I promise this will be my last World Cup post, at least for the next 3 and a half years…

Though I seem to be in the minority, I thought the final was quite exciting, full of excellent effort, a few great shots, dramatic fouls, and of course, the infamous Zidane head butt. I’m not sure whether to condemn Zizou for the blatant attack that most certainly deserved the red card, or to applaud him for finally standing up for himself after being grabbed, pulled, and otherwise harrassed for the entire game. He’s been the greatest player of his generation, and I don’t really know what to say beyond mentioning that I doubt it affected the outcome of the game in the least.

Even though my grandmother was born in Italy, I was sentimentally hoping for a French win for several reasons: I wanted to see Zidane win in his swan song, Thierry Henry has a been a vocal force campaigning for the elimination of racism in the sport, Ribery is just fun to watch and finally I just plain don’t like the style of the Italian game. Check out this passage from Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World:

Starting in the 1960’s, the Italians began practicing a highly defensive strategy called catenaccio, the lockdown. This formation adds an extra layer of defese, a sweeper, bringing up the rear of an already robust back line that marks man to man. Offense doesn’t usually receive many resources in this arrangement. Goals are scored in bursts of counterattack, with the ball quickly sent up the field in flashes. This way, goals come with great rarity, usually only once or twice a game. With so few opportunities to score, and so little margin for error, players must do whatever they can to gain the upper hand. Thus, the greatest cliche of Italian soccer - the impassioned two handed mamma mia pleading with the referee.

Even as the old catenaccio style has been heavily modified in recent years to provide more offense, the tropes of the system still remain. Complaints and gamesmanship are still meant to provide a decisive advantage in games. Players flop in hopes of deceiving the referee into awarding a penalty. They argue the justice of every decision, calculating that they can plant enough doubt to earn a make-up call later in the game. After every goal, defenders hold up their arms in protest, as if this gesture might pry up a linesman’s offside flag.

Because of the referee’s centrality to the outcome of games, teams do whatever they can to influence him.

It is precisely this diving that most American sports fans turn to when they inevitably begin their anti-soccer diatribes. It is a fair complaint, but in my opinion not really at the heart of America’s active disdain for the game. Again, turning to Foer’s book, he (correctly, in my opinion) points out that in most of the world, the majority of soccer fans are drawn from the working class. In America, we are one of the few countries where the game has been co-opted by the middle and upper class and turned into what many view as an elitist sport. The best analogy I can come up with is to compare soccer with John Kerry on one side and NASCAR and George W. Bush on the other. When soccer enthusiasts claim that the game represents sophistication (which it clearly doesn’t, except for the Europhile) and everyone who doesn’t like it is ignorant, they don’t do the sport any favors and just continue to feed the frothing hatred that comes from certain quarters of the American sports media.

I wish soccer fans would quit trying to convert the masses and acting like they know something that the rest of the country is too stupid to figure out. If this were to happen, then perhaps the sport could gain some popularity all on its own!