Why i like soccer

[Lars77]

Since there's so many people complaining that soccer is boring, i thought i'd try and get to the core of why soccer (or association football as it's actually called) is so popular.


I think one of the main reasons is it's significance for local culture and tradition. Most European and latin american football clubs are still associations. Sure, on the top level in Europe a lot of them has changed into limited companies, often to avoid the entire club having to fold if they end up in financial difficulty, and to maximise profits to run the first team. Still, in the German league for example, it's illegal for clubs to do so, they have to be associations (except Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, who started out, and are still owned by corporations Bayer and VW). I think this is the chief reason why the German league is the football league with the highest attendance in the world. They are also legally required to sell a percentage of tickets cheaply to make the game available to everyone.
In Europe and Latin America especially, football clubs represents local communities. They are not just franchises with a theme, a name and an image. If there is an equivalent to this in the US, i guess the closest is the college sports teams. This strong link between the local community and the club is what makes soccer big. And that is why for example, a small, lower league team from an English village is capabale of bringing 40.000 fans to Wembley stadium if they should manage to progress to a cup final.

Tradition is another important factor. It's been played in pretty much the same way for more than one hundred years, with just a few rule modifications. The pitch is the same, the goal is the same. The tactics and the athletes change and progress. This means that it becomes possible, at least to some extent, to compare teams and players through the ages. That is why Argentinians, Brazilians, Dutch and Germans can argue about who was the best player in the history of the game. Diego Maradona, Pele, Johan Cruyff, or Franz Beckenbauer. It's also traditional on a personal level. Many many football fans have started to support teams because they were brought by their father. Who in turn were brought to games by their father. People often inherit allegiance to a club from their parents.

When it comes to the game itself, football has a unique flow and dynamic to it. Sure a game can be boring, it can be boring as hell. But at any second something could happen that lights a spark and changes it completely. And a lot of times that happens. No game is the same. No goal is scored in exactly the same way. The fact that the clock never stops helps this dynamic a lot. Most other team sports stop the clock when play stops, so it's like pulling a switch. Football just keeps going.

And it's the variety. In many team sports, a player in a given position has to have a certain set of skills, otherwise he will not play well in that position. In soccer, players can be short, tall, fast, strong. They can use different styles to do well in their position. They can run a lot off the ball, they can be great passers, great shooters, great crossers. And it's up to the coach to choose a formation and compose the team in such a way that players flurish and compliment each others' skills. Because that's where the magic really happens. The individuals have to work together, exploit the skills of their team mates to achieve their goals. The result is that teams have completely different styles, they play in different ways depending on the material available to them. In football, there are many ways to achieve the same goal: Win the game. Very few, if any other sports are like that.

And they're not all wimps faking injuries. Behind every great team, there's usually a hard player. Often he's an intimidator and a leader. Players like the Brazilian Dunga, the engine in their 1994 World Cup winning team. Or Roy Keane, the Irish amateur boxer/footballer who probably contributed more than anyone to Manchester United's ascent to greatness. I'm also a big hockey fan, but some of the toughest athletes i've seen have been football players.

[Stevepol]

1. Very illuminating post. Helps to understand the appeal of the World Cup.

[malaise]

2. Nice post

:hi:

[wilt the stilt]

3. two disagreements

all sports use what is given to them as far as personnel to compete. For example in baseball you can have a dominant pitching team or a dominant hitting team. You can have a homer hitting team or a running team that steals bases. Each requires different skills and different types of players. Your strategy is dictated by your personnel.

The same can be said about football as you have run dominant teams and pass dominant teams.

Basketball has fastbreak teams and half court teams.

Each of these types of teams will be dictated by your personnel.

The one overriding requirement for soccer is you have to be fast.

The unique sport among all of these is baseball. It is the only sport where you can be flat and slow. the overriding requirement for baseball is eyesight and even that can be overcome if you are a pitcher.

