With the World Cup underway, you may have noticed that soccer fans are coming out of the woodwork. It’s one big party and everyone’s invited.
But, like many other hipster parties you try to attend, you’re ultimately thinking of any excuse to leave short of just walking away without bothering to tell anybody.
Obviously, you couldn’t care less whether or not I watch the World Cup or just mindlessly tweet a player’s name when he scores to break up an agonizingly long scoreless tie. And that’s fine, but like any other hip endeavor, it sure doesn’t feel like it’s okay to think soccer is the tedious sport that it is.
“But you just don’t get it. The strategies, the flawless art of a perfectly executed pass,” an actual follower of soccer might tell me. But I know exactly what this sport is:
It’s not the simplicity, though. What kind of sport, with some of the world’s best athletes, would resort to such flagrant injury-faking? You might think the faking of fouls in the NBA is an epidemic, but in the world of soccer, the epidemic has become a sentient organism that rules over all, spreading its seed to every corner of the world.
I’m supposed to cheer this?
And despite the imaginative interpretations of injuries, there’s just no other way to put it than to say that for very long, agonizing stretches, any soccer match is going to be mind-numbingly boring. You can’t defend that. You can blow on your vuvuzela and sing along to as many crowd chants as you want, but deep down, you wonder what the hell you’re doing.
Though in true hipster fashion, the sick thing is that it feels like the eye-gouging boredom of the game is why so many people claim to enjoy it in the first place. It’s so against the grain. Constant excitement – or even reasonable stretches of it – in a game? You don’t need that shit! And you’re an idiot if you think you do!
Soccer fans revel in the banality of back-and-forth passing nowhere near an opportunity to score. They get off on 90+ minutes of no scoring and maybe one or two legitimate chances to see a goal actually happen. They wonder how we just can’t see the big picture of it all.
People often like to argue the same general points against baseball, that it’s a struggle to get through a game. At times, that may be true – the Red Sox and Yankees see to that. But the World Cup is the sport’s biggest stage. The World Series is undeniably tense, and every pitch carries a weight and significance that can completely alter a game or an entire series. That argument, like so many pro-soccer arguments, comes from the mouths of fools.
That fact is that soccer fans are monsters, and it’s a sport that has somehow been overrun by the hipster elite, begging to infiltrate the world of athletics. I’ve seen a lot of friends around me fall to the pressures of this widespread assimilation.
Protect yourself, and don’t let it happen to you, too. When a coworker stops by your desk to talk about whatever match he watched, tell him to get lost. When a friend wonders what dark horse you’re rooting for in the tournament, simply find some new friends. Make it widely and explicitly known that you won’t be a party to any of it. Our time on this planet is short, and you’ve got a life to live. There’s no place for self-torture of the mind, body and spirit.
