invertigo hayfever

Well this is a really interesting question, because I remember that back in the day the joke about soccer, cf The Simpsons, was that soccer was unsatisfying because it was low-scoring and games regularly ended in ties. That 90-minute games are usually determined by only one or two goals would suggest that most of what happens in soccer is boring. So I'm treating this as an open-ended question to mean, "What is the appeal of soccer, as might be communicated to someone who doesn't watch it?"

I'm presuming that I'd be answering the question (I don't know if you're posing this because you think this about soccer yourself, or if it's in reference to the opinions of people you might know) for someone who's at least a fan of some professional sports.¹

Since I think this is a really open-ended question, I'll start by making some shorter answers that might help contextualize the appeal of soccer to a fan of other major American sports.

I think a fan of hockey could easily understand what makes soccer appealing -- heck, arena soccer and futsal is just soccer played at hockey scale. There are fewer fights, but a lot of games still have tempers flaring, and while there's usually a lot less shoving and punching, there's still a lot of tripping, jockeying, and general shithousery.

For the American football fan, I'd try to appeal to the way big plays can get people's attention. Think about a quarterback reading the field. If they see room in back, they might get tons of yards from throwing a pass to a receiver who's broken past his markers. If the field in front is open, they might take a sneak or do a handoff that can easily get a first down. A defensive tackle can sneak into the backline and sack the QB or stop a big pass too. The continuous nature of soccer means that those moments can happen at any time, and very frequently do. Even in slow stages where it seems like teams are resting to maintain possession, stability can shift in a moment from a lapse in attention or judgment.

As you suggest in how you've phrased your question, a baseball fan might reject the premise of the question entirely. Even when it seems like things aren't moving, players are reading the field, strategizing to set up plays, and of course focused on where to put the ball. The same is true in soccer, and, again, this sort of reading the game and planning is, I think, a more continuous process.

Basketball might be the hardest case here. The defensive game in basketball is very different from soccer², and the expectation is that offensive drives alternate with each team getting points from successfully sinking a basket. NBA games typically have their scorelines in the 80-120 point range and margins are pretty narrow between teams, often fewer than 10 points (i.e., 3-5 FG) at the end of the game. I might argue that both sports are actually games of margins, then. To paraphrase that old quote about jazz, soccer is all about the scoring drives the teams don't make.

And I want to jump from that specific argument into something with a bit more narrative focus, because I think while this might technically have answered your question by now, I don't think it really captures the spirit of that question; there's more interesting ground to be charted here. That's especially true when "You know that sport you do like? Well, this is almost exactly the opposite! Enjoy!" has to still be a hard sell for a skeptic. So let's get into more detail about what the US gets wrong about soccer.

What I think the US gets wrong about soccer is that they're not used to watching it at multiple scales. When you see soccer played in Europe as an American, it's mainly promoted from the bigger countries' primary leagues, and with a higher focus on the consistent top-performing teams in those countries. For televised performances it's easy to see why networks do this -- it's easy to sell the levels of prestige. For in-person matches it might be even easier, because only the bigger-name teams have the money to do expansive tours.

Watching only at the top levels gets you a warped idea of what the sport is like. For example, consider the match about a month ago between Arsenal and Manchester City. These are two teams whose performances have kept them at the top of the premiere league table and had been in great shape in the Champions' League, putting them in a place where it's safe to say they're both in the top 10 in all of Europe. The game had Arsenal packing their own penalty box defensively, holding onto the ball less than 30% of the game, and keeping Manchester City to a total of 12 shots and only 1 on target, with 6 shots of their own, 2 of which were on target. That's, on average, one shot every five minutes and most of them weren't even a threat for the other team.

The dichotomy here between basketball and soccer doesn't get any better when you look just at the MLS. When you see how the MLS has actually garnered fan attention, it's been through the recruitment of high-profile players who make major impacts in the fate of the teams they join (in very recent memory, Gareth Bale's use as a super-sub by LAFC was key to their victory in the '22 MLS Cup, and of course Messi with Inter Miami won the inaugural Leagues Cup despite the team having languished at the bottom of the MLS table). I acknowledge that it's hard to really argue in favor of soccer when you have these major teams that get by on the basis of a single superstar, who still doesn't see a ton of playing time, and has to make contributions to the game that tend to be more abstract. It's a far cry from a basketball team that might also rely on a single superstar, but who has more concrete, more quantifiable benefits to their team, like 38 points while massively weakened from a bout of food poisoning.

