they don’t really like soccer, they just want to signal their membership in a group they believe is superior. It is Star Bellied Sneetch-ism.

Anyway, that’s my problem with soccer.