Yeah the rankings are not very accurate. They've changed the system of ranking I think 2 years ago, now its more accurate, but still. There is another ranking on some website, they have their own system, that one is pretty good. I forgot how its called.
Its not boring, its just because you dont like it. If you did not like baseball, you were saying that you find baseball boring. People who do not like american football, the first thing they say is its boring. Its just a matter of taste en interest, dont hate on a sport.
So they suck in football too. Your point you try to make that football is not really a sport, or loser sport, or re ed sport is lame and unbiased. Look, I dont know about the mothers and their loser children, since I do not live in the States. But I do know that your image of football is very weak, and you make it look like a loser sport, that's just BS. Everywhere there are injuries, football has one ofthe most terrible injuries ever, more than baseball, basketball, american football. But why adding injuries into the argument?
everyone seems to be missing my point.
My point isn't about whether baseball is less boring than soccer.
Parents are protective of their kids when they are younger, they like to shelter them and control them. They force their kids into playing soccer because if they play baseball they might ride the bench, or stick out as the worst kid on the team. Sometimes parents can't accept when their kid sucks at sports, so soccer is the safest. They can buy their kid some shin guards, he can run around with the other kids and never appear to suck at soccer. If little Johnny played football he would never make it through the first tackling practice, if he played basketball he wouldn't ever get on the court. Soccer offer the safest environment so little Johnny can feel good about himself and the parents can feel good about themselves. Thats why it's a loser mentality sport. Loser mentality is like communism, expecting everyone to be the same; expecting the highly athletic kids to sit on the bench so the ones that suck get a chance to play. That is soccer in a nuts here in the states. Soccer only exists in the states in pee wee levels, and by the time most players reach the point to play at it's highest levels they are so turned off to it that's the reason it's so unpopular.
actually, my viewpoints on soccer were inspired by an essay I read as part of a book..
Like many U.S. citizens, I spend much of my free time thinking about the future of sports and the future of our children. This is because I care deeply about sports.
In the spirit of both, I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, and exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, the future dystopia has never come. But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country, and that eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying, and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyper kinetic zeitgeist of Americana. After America placed eighth in the 2002 World Cup tournament, team forward Clint Mathis said, "If we can turn one more person who wasn't a soccer fan into a soccer fan, we've accomplished something." Apparently, that's all that matters to these idiots. They won't be satisfied until we are all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth is somehow noble. However, I know this will never happen. Not really. Dumb bunnies like Clint Mathis will be wrong forever, and that might be the only thing saving us from ourselves.
My personal war against the so-called "soccer menace" probably reached it's peak in 1993, when I was nearly fired from a college newspaper for suggesting that soccer was the reason thousands of Brazilians are annually killed at Quiet Riot concerts in Rio de Janeiro, a statement that is-admittedly-half true. A few weeks after the publication of said piece, a pe ion to have me removed as the newspapers' sports editor was circulated by a ridiculously vocal campus organization called the Hispanic American Council, prompting an "academic hearing" where I was accused (with absolute seriousness) of libeling Pele. If memory serves, I think my criticism of soccer and Quiet Riot was somehow taken as racist., although-admittedly- I'm not completely positive, as I was intoxicated for most of the monthlong episode. But the bottom line is I'm still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or--at the very least--convinces people to shut the up about it).
According to the Soccer Industry Council of America, soccer is the No. 1 youth participation sport in the U.S. There are more than 3.6 million players under the age of 19 registered to play, and that number has been expanding 8% every year since 1990. There has also been a substantial increase in the number of kids who play past the age of 12, a statistic that soccer proponents are especially thrilled about. "These are the players that will go on to be fans, referees, coaches, and players in the future," observed Virgil Lewis, chairman of the United States Youth Soccer Association.
Certainly, I can't argue with Virgil's math: I have no doubt that battalions of Gatorade-stained children are running around the green wastelands of suburbia, randomly kicking a black and white ball in the general direction of tuna netting. However, Lewis's larger logic is profoundly flawed. There continues to be this blindly optimistic belief that all of the brats playing soccer in 2003 are going to be crazed MLS fans in 2023, just as it was assumed that 11 year old players in 1983 would be watching Bob Costas provide play-by-play for soccer games right now. That will never happen. We will never care about soccer in this country. And it's not just because soccer is inherently un-American, which is what most soccer haters tend to insinuate. It's mostly because soccer is geared towards Outcast Culture.
