COMMENTARY: Five points on what’s wrong with soccer in general and the FIFA World Cup in particular.
KRAKOW — I usually find the quadrennial FIFA World Cup aggravating for the five reasons enumerated below, plus one other: my students here in the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society are sometimes so obsessed with the competition that it becomes challenging to keep our community of learners focused on the seminar’s deep dive into Catholic social doctrine.
But as we have few students this year whose countries even made it to the tourney’s knockout stage, interest is somewhat more muted than in the past. And I’ll admit that it’s been a good thing that World Cup tourists at the American-based matches are getting a taste of American friendliness and hospitality that (despite presidential interventions) nicely contradicts the country’s image in much of the world press and on social media.
Nonetheless, duty requires me to note what’s wrong with soccer (a.k.a. “football”) in general and the FIFA World Cup in particular:
1) Soccer seems not to understand that God gave us opposable thumbs for a reason. Opposable thumbs allow us to throw, catch and hold a bat or hockey stick. These abilities are not accidental. They are woven into the fabric of creation, which the Creator knew to be good (cf. Genesis 1:25, 31). To treat the abilities that opposable thumbs make possible as if they were somehow nefarious is to reject a gift of God. One might even say that it’s a violation of the natural moral law: the truths embedded in the world and in us.
2) Soccer is not infrequently bereft of scoring. It’s as if running back and forth to no discernible effect is a properly calibrated human act. Afficionados of the game will tell you that it’s not so much about goals as it is about the beauty of all that to-and-fro: hence their term, “the beautiful game.” Sorry, folks. Sports with little scoring — excepting that rarest of athletic feats, baseball’s “perfect game,” in which a pitcher allows neither a hit nor a walk across 27 batters — are doses of Sominex. Think of last February’s Super Bowl, a defensive struggle that was gripping for a while before devolving into a colossal bore. The last World Cup final played in the United States, in 1994, ended in a 0-0 tie. My appreciation of its alleged beauty may have been diminished by the fact that I watched it on a small black-and-white TV in an un-airconditioned Polish hotel room while recovering from a bout of food poisoning that had sent my temperature into the red zone. But then consider this….
3) That 1994 World Cup, like the finals in 2006 and 2022, was ultimately decided by penalty kicks: When the score is tied after regulation time and two overtimes have expired, the game is decided by penalty kicks — by one player after another taking gimme shots at the opposing goalkeeper from point-blank range, rather than by playing until someone wins on a properly scored goal.
Settling what imagines itself the world’s greatest sports event this way is ridiculous. Do we end the World Series by playing Home Run Derby? Do we determine the Super Bowl winner by a field goal kicking contest? Is Wimbledon decided by seeing who can hit a tennis ball the farthest? A sport that doesn’t know how to finish its most important game has got issues.
4) Histrionics in soccer are out of control. With little provocation, players writhe on the turf, trying to draw yellow warning cards or red ejection cards for their opponents. If they don’t get their way, they sometimes carry on like 2-year-olds deprived of their lollipops. I intensely dislike the self-indulgent, gyrating idiocies that now attend most NFL touchdowns and the unsportsmanlike glowering and bat-tossing that sometimes follow a home run in baseball. Soccer histrionics are an order of magnitude worse, however. Tell me this play-acting is a “cultural thing”, and I’ll happily explain why some cultures are superior to others.
5) FIFA, the World Cup’s governing body, is arguably the most corrupt, avaricious cabal of sports honchos on Earth, the International Olympic Committee being the only competition. (I was once on a Lake Geneva sidewheeler with a friend when we passed a large building in Lausanne. Me: “Is that the IOC headquarters?” Friend: “Yes.” Me: “I thought I smelled something nasty.”) FIFA’s money-grubbing would make Gilded Age robber barons blush. Cheap seats at the group stage of World Cup 2026 cost anywhere from $140 to $1,410. You can (if you’re mad) pay anywhere from $25,000 to $2 million for a premium seat at the finals. Plutocrats of the world unite!
And now, back to our regular summer baseball programming ….
