A fatwa on soccer

(Oh, congrats to Italy, by the way. And thank you. The French are insufferable enough as it is.)

I, like most Americans, don't give a rat's ass about soccer. You heard me! Soccer, not "football." Though I will admit that it makes much more sense to call soccer "football" than it does to call real football "football." We have to thank one of those Ivy League schools for that. Can't really remember the story, but it has to do with one university trying to piss off another during the game's infancy by making it a passing game, yada yada yada.

At any rate, soccer is an inherently un-American game and the real wonder of it all is that we do as well as we do (making it to the playoffs, or whatever they are called) given that we have such little interest in it. Soccer is un-American for several reasons:

1. Ties are permitted. Americans realize that there are only two kinds of people in this world: winners and losers. Ties are a hippie-Euro concept.
2. Soccer actually encourages malingering. You see these players get mildly grazed in a play and suddenly they are on the ground holding their legs as if some IRA enforcer knee-capped them with a .22. It's endemic! (Check out this video, which, while purportedly making fun of the Italians, could pretty much be true of any team.) If you were playing American football, you could have your tibia sticking out of your thigh, and the coach would just tell you to "walk it off."
3. Finally, as Stephen Colbert has said, soccer is the metric system of sports, and we don't need it.

So, next time a soccer fan asks you if you saw the World Cup, say, "Soccer? Isn't that that girls' game where they take off their shirts when they win?"