[caraher]

4. I'm still a bit fuzzy about the "associations"

We don't really have an equivalent in the US; maybe some of the pro teams that don't have a single dominant owner?

That reason for liking soccer isn't going to get anyone who didn't grow up with it to like the sport. If you didn't grow up living and dying with the fortunes of some team you're more likely to like it or not based on what happens on the pitch for 90 minutes.

[Lars77]

5. The Green Bay Packers are community-owned at least..

but that's the only team i can think of on the professional level in the US.

Still, i'm not actually trying to make you like soccer because the European and latin American teams are associations. I was using it as a reason to explain why football is such a huge sport around the world.

Teams has a myriad of different reasons to exist. For example Celtic FC of Glasgow, Scotland were founded in 1888 to play games to collect money for the soup stations in Glasgow, serving the poor catholic population who had escaped the potato famine in Ireland. Their local rivals Rangers stem from the protestant, pro-british population in Glasgow. To this day Celtic fans fly Irish flags at the games, while Rangers fly the British union flag and Rangers fans are still chanting about the potato famine. There's usually not a Scottish flag in sight.

Many of them simply started out as sporting associations, clubs to promote exercise and health in their local communities.

[two gun sid]

6. Nice post.

[redqueen]

7. Nicely put.

I like it because at the top levels, I think it is simply beautiful to watch.

[dmallind]

8. Why I don't (and no - no mention of lack of scoring)

I grew up with soccer. I spent the first twenty-odd years of my life thinking footballs were round, so please dispense with notions of stereotyped American ignorance from the outset.

I played it (mediocre at best admittedly). I watched it. But never really thought of it as a great sport. Still don't. Why?

1) It misses out on the "wow - I wish I could do that!" factor. Few people can even come close to hitting a 95mph fastball, or dunking a basketball, or throwing a 60yd pass to a target the size of a dinner plate moving at 25mph while 11 huge people try to crush you. Just about anybody can kick a ball with at least basic accuracy. Sure some people can do it better than the rest of us, but the difference is not so dramatic or so impressive to watch. Soccer may very well be the most accessible team sport to play, but this universality is a drawback as a spectator sport.

2) The action is neither active enough nor discrete enough in significance. Even though soccer moves continuously (As does hockey and basketball in all but the last few minutes, let alone rugby) much of the action is not contributive to the success or failure of the team. A large section of the 90 some minutes consists of back and forward midfield passing. People with advanced knowledge of the game can maybe - with a good enough view - see the attempts at creating space or positive matchups, but it lacks the direct feedback to positive or negative emotional responses of passing in basketball or hockey which creates either success or failure on a nigh-instantaneous basis and which are also seen as strategic moves by cognoscenti.

3) Yes this complaint is a bit more hackneyed, but it's also real. While nobody wants to see soccer become a hockey-level collision sport, the absurd fakery of being fouled (sure sure it's "illegal" but it's about as really illegal as driving 57 on I-95) makes the game a farce at the pro and international level (watch a casual game in the park between boys and this is strangely absent for some reason...). I have yet to see a game that did not have at least ten obvious dives caused by contact that would not have seriously hurt or impeded a 4 year old. This interrupts what should be one of soccer's best attributes, and is often claimed as one still - the flow of movement. In a broader context it also devalues the athletes themselves. You don't have to be a lumbering testosterone-sodden ape to lose respect for the undeniable athleticism of fakers like Ronaldo and Klingsman when their antics seriously disrupt the action and distort the results.

4) The influence and opacity of officiating on outcomes. Even soccer's greatest fans will admit that it offers relatively few opportunities to change the result. When these opportunities are also the plays that are more likely than any other to be created or negated by officiating calls (penalties/offsides etc) and when the officials do not need to be specific in their explanations or consistent in their calls, it cheapens the results and makes watchers question the point of the effort to create those chances. American football has plenty of officiating issues but they rarely change the outcome of the single scoring play, or one of two or three at most. In baseball or hockey or basketball too , officiating calls rarely change the result as there are too many opportunities for the teams to do so, and calls that give or take away points are much more closely scrutinized and cogently explained and defended.