On the surface, one might assume that would actually play to soccer's advantage, as America has plenty of outcasts. Some American outcasts are very popular, such as OutKast. But Outcast culture does not meld with Intimidation Culture, and the latter aesthetic has always been the cornerstone of team sports. An outcast can be intimidating in an individual event-Mike Tyson and John McEnroe are proof-but they rarely thrive in the social environment of a team organism (e.g. Albert Belle, Pete Maravich). Unless your Barry Bonds, being an outcast is an hetical to the group concept. But soccer is the one sport that is the one exception to that reality: Soccer contentiously rewards the outcast, which is was so many adults are fooled into thinking kids love it. The truth is that most kids do not love soccer, they simply hate the alternatives more. For 60% of adolescents in any 4th grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out 4 times a game. These are the kids who are afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they're now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air-balls. Basketball games actually stops to recognize their failure. And football is nothing more than a ironical death sentence; somehow, outcasts find themselves in a situation where the people normally penalized for teasing them are suddenly urged to annihilate them.
This is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification; it's the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1-0 or 2-1. A normal 11 year old can play an entire season without placing a toe to a ball and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions. Soccer feels "fun" because it's not terrifying- its the only sport where you can't up. An outcast can succeed simply by not failing, and public failure is every outcast's deepest fear. For society's prepubescent pariahs, soccer represents safety.
However, the demand for such an oasis disappears once an outcast escapes from the imposed slavery of youth athletics; by the time they reach the 9th grade, it's perfectly acceptable to quit the team and shop at Hot Topic. Most youth soccer players end up joining the debate team before they turn 15. Meanwhile, the kind of person who truly loves the notion of sports (and perhaps, sadly, unconsciously needs to have sports in their life) doesn't want to watch or play a game designed for losers. They're never going to care about a sport where announcers inexplicably celebrate the beauty of missed shots and the strategic glory or repe ive stalemate. We want to see domination. We want to see athletes who don't look like us, and who we could never be. We want to see people who could destroy us, and we want to feel like that desire is normal. But those people don't exist in soccer; their game is dominated by mono-monikered clones obsessed with falling to their knees and ripping off their clothes.
Soccer fanatics love to tell you that soccer is the most popular game on earth and that it's played by 500 million people every day, as if that somehow proves it's value. Actually, the opposite is true. Why should I care that every single citizen of Chile and Iran and Gibraltar thoughtlessly adore "futball"? Do people making this argument also assume Coca-Cola is ambrosia? Real sports arn't for everyone. And don't accuse me of being the ugly American for degrading soccer. That has nothing to do with it. It's not xenophobic to hate soccer, it's socially reprehensible to support it. To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of compe ion and the capacity of human spirit. It should surprise no one that Benito Mussolini loved being photographed with Italian soccer stars during the 1930's; they were undoubtedly kindred spirits. I would sooner have my kid deal crystal meth than play soccer.
That said, I don't think my thoughts on soccer are radical. If push come to shove, I would be more than willing to compromise: It's not necessary to wholly outlaw soccer as a living en y. I concede that it has the right to exist. All I ask is that I never have to see it on T.V., that it's not played in public, and that nobody-and I mean nobody-ever utters the phrase "soccer is the sport of the future"
That could be true, about the parents, i dont know since i dont live in usa. But that has nothing to do with football, nor the quality of the game. It's just about what those parents think.
While I quite enjoy soccer when it is played by people who know what they're doing, Thunder Dan is approximately 1000% correct when it comes to identifying soccer's place in Anglo-white American culture.
As an added piece of evidence, I present Houston's own "Fun Fair Positive Soccer." To wit:
1) FFPS plays 5 on a side
2) FFPS mandates equal ball-possession time for each player
3) FFPS rotates the positions each player plays
4) FFPS has highly simplified rules that 5-year-olds can understand
5) FFPS does not keep score
6) FFPS includes special-needs players on their teams
7) FFPS is available to "children" up to the age of 22
8) FFPS awards a trophy to each player for participation
Now, clearly the point of this exercise is not to play soccer or anything like it. The point is for young people who don't have a lot going for them to get some exercise outside without having to feel like losers. That is the role soccer plays for non-Hispanic white suburban people in the United States.
