Nevermind, just scroll on by down the page

Why the U.S. doesn’t care.
The Week Magazine
6/30/2006

Chalk up “another false dawn for soccer in America,” said Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. At the World Cup, the planet’s biggest—and most watched—sporting event, the U.S. men’s soccer team last week was beaten, and eliminated, by the tiny West African nation of Ghana. Before the tournament there had been hopes that an improved U.S. team might survive deep into the competition, and maybe, just maybe, capture the public’s imagination. But the truth is that “even a better performance at the Cup probably would not have altered the sport’s trajectory much.” For reasons nobody has quite pinned down, Americans remain suspicious of—and indifferent to—the world’s most popular sport, almost as if soccer were somehow a fundamentally “un-American activity.”

Well, isn’t it? said Frank Cannon and Richard Lessner in The Weekly Standard. So many matches seem to end 0–0 or 1–1 that “in truth, soccer could be played without using a ball at all and few would notice the difference.” For the chain-smoking “nihilists” who occupy Europe, the dearth of goals makes soccer a perfect “metaphor for the meaninglessness of life.” But here in America, we “still believe the world makes sense” and that the expenditure of effort results—or should result—in achievement. Americans are also justly suspicious of a sport that arbitrarily forbids the use of hands. Last time we checked, it was the human hand, with its opposable thumbs, that set “us apart from the animal world.” And then there’s all the whining, said Jake Novak in Newsday. European soccer players seem to spend most of the game writhing in fake agony and “pointing out potential rules violations to the refs.” Whether it takes place on a soccer pitch or at a meeting of the United Nations, Americans don’t find that kind of behavior endearing.

The real question isn’t why Americans don’t care about the World Cup, said John Tierney in The New York Times. It’s why the rest of the world does. “Maybe they love soccer because they haven’t been given better alternatives.” Don’t get me wrong: “For most of my life I was one of those proselytizers for the ‘beautiful game’ who bemoaned Americans’ parochialism.” But with time and experience I’ve come to perceive the truth—soccer just isn’t that much fun to watch. Whether I’d still feel that way “if the ref on Thursday had capriciously given the winning penalty kick to the U.S. instead of to Ghana,” however, I cannot say.