Without addressing these flaws, soccer is unlikely to pose much of a challenge to the major league sports here.

[Threedifferentones]

9. It's easy to kick a soccer ball accuratly?

Yet goals are also rare, at least as rare as in hockey, despite the fact that in hockey the goalie takes up the vast majority of the net. The standard soccer goal is TWENTY FOUR FEET WIDE and eight feet tall. Goals are rare, but anyone can kick a ball where they want consistently?

The only thing you can possibly mean is that it is easy for you, which I doubt. If it is, it's a sick twist of fate you were born around people who don't like soccer.

Your first point is a joke. It proves immediately you are simply ignorant of the game. That's okay, I used to hate American football, until I attended the University of Tennessee.

I think what you mean is that it's easy to place a ball on the ground, take a couple of steps back at an angle that suits you, and boot the ball to the part of the soccer field you want. What you don't mean is that it is easy to kick a ball passed to you through the air with one touch into the net while running quickly. Or that passing a ball right to your teammates head is easy? Once again, and you'll hear soccer fans saying this a lot, all while being pursued at high speed.

Dribbling a soccer ball at full pace with good control is really freaking hard. You can't do it, I practiced for years and couldn't consistently. And I don't even run that fast compared with pros. The faster you run, the harder it gets.

Controlling a ball and doing what you want with it with one or two touches while running quickly is really freaking hard without your hands. The wow factor is absolutely there in soccer.

I did not bother to read the rest of your post, because you just don't want to be a fan of the game. That's fine.

I've never understood why someone would subject themselves to watching a baseball game. 95% of the time everyone is standing still, if you don't count a pitch or a swing as movement. It requires almost no team work, it is a collection of individual efforts more than a collective effort.

But, my complaints don't really prove baseball is boring. They just show that getting into watching a sport requires you to either play it seriously or falling in love with a team. If the American team ever wins a world cup, I have a feeling Americans might become more excited about the game.

[Lars77]

10. It's a very strange argument

I can go to a park and throw a baseball fairly accurately and consistently. But that does not mean i can throw it like that over the distance of the baseball diamond at 95 miles an hour.

That's the difference between recreation and pro sports.

[redqueen]

11. That's where I stopped reading, too.

Didn't think there was any point bothering to explain how wrong it was, though. Thanks for bothering.

[wilt the stilt]

12. I don't agree with the poster that there is no wow factor

I think soccer players are talented and well skilled players and I don't believe Americans don't like it because they don't "get it". I think the people think us Americans who "don't get it is an absurd and real put down of our capacity to understand "other sports".

I do think soccer would be fun to play and I was told by many soccer players who I played basketball with that I was the perfect size and coordinated enough to be really good at soccer. I just loved basketball to much to start to play soccer.

I maintain that basketball is the most fun to play because everyone gets to score and everyone develops individual moves. It also demands as much teamwork as any other game.



Many of us have watched and played sports into our forties. We understand games very well. The earlier poster actually captured what is one of the bigger problems and Landon Donovan actually said it on his interview. The better team doesn't always win.
As the earlier poster acknowledged in almost all other sports the better team wins. This is frustrating to many viewers.

When the average "soccer fan" states that we don't get the drama. What incredible bullshit. We get drama and we get sports.

As`I continue to say the hardest game is baseball. It is highly skilled and hitting, fielding and throwing a baseball are the most difficult of all the skills.

Batting averages for superstars are .300 which means you fail 70% of the time. errors for fielding are calculated and put on the scoreboard and ERA's are kept and last but not least an error in fielding can cost you a game and you may never be involved in another play or at bat the rest of the game.

No other sport with the exception of golf is so exact.

[dmallind]

13. You didn't even understand the part you did read obviously NT

[Threedifferentones]

14. Irony award, lol