Now, for Latinos it's a whole other matter entirely. They actually like soccer, and many young Latinos who are actually good at sports play it. This is part of the reason a league like FFPS has to exist -- Latino families in Houston keep working their way up to the middle class, and getting their kids into youth soccer leagues, where they immediately start humiliating the kids whose only reason for playing soccer was to avoid getting humiliated.
I don't understand the need to avoid humiliation. I sucked at every kind of sport that required hand-eye coordination. I couldn't hit, field, throw, or catch anything. I was always the last guy picked. The only exception was basketball, and that was only because I was a relatively tall white kid in a city with lots of short Mexicans. If I wandered in among people my size, I was immediately exposed as an uncoordinated goof, but on the Southside, I might as well have been Shaq, and in instances when I went to Mexico, I was a breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime freak of nature to the people there.
Other nerds taller than 5'10" I knew had the same experience.
Now my inability to play any kind of compe ive sport has negatively affected my life basically not at all. It tempers my arrogance somewhat, since despite being good at the book-learnin' stuff, I know there are plenty of things at which I suck. The root word of "humiliation" is "humility" which is a good thing. Also, if people get gratified with self-esteem just for showing up, then they never learn the value of working for anything or getting better at it. And having a nation full of people who are full of self-esteem despite sucking at pretty much every endeavor and never exerting meaningful effort is a recipe for getting its collective ass kicked by China eight ways from Sunday, since unfortunately God/the universe/cold cruel fate doesn't seem to view FFPS as the paradigm for reality.
So to summarize:
1) Soccer for white suburbanites is an exercise in avoiding humiliation.
2) Going through life trying to avoid humiliation results in not accomplishing anything.
3) This is why the Chinese are kicking our asses
4) If you really need to feel better about your nerdy self, challenge the short Mexican kids who just beat you 9-0 on the pitch to a game of basketball.
Extra Stout is right. Those are the reasons the top athletes will never play soccer, which in turn is the reason nobody in America gives a about soccer
I've got two nieces who play soccer in HS and they love it. I only played kick ball.
Furthermore, the biggest reason soccer is so popular around the world is that all the kids in some shockingly poor town need to play soccer is 1) a ball, and 2) an empty patch of dirt, whereas for American football or baseball a whole lot of expensive gear is necessary.
I would predict that the USA one day would be a soccer power if I thought the country were going to remain intact, simply because eventually central North America will have enough of a critical mass of Latinos who care about the sport.
Me gusta el soccer!!!
Exactly, all of you stop referring to the game with Soccer. It's FOOTBALL! You have Football and American Football.
eeeh it's an endless debate
That was not the group of Death.
Argentina,Netherlands, Ivory Coast and Serbia was the Group of Death.
Last edited by rascal; 06-29-2009 at 10:45 AM.
Meh, most people agreed it was a toss-up between that group and the Ivory Coast, Holland, Argentina and Serbia group. Serbia was total doo-doo though.
Exactly, this was the group of death, group C. Group E wasnt really. If E was, then F should have been a group of death also
SoccerExactly, all of you stop referring to the game with Soccer. It's FOOTBALL! You have Football and American Football.
eeeh it's an endless debate
Football
Soccer
Football
Soccer
Football
Soccer
Football
I root against the USA. Most people in the USA don't care at all about scoccer so I want them out as soon as possible in the World Cup. Let the World Cup be won by countries that have a passion for the game. Also if the USA wins then all they show and talk about is the USA games. I'd rather watch games that the USA is not playing in.
I think it was the Americans who overrated their crappy team that insisted they were in the Group of Death.
-------->
Left: Football Right: handegg Rugby - American football
I was actually making fun of his spanglish. Soccer sucks. Basketball is better.Exactly, all of you stop referring to the game with Soccer. It's FOOTBALL! You have Football and American Football.
eeeh it's an endless debate
I root for the US to lose every game too so I don't have to see them cover that on ESPN, when they bring in that Irish guy. I don't think there would be any complaints if USA Soccer just folded all together. Their whole purpose is to try and get people to like soccer, you can't make people like stuff, and even if you win people won't like it.
Basketball is indeed better. But, football is nice too! (F-O-O-T-B-A-L-L-!-!)
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
