A friend of mine once told me British “football” fans don’t mind if we call it “soccer.” What really infuriates these supporters is when we call American football “football.” They will tell you there is only one football, and it’s “the beautiful game” played by legends such as Pele, Maradona, and Ronaldo. But as the United States fields arguably its most talented team ever at this summer’s World Cup in South Africa, the ranks of American soccer fans are steadily growing.
Still, others’ attitudes toward the game are as hostile as ever, with many of these mindsets stemming from negative qualities in our citizenry — often exaggerated stereotypes. One particular soccer-hater is Tom Powers, a sports columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota. He wrote a piece stating he would not watch the Cup simply because he hates all soccer fans.
There would be nothing wrong with his dislike of soccer if he wrote a respectful opinion with substantial reasons for his lack of interest in the sport. Instead, he delivered a poorly argued and confrontational column projecting an attitude of superiority to the world’s soccer-loving majority.
The first example jumps out in his opening paragraph, in which he writes: “The World Cup of soccer begins Friday in Johannesburg, South Africa, and you will watch it on TV, and you will like it or else you will be labeled a cretin.” Where are these legions of soccer purists who accost every person that doesn’t enjoy the game? He claims that one cannot legitimately dislike soccer without being accused of being too stupid to understand it. Powers does not realize that the reason fans have a problem with his outspoken opposition to the sport is not merely because he doesn’t like it, but because the arguments he makes are intolerant and uninformed.
It’s true that the argument about “understanding it” is sometimes unfairly used in a dismissive way by some soccer fans — just as it is used by fans of American football and baseball — but Powers actually does not seem to comprehend the tactical side of soccer.
A second example of his ignorance was demonstrated when he talked about soccer at the youth level, writing that it is “a pleasant enough diversion … when the players are unskilled enough to create many surprises.” It is doubtful whether Powers has watched many professional soccer matches if he thinks that only unskilled players are surprising. That’s like saying watching a 6-year-old fall over swinging at a tee-ball is more interesting than seeing a major-league outfielder make a diving catch.
Finally, Powers wrote that if you say you don’t like soccer, “… your intelligence may be questioned, you may even be labeled a racist.” If he has ever been treated this way by a soccer fan, it is most likely not because of his distaste for soccer but because of a similar anti-soccer editorial he wrote in 2006 about the last World Cup. (In that column, he claimed the Department of Homeland Security should “monitor the city-by-city television ratings of this month’s World Cup soccer tournament,” saying that high ratings “likely signal a concentrated pocket of illegals. No one who actually is from here cares about the most over-hyped, mind-numbingly boring event in the world.”) Powers blatantly stated in this column that the only people who like soccer are immigrants, illegal at that, and the reason they like the sport is because they are too stupid to realize how boring it is.
Ultimately, the legions of soccer fans across the world don’t care what Powers thinks, and they will enjoy the tournament with or without him. As the Brits have exemplified, not everyone needs to like “soccer,” but at least fans and non-fans can have a mutual respect for one another’s opinions. And maybe in 2014, when the next World Cup begins in Brazil, our country will have progressed enough that we won’t need to listen to insults such as the ones coming from Powers’ pen.