Why do we hate soccer?

At 11:53 a.m. on Friday, roughly seven minutes before the start of the world's biggest sporting event, I walked into Buffalo Wild Wings in Boardman. Two giant screens were showing that day's Germany-Costa Rica game, the first in the month-long extravaganza known as the World Cup.
About 30 people were in the restaurant. No one seemed to be watching the game.
A few feet away, three guys in their 30s were sitting at the bar watching baseball highlights on ESPN News. There was a pitcher of beer in front of two of them. I sat down between them and asked, simply, "So, you watching the World Cup?"
"Sorry, I'm a football guy," one of them said.
"No, I'm just here for lunch," another said.
A German fan with a multi-colored mohawk flashed on the screen. Another fan was waving the German flag. Another had his face painted. Tickets for the opener in Munich -- and for pretty much every other match -- had been sold out for months. You want in? Prepare to pay a few thousand bucks.
Over the next month, billions of people will miss work, sit glued to their televisions, devour newspapers, get drunk, get in fights, get drunker, celebrate wins, mourn losses and lose sleep (and hair and money and years off their life span) because of the World Cup.
And we'll ignore it.
Back at the bar, I asked one of the guys why he thinks soccer (or football, or fussball, or futbol) is so popular around the world.
"I think it's because they don't have anything else," he said. "We have all these other sports. They just have soccer."
I asked another guy how long he can watch soccer before changing the channel.
"Two minutes," he said.
And what would he say if one of his friends wanted to watch it?
"And there's a football game on?" he asked.
Sure.
"Get out," he said.
This isn't news, of course. England invented soccer. France organized it. Brazil perfected it. And America ... ignores it.
This story will try to explain why.
Different countries,different sports
Recently, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik contrasted American sports -- which have lots of scoring and action --with the low-scoring, defense-heavy game that dominates the world's sports scene.
"The World Cup is a festival of fate -- man accepting his hard circumstances, the near-certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal," he wrote. "Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield."
That's a pretty literary response. So I asked around and here's some other reasons people gave for not watching soccer:
UI'm not a communist.
UI like real sports.
UIt's boring.
Esquire columnist Chuck Klosterman, who once worked for the Akron Beacon Journal, has spent much of his life railing against soccer, a.k.a. the "sport of the future" in America.
"Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come," he once wrote. "But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country and that soccer will eventually be as popular as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana."
(Side note. "Dystopia" means "an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror"; "hyperkinetic" means "hyper or frenetic"; and "zeitgeist" means "the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation.")
After the U.S. team finished eighth in the 2002 World Cup, 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," Klosterman writes, "that's all that matters to these idiots. They won't be satisfied until we're all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth (and losing to Poland!) is somehow noble."
He later writes that he'd be willing to die a painful public death, assuming his execution destroys the game of soccer "or, at the very least, convinces people to shut up about it."
Klosterman is, as you can see, pretty passionate about this.
We participate,not spectate
Soccer is, of course, the No. 1 youth participation sport in the country -- about four million kids under 18 play in youth leagues and millions more play on their own -- but Klosterman argues those numbers are misleading.
"The truth is that most children don't love soccer," he writes. "They simply hate the alternatives more."
Simply put, he says, it's hard to be humiliated in soccer. (Unless you're a goalie.) You can't drop a fly ball, you can't airball a free throw and you can't get annihilated by that kid in your fourth grade class with a mustache.
"A normal 11-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions," Klosterman writes. "It's the only sport where you can't [screw] up."
It's also one of the few sports in America that kids play but don't watch. In 1994, soccer finished 67th -- after tractor-pulling -- in a pre-World Cup poll asking Americans to rank their favorite spectator sport. Those numbers are undoubtedly higher now -- "Much more popular than freeze tag," could be the official motto of Major League Soccer -- but for whatever reason, it just hasn't caught on as a spectator sport.
MLS has done better than any other American soccer league -- attendance at games hovers between 10,000 and 30,000 a game, depending on where it's played -- although half of the players on D.C. United (the model franchise in MLS) will make less than $36,500, which is less than Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez will make per at-bat this year.
The Women's United Soccer Association was created after America's thrilling victory in the Women's World Cup in 1998 -- I've actually asked Brandi Chastain about her infamous sports bra, which was pretty cool -- but, like most pro soccer leagues in America, it folded.
Soccer leaguesare a tease
Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford -- another soccer critic -- lumps soccer in with sports such as swimming or jogging. It's something people do, not something people watch.
"But soccer leagues always seem to burst forth, to tease us into thinking that this time America will succumb to the same boring, scoreless game that the rest of the world has always settled for," he once wrote. "Then even the soccer players go back to watching the NFL."
(Or, to use the oft-quoted phrase, "soccer is the sport of the future in America ... and always will be.")
Last month, on the third floor of a hotel in Florence, Italy, I discovered what it must be like to be an international soccer fan in America. In a city with an incredibly rich history, hundreds of priceless works of art and phenomenal food, I spent an hour of my vacation standing in front of a 19-inch television set, flipping through the channels, trying to find highlights of the Cavaliers' Game Six victory over the Wizards.
Of the 30 channels, two were in English. One of them was CNN Europe. When they finally got to sports, I had to sit through five minutes of soccer highlights before I saw LeBron's shot.
(It was worth it.)
From mythto reality
For most of my life, the popularity of soccer seemed like a myth, like the Greek gods, George Washington and the cherry tree or Michael Bolton's record sales.
Hearing that soccer was the world's most popular sport was sort of like hearing that broccoli was the world's most popular food. You want to ask, "Have you tried pizza?"
I also spent a couple days in Berlin last month. Germany is hosting the World Cup and there was last-minute construction going on everywhere. In front of the Reichstag (which is the main government building), they're building a stadium that won't even hold any competitions. It'll just have a big screen for fans to watch the games.
And there are souvenirs everywhere. Stuffed animals. Soccer balls. T-shirts. Jerseys. Posters of famous soccer players in the windows.
My sister, who lives in Amsterdam and is not a soccer fan, bought me a bright orange shirt that shows a guy from the Netherlands flossing his behind with a German flag, which I opted not to wear in Germany.
(Apparently, Germany and the Netherlands have a big rivalry, which is directly related to the German occupation during World War II.)
(I don't know anything about that but I'll say this: It's a pretty funny shirt.)
A few days later, when I was in Tuscany, we parked our cars outside a restaurant and saw a line of 10 cars come roaring past on the road, honking their horns, waving flags, yelling things out the window ... all because of a soccer match.
After that, I knew it was no myth. Broccoli really is that popular.
A chance toembrace soccer
Over the next few weeks, ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC will broadcast all 64 World Cup games live and in high definition. ESPN will have a two-hour show with highlights and analysis.
America, which plays its first game Monday and will compete in the so-called "Group of Death," isn't supposed to do much.
Still, a few more Americans will undoubtedly become soccer fans this month. A few more will rail against it. And in the end, when NFL training camps open in July, everyone will go back to watching football. (The American kind.)
Until then, I hope the soccer-haters can leave the soccer-lovers alone, the soccer-lovers will quit trying to push their sport on the soccer-haters and that, in the end, the entire world will unite in the one sports activity we can all get behind:
Hating NASCAR.
XJoe Scalzo is a sportswriter for The Vindicator. Write him at scalzo@vindy.com.