Note: This is a rewrite of a popular post from four years ago, the last time I had a reason to think about international kick-ball. I’ve expanded on the topic a bit and updated the references to make it more timely. This will be the last soccer post for four years.
Way back in the olden thymes, when the World Cup was held in the United States, I went to the games played in Foxboro. I happen to be at the airport when the Greek team arrived, so I got to see them buying Marlboros at the gift shop. Seeing a bunch of swarthy guys chain smoking outside the terminal is my main memory of international soccer. That and how all of them were glaring at every piece of tail in sight. It was as if they just got out of prison. Little dogs and little men have no control of their sex drive.
That said, it was a good time in Boston during the World Cup, and I had fun at the games I attended. Soccer is boring, dull, and tedious on television. 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 cannonball to the knee, the crowd roars in unison, thus making it more like a stage play than a sporting event. You lose that interplay on TV, so it comes off as absurd. That and the Greek fans I was with knew how to jeer.
Watching soccer live is also better than TV, because you get to see the players that are not involved in the play. They are often chatting 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 also get a better sense of what is really happening. The strategy comes into focus sooner than on TV. 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.
World Cup soccer and Olympic soccer are fun because so much is at stake. The Little League World Series gets big TV ratings in the U.S. for the same reason. People do not watch little kids play baseball, unless it is their kids. Put the same kids in an international tournament and suddenly the nation gets interested. There is also the fact that the World Cup features the best players in the world. The fact is, Lionel Mesi or Neymar kicking a ball around will always seem more thrilling than two unknown guys.
Now, what has always turned me off about soccer is the cultural angle. When I was a boy, our betters in America were trying to force soccer and the metric system on us. The people doing it were all loathsome snobs. Worse yet, all of them were the children of working-class people who should have known better. But their parents sent them off to the state college and they came back thinking they were sophisticated citizens of the world, so they loved soccer. Yep, soccer was a Boomer fetish.
Even all these year on, I still think of those smug assholes of my youth, whenever soccer comes to my attention. I associate it with the ridiculous poseurs who turn up in every Progressive cultural fad. I have probably heard “it is the most popular sport in the world” a million times in my life. That is the sort of thing stupid people say when they want to sound sophisticated. In most of the world, soccer is the sport of the poor and lower classes. That means our bourgeois bohemians are aping the mores of chavs. Good job phonies!
A recent development, one that I find most irritating, is the fake passion of cosmopolitan men for Premiere League teams in Britain. They saw videos of Euro-guy with his hands on his head in agony over a soccer match and now they are pretending to have had a lifelong passion for a soccer club in England. 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. He says “footie” now. He went bald and his wife is fat. That is justice.
It is all a pose, of course. What is 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 everyone else to play along, in order to be polite. Everyone knows the poseur is full of crap, but the guy who says what everyone thinks, risks being castigated for being rude. These people turn our morality on its head, by making our virtues into vices. They deserve to be hated.
One other thing that turns me off is the “you don’t understand the complexity of the sport” line from people who probably do not understand the sport at all. Soccer’s appeal is based on its simplicity. Real fans know this, but poseurs prattle on about the complexity in order to shift the focus from their misplaced and irrational love for a foreign sport, onto the skepticism of their critics. In other words, they do not really like soccer, they just want to signal their membership in a group they believe is superior. It is Star Bellied Sneetch-ism.
Another thing about soccer is the coverage in the American sporting press. The same people who normalized porn, have tried to use soccer in their war on whites. They have endlessly promoted soccer, despite the fact Americans have limited interest. Whenever there is a big match in Europe, we get coverage of how the foreign fans reacted to the result. A standing head in the sporting press is “Watch Fans React To…” and then the thing that happened in a soccer match. It is an effort to weaponize the bandwagon effect.
Of course, now that European teams look more like refugee camps than European, the anti-whites love soccer even more. They use the browning of the traditional World Cup powers as “proof” that the great replacement is going to be wonderful. You can almost hear them saying, “See how much better sports will be when the whites are replaced with the non-whites?” Like so much about society, soccer has become another weapon wielded by the anti-whites in the race war. It is a reminder of what they plan for us.
Anyway, that is my problem with soccer.
