FAUX FOOTBALL

The Boring Game

Whether you call it soccer or football, it still sucks

Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash

If you missed the news, North America will be hosting the 2026 World Cup tournament. From June 11th to July 19th, 48 teams will compete in three countries, culminating in the championship game in New York.

While millions will be glued to the competition, I won’t be one of them. I will be anxiously awaiting the final game, hoping that things will quickly return to normal.

As far as I’m concerned, having our TV screens filled with faux football for five weeks will be agony. For someone used to the fast pace of playoff hockey, watching 22 men move a ball up and down a giant field over and over again with little or no action will be torture.

After all, the typical hockey game has fifty or so shots on goal, sometimes more. The typical soccer match, on the other hand, usually has about ten total shots on net and often far fewer.

With scores like 1–0, 1–1, and 0–0, it’s hard to see why the rest of the world calls this the beautiful game. When I think of soccer, beauty is the last thing that comes to mind. From my perspective, it should be called the boring game.

Even the scoring nomenclature is annoying. In most other sports, a 1–0 game is described as “one nothing.” Not in soccer, however, where that score becomes “one-nil.”

A scoreless tie — the zenith of soccer boredom — is a “nil nil” game, which in effect, is a fairly accurate description, as just about nothing has happened for over 90 minutes.

And what about that “over 90 minutes” business? Most sports have a defined ending, but not soccer. At the end of regulation time, a referee arbitrarily adds three, four, or five minutes of time. Just what the soccer spectator dying of boredom needs — an extra few minutes of agony.

Let’s face it; the tournament will be a giant annoyance. Not only will TV soccer coverage pre-empt much of regular programming, it will also subject many of us to hordes of crazy soccer fans. Normally dormant, these folks come out of the woodwork at World Cup time with their wild uniforms, national flags, and annoying noisemakers.

Who knew that pasty-faced guy two cubicles down was a rabid fan of the New Zealand team? And who could have guessed that, all along, your boss couldn’t wait to wrap herself in the flag of Ecuador, Qatar, or Côte d’Ivoire?

People who used to appear quite calm and rational all of a sudden seem to be given carte blanche to run around acting like fools. And all this craziness is over a team of eleven men in shorts, ten of whom are incapable of using their hands as they run about haphazardly on a giant green field.

Speaking of noisemakers, thankfully, we won’t be subjected to that most aggravating of soccer match sounds, the ever-present orchestra of annoying vuvuzelas. After the incessant use of these annoying horns during the 2010 World Cup, FIFA, the organizing body of world soccer, banned their use, but you can be sure football fans will come up with other annoying noisemakers.

Now, if FIFA was serious about attracting new fans to the game this coming summer, it should also ban air horns, bagpipes, handguns, and any other instruments of aural torture. And while they’re at it, they might want to consider making a few minor changes to the game.

Shrink the field, add four bases, give the players gloves and bats, and you’ve got something Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans can get behind. Who knows? It might even be as exciting as our favorite action-packed summertime sport: baseball.

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