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The Ongoing Be-Peevement of Juan: World Cup Edition

It’s been awhile since I let fly with some belligerence about what’s making my blood boil at the moment. Since the World Cup is underway, and more fun than ever, I thought I’d weigh in with a short list of things that peeve me about the World Cup. Some peeves inspired by this year’s edition specifically, some by the broader tradition.

This list is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive.

1. All the Posturing About Legitimacy and Authenticity of Fans

When I was younger, soccer was the ultimate Band You Haven’t Heard Of. If you liked it, it was your identity, whether you wanted the label or not. But you wanted the label. Most of the time, this just made you a target for pointless belligerence from folks who wanted to make sure you knew soccer was 1) not a real sport 2) boring as hell, and 3) never going to catch on in the United States.

Every four years, though, the Swing-Voting Uncommitted Centrists of the Sports Culture Wars wanted to watch the World Cup, and wanted to understand what they were watching. Soccer People were dragged from the social basement where we’d been nibbling our fingernails and chattering incoherently about offsides in the darkness, and installed in front of crowds of friends, where we nibbled our fingernails, chattered incoherently about offsides, and were treated like gurus.

As soccer becomes more popular stateside, this has led to two phenomena, both of which achieve peak bloom during the World Cup:

Non-fans and casual fans are tempted (and many succumb to said temptation) to establish or invent bonafides as “real” soccer fans. Some fans do this in a cynical attempt to become a Soccer Person and be esteemed as a guru of the game. Most, though, do it in hopes of avoiding the scorn of Soccer Persons who are bitterly protective of our right to be the only people screeching unintelligibly about genuinely criminal amounts of Stoppage Time.
Longtime fans seethe pissily about new fans, who don’t recall the dark days when NASCAR was more relevant than soccer and there was nothing special about Claudio Reyna playing for Manchester City. They emphasize the distinction--usually with references to obscure historical moments in soccer. They feel that after years of being That Girl Who Knows About Soccer, they shouldn’t be required to cede social space to That Jerk Who Has Lots of Money and Bought an AC Milan Jersey Online.

Of course, by wasting time adjudicating who the Real Soccer Fans are, we reduce ourselves to people who find their identity in a soccer-centric caste system, rather than finding genuine pleasure in the game itself. If you enjoy using soccer as a framework for building social hierarchies, then go for it. But I promise you, you won’t enjoy it nearly as much as if you just sat back and enjoyed the game.

2. Yammering About How It’s Actually Cool That the United States Isn’t Good At Soccer Because We Dominate Everything.

If this were true, saying so would be repulsively condescending. “I’m tired of winning,” folks moan to the victory-impoverished rest-of-the-world, “you take this sport, I don’t care about it.”

Of course, it isn’t true, Americans are dominant at sports we invented (although we’re no longer as dominant in basketball and baseball as we used to be) and swimming (“we” means “Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky”), and the rest of the world is catching up in the ones we invented. We’re not dominant in Tennis, Golf, Rugby, Hockey, Cricket, Volleyball, Darts, Snooker, or F1 racing, among other things that various large groups of people care about quite a lot. As far as the authorities I’ve consulted can say, either cricket or tennis is the second most popular sport in the world.

Heck, in medals-per-million-people, we’re not even in the top 10.

Far from being a statement against the perceived nativism of supporting your home country because your home country is a hegemon, this sentiment puts the “centric” in ethnocentric by showing just how important you think our home nation’s provincial pastimes are on the world stage.

3. Cheering for or against national teams based on the policies of their governments.

There’s a Twitter handle that--with what I’m sure are excellent motives--prepares and tweets out snapshots of relevant statistics about the human rights situation in country before two countries play, presumably so that interested soccer fans can support the more humane nation.

Once again, I rise in my be-pissedness to point out that--in the games I checked, this nifty blueprint for cheering for the “good guys” would lead you to have overwhelmingly cheered for....the wealthier, whiter teams.

This doesn’t hold in all cases, but it is worth noting. More, though, it irritates me that people who at least like to shroud themselves in Eu de Humanitarianism reduce the human beings who play the game to one-note avatars for their political leadership’s worst behavior. It’s dehumanizing and unfair.

5. This Whole Iceland Bit

I don’t really have a problem with people rooting for Iceland--Iceland is cool. But I chafe a bit at some of the language surrounding them, as though they’re the exhilarating, plucky upstarts of this tournament just because nobody lives there, and some of them have other jobs.

Gylfi Sigurdsson, their star player, has a value of $35m, according to Transfermarket. That’s more than the entire value of the Panamanian or Saudi squads. Heck, that’s more than those two squads combined. They’ve got a number of players on teams in top-tier European leagues; they’re a fantastically efficient small country...but they’re not exactly weekenders. Even Hannes Halldorsson, the celebrate goalkeeper/filmmaker appears--from my bit of digging--to make more money from playing soccer than the most recent captain of the United States national team, Wil Trapp.

So there’s that.

My favorite ill-fated underdogs of this World Cup were Peru. They played beautiful, doomed soccer, and are now on their way home. They are so likeable and lively and charismatic on the pitch that it’s difficult to believe that not a single one of them designs board games or directs videos for Eurovision submissions. Incredible.

In closing, it’s worth noting that while Uruguay, the next smallest nation at 3.4 million inhabitants, has a population ten times larger than Iceland, per capita GDP is less than half as much and the team is a whole lot better, and has been for a long time.

In actual closing, though, I'd like to note that this has been an exceptionally fun World Cup, and frankly, we don't deserve to have come this far without a scoreless draw. Let's be grateful.