EFUCKINGNUFF ALREADY

This guy over at Sully:

There are plenty of sports in the United States that occasionally capture the intermittent attention of the casual sports fan, but won't "break through" the sports zeitgeist until and unless the United States fields a successful national team. This is how it tends to work with the Olympic team sports, and it's how it will work with the World Cup. If the United States can advance far in this tournament, Americans will become more interested; if not, they'll switch back to baseball and the NFL draft. In this approach, the casual sports fan is using a strategy of "rational ignorance" -- i.e., not caring until the team is sufficiently successful.

This is one of the dumber fucking things I've read in the "why doesn't america love soccer?" collective that comes around every four fucking years.

For fuck's sake - yeah, that worked out so well for hockey after the 1980 USA team, didn't it? That win was so big that they moved most of the NHL to the US, along with the most dominant team player in the history of team sports, and people gave so little of a shit that within a decade and a half it got surpassed by a "sport" that is a bunch of dudes driving cars in a circle. Think about that for a second. I am spending the day watching a 2 year-old girl. There are plenty of toys in the room that if we wanted to we could simulate a game of hockey; standing a few feet away and slapping a pretend puck back to each other if nothing else. But there's exactly no chance in hell we're gonna get into a car and drive it around a track 250 times at 200mph. And yet statistics tell us that it is a lot more likely that she and I like NASCAR more than hockey.

Americans love to sit around and talk about how awesome America is, and how much Europe and every other place on the planet sucks next to America, and yet we have some strange insecurity with our distant relationship to soccer. It's not enough that we're in love with how awesome our democracy is, or that we're the greatest superpower in the world or that when the aliens come it will be an American, Will Smith, who will kick ass and save the world; for some reason we're still upset that the rest of the world is not only better at having a bunch of guys kicking a ball around on a big field of grass, but that the rest of the world is better at CARING about a bunch of guys kicking a ball around on a grass field. Fucking hell.