Soccer's Boring. There, We Said it.

OK, we're going to say it. We're going to be 'that' guy, we're going to be the American dinosaur about the game. Despite all the gushing over the 2014 World Cup, we're going to say the thing which most Americans are thinking, and they're thinking it because they're right.

Soccer's boring.

Sorry, world sports community, but 0-0 and 1-1 games simply lack real excitement. A lead of two goals with twenty, heck, thirty minutes left is generally insurmountable, and even soccer fans know that. The game is dull: they need to widen the net or take a few players off the field or something.

There's a reason so many Yanks haven't taken to the game. We like to see sports where teams are actually in the game for the whole length of it. A 4-0 baseball contest can still be overcome in the late innings, and American football and basketball stop the clock so often that it almost guarantees no one is out until the fat lady sings (an issue of sportsmanship and fair play in itself, but one which provides at least manufactured excitement). You know why Portugal lost 4-0 the other day? Because even they knew, after the second German goal, that they were toast.

And then, when they finally decide to actually allow a team to win a close game, and when that winner isn't produced in a hundred and twenty minutes, two whole (real) hours of play, they end it with a shootout, where either the lucky shooter or lucky goalie secures the win. That's like winning a World Series on a home run contest or a Super Bowl on a field goal (oh, they do that, don't they?). At the least NHL lets hockey players win a Stanley Cup on the ice and not after a series of one on ones.

We're not saying that the game is unathletic or the players without skill and stamina. It's just dull. That tells us more about the rest of the world than it does about the US, quite frankly.