So here's where I call upon your knowledge as a fighting game guy. Like, you know that when you watch a match between less-experienced or mismatched opponents that a game can move really quickly and end almost as soon as it starts, but high-level matches tend to be slower. Players at the top levels pace themselves more slowly as they search for good openings against opponents they know are good enough to punish them badly if they make the first mistake. Neither player wants to make that first mistake. What seems like a slow match is deeply psychological, and deeply dramatic. As this video shows, the pro speed-of-play distinction is true of soccer, in almost the exact same way.

Watching Ryu and Ken stand around and move a few pixels on opposite sides of the screen might not seem exciting, but those who know how quickly a mistake can turn a game around know just what kind of dramatic tension this seemingly bland exchange holds, like the classic Hitchcock quote about suspense. There is a metaphorical bomb that can go off at any moment if either player makes just the wrong move at a specific time, and as time goes on the more likely that fatigue will set in just enough, that attention will slip, that someone will do the thing that makes that bomb go off, and we don't know just when. Sports of this nature retain all the tension of Hitchcock's suspense example -- and yet knowing that the bomb will go off, and when, provides us with a drip feed of catharsis throughout, we can brace for emotional impact with the explosion. Sport is too raw for that; competition denies that catharsis to at least one of the teams, which makes experiencing it all the more valuable.

Any given moment of the Arsenal game may not be terribly exciting, but the result is deeply meaningful when examining the game as a whole. Arsenal and Man City have been, and continue to be, locked in a very tight struggle for the top of the Premiere League table. While signs point to Manchester City winning the league for a second time, Arsenal's defensive organization is absolutely incredible in-context. If you're invested in their performance, as I am, then at any given moment this defensive gambit is incredibly stressful, and when their previous season's end was defined by defensive choking against teams that they should have been confidently beating. If you scan the article you'll also note that a similar problem happened the year before that, too. And yet, that game, they held on against one of the strongest teams in the world for the full 1.5 hours, and managed a few moments where they looked sure to take the lead.

Human-scale drama is happening all over the pitch at any moment.

And, y'know, everyone I know who is invested in fighting games goes on about the importance of investing in your own local communities, and local scenes. I understand that a lot; I've been pretty open about a major reason that I blog about the USL Championship here is specifically that it's the league that our local team competes in. It is, in pro soccer terms, the closest we have to a "local scene". Incidentally, that guy who did the speed-of-play video? He's a USL player as well; he'd been with Birmingham Legion for a few years and now is with Detroit City. He's got a good idea of what it takes to be a good player and what the pro game actually looks like.

You see, the speed-of-play issue cuts both ways, of course. A while back I saw a youtube short that I, sadly, cannot find any longer, where a goalkeeper was talking about the massive difference in playstyle required by keepers in the lower leagues (i.e., England's national leagues) vs. at professional levels. Here's the summary: Professional defenses are, of course, likely to be much better organized, to have a better situational awareness, and to communicate with each other better. This matters for figuring out where a goalkeeper needs to focus attention and positioning -- a less-organized defensive line calls for a defender who can cover a wider range of the field, and might need to come off the goal line more to proactively stop attacking plays. A pro goalkeeper used to being more focused and less physical could be incredibly successful stopping attacks poking through the defense, but would almost certainly fail at the challenges that the national league brings regularly, because they have to be part of a team.

Lower-league engagement is a great reminder of just how unpredictable the game can be, of how intense the competition actually is even when it seems to play conservatively. Like, only a few hours before you sent me that ask, some incredible things happened in USL competition. One team got off to a lead by, seeing a keeper off the line, making a chip shot from 3/4 of the length of the field³. Another team pulled a high press to stress out their former goalkeeper, a tactic that opened up the backfield such that after they scored, they conceded, TWICE⁴. And of course, in the intense southern California derby between Sacramento Republic and Orange County SC, the first goal was scored off a header 18 seconds into the game⁵.

