Your pretentious, