There are many things for which the rest of the world rightly makes fun of the US: inability to speak other languages, lack of public transit, poor taste in food and drinks, macdonald's, cost of health care, 60% of people believing the world was destroyed in a flood, etc.

However, one of them just isn't fair: Soccer is not a better game than the sports the US supports.

Soccer is in fact a vastly inferior spectator sport for many reasons. Before I get to them I must say that Soccer is a great sport to play, and that international sports are wonderful (more on that in a later post). But as a spectator sport, independent of the fact that national sports teams are great, soccer is inferior.

There are no statistics.

There are only about 2 interesting minutes of action during the entire game and you don't know when they'll happen. (Does this mean I have a short attention span? No, I can watch a whole soccer game for those 2 minutes of excitement, but making spectators sit through 88 minutes of boredom being forced to continue paying attention is not a virtue for the game. Having a long attention span may be good, but boring things are still inferior.)

There is very little strategy because there's so few substitutions and no stoppage of play for the coaches to intervene in the game.

All of the players are about the size of ants for nearly the entire game.
There are basically only two kinds of leads, one point leads and insurmountable ones.

Most games end in draws.

When the game is over you can't point to why one team won. It wasn't because they were better, it's usually because one shot went 6 inches to the left while another went six inches to the right. (Example: Germany's goal against Holland and Holland's near miss past the right post in the first half. There's less than a foot seperating those two. That's not skill, it's luck.)

The lead very rarely changes hands.

You don't know how much time is left in the game which reduces the amount of drama in the end.



Notice that I say all of this after having watched France and England play one of the more exciting soccer games of the year. It's just an inferior spectator sport to american football, baseball, basketball, and hockey (which at least has more action).

To compensate it has three advantages:

The game only takes 110 minutes total.

You don't need to know anything other than that scoring goals is good to watch it.

Its played as a serious international sport.



All three of these are great, but other sports could be modified to fit the first and last of those.

And I don't think that finding soccer to be an inferior sport makes me a backwards dumb american.