I was wrong. Completely. If you had asked me about the sport known as soccer (in this country, at least) eight months ago, I would have told you some nonsense about it being a tedious, low-scoring, repetitive event played by athletes too short for basketball and too light for what I would strongly proclaim REAL football. Man, I was a jerk eight months ago.
I was also in a pretty miserable situation. Europe is no place for a devoted fan of American sports. While I was in Spain, there were only three options: soccer, soccer and soccer. My host family’s futbol obsession (shared by all red-blooded Spaniards) meant that we watched at least three games a week.
Over time though, it grew on me. Soccer requires peak physical condition. In this game, speed is everything. A second’s hesitation can send the whole game down the tubes. Soccer is a sport of perpetual motion. There are no timeouts. After years of watching the NBA, where the last five minutes can last up to an hour, it was refreshing to watch a 90-minute game generally conclude in only two hours.
What’s more, soccer is much more difficult than it appears. A player has to make precision passes after being run ragged for an hour halfway up the field. Offensive opportunities are precious and few. Imagine being a quarterback in I-formation with no guards or offensive ends and then having to pass the ball with your foot as two guys in mullets come rushing towards you, all with about 30 seconds on the clock. A match is always a high-tension situation, because generally the game can be won at any given moment by either side. Even down 1-0 with two minutes to go, it’s not unheard of for a team, scoreless for 88 minutes, to suddenly come back and knock two in. In such a low scoring game, mistakes are simply fatal, particularly for the goalie. That cage is enormous, and odds are, one-on-one with the goalie, that ball is going in.
Exacerbating the stress factor of every passing moment are the fans. Interestingly enough, the fans, I think, are what make soccer so great. As a Raiders fan, I know a thing or two about nationalism and devotion in the stands. But what I saw in Europe surpasses anything I’ve ever seen in the States. I could see it every game we watched at home, as my host father, literally on the edge of his seat for two hours, cussed more than a drunken sailor on the first night of shore leave. And I could hear it, every night, for almost a week, as every passing car until 4 a.m. honked their horns to the tune from that old sketch “Dog Show” after Sevilla won the WEFA championship.
But all municipal and regional based loyalties aside, nothing could prepare me for what I witnessed during the World Cup in Europe. Never have I seen such passion attached to a sporting event. Forget national pride — these people behaved as though the sovereignty of their states was on the line. The World Cup was EVERYwhere in Europe this summer. I saw grown men moved to tears. I saw complete strangers embrace each other after a crucial goal. And of course, there was the nail-biting anxiety during the penalty kicks of the Portugal-England match and the France-Italy match. Swarms of people in the streets honked horns, waved flags and closed their businesses hours early in the middle of the busy tourist season just to be able to get home in time, or at least to be able to see the game televised in the huge plaza in the middle of the city.
The passion for this game was something palpable. It made me wonder what would happen if the US team ever won the World Cup. Would we celebrate to such a degree? Would we literally drop everything and let the sensation of victory completely overwhelm us as they did in Italy this year and several other nations around the world in the past? Would there be a nation-sized party? Honestly, I don’t think so. And maybe because of that, we don’t deserve to. At least not yet. The whole world can’t be wrong about this sport. Maybe eventually, we’ll all catch on.