And, like, this is barely cherry-picking examples. These were all games from just yesterday, played within a few hours of each other. The league can be incredibly chaotic, and every week has incredible stories like these, which is why I enjoy following not just my team but as much of the league as I can manage, and thus why I like to talk about it so much.

In that sense I almost reject the premise of the question -- soccer is incredibly interesting before the goals happen, because you never know if the moment you're watching is going to lead to a goal, and the more you watch the game in general the more you'll come to appreciate that fact. If anything, it's more common for a team to try to come up to an early lead and then start turtling the way that Arsenal did against Man City, and that can lead to an outcome that gets particularly stressful. A player could get sent off, someone's leg could strike an opposing player while they run into the box, someone could have their foot at just the wrong angle to deflect the ball into the goal away from the keeper, an offside trap might not work, or something else could happen beyond our ability to predict in the moment.⁶

That experience with the moments where things go wrong helps us contextualize the dryer-looking moments when things go completely right. Like, if someone went up to you and said "Justin v. Daigo? I don't understand why everyone's screaming. Ken's health bar isn't even going down!" you'd probably think they were putting you on, because it's easy to see how pixel-perfect, frame-precise timing was necessary to parry every move in that sequence and actually keep alive in that moment in order to produce that counterattack. Soccer is a lot more like that than a lot of people give it credit for, and I think a lack of familiarity and less defensively-focused sports are why.

I think that's ultimately my answer for what US audiences get wrong about soccer. They don't see the low-level playstyles that help demonstrate how elegant and challenging the high-level play actually is, how actually difficult and mentally (and physically) straining it can be even when it doesn't look like it is, and as a result they also don't appreciate just how quickly a team's fate can change, or how sustained pressure can lead to outcomes that fight against the run of play.

I was typing this up during El Clasico, the Spanish game between consistently competitive rivals Barcelona and Real Madrid. While Real Madrid did the seemingly-unthinkable in actually unseating Man City as champions of Europe in last week's Champions' League quarterfinal in a tiebreaker 4-3 penalty kick shootout, it's this match that I think really speaks to the unpredictability of the game, where after spending the entire regulation time down, Bellingham got a goal to put them up over Barcelona and win 3-2. ESPN highlights are widely regarded as terrible, but you can see them here; it was a result that serves as a testament to the fact that chaos and physicality can define the game even at its highest levels.

Thanks for the ask! This was a lot of fun to think about and try to get my thoughts in order about.

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1. I think there are good reasons to dislike pro sports (ranging from reputation/money laundering to cults of personality allowing people to get away with criminal actions) and soccer, with how many communities and leagues there are playing it -- it's not 'the world's game' for nothing -- has that worse than most.

2. The main differences I'd put this down to are a much stricter definition for what counts as a foul in basketball and the goaltending rules. It's hard to block a shot on its way in -- rebounds and pass interceptions seem to be the main way that possession changes between teams. And of course free-throws. I know a lot of people don't like the way that basketball games have their flow interrupted by tactical defensive fouls, and especially the way that manifests as "hack-a-Shaq" tactics. The Elam ending attempts to solve that, but I think the better option is to, as with what soccer rules do, let the fouled team choose who they want to take the free-throws rather than have the fouled player be the one to go to the line.

3. And this is El Paso Locomotive, so you know I feel dirty for even mentioning it, but I gotta give credit when it's relevant.

4. This is of course exactly what the speed-of-play paradox is about. A successful high-press absolutely can choke out attempts to play the ball out from defense, but the commitment of players forward means that areas further back that they could be covering to stop passes are open. This makes counterattacking more effective, and go figure that the responses to those goals came so quickly!

5. This is not a speed record for goals scored in the USL. That would be Justin Dhillon's goal within 10 seconds playing for Tacoma Defiance against Reno 1868 back in 2019.

6. That said, there's more to it than just positioning and vigilance. Defending a lead also can involve creative ways to manage the game clock. I recently learned about this fabulous time-wasting sequence by South African team Mamelodi Sundowns, letting the game clock run down as like four players on their team get yellow cards for failing to take a corner kick within a reasonable amount of time -- slowing the game down not just by rotating who'll take the kick but by forcing the ref to manage the paperwork of filling out the booking sheet. I wouldn't think this sequence requires a ton of explanation or experience with the game to appreciate; it's shitposting, trolling in the form of soccer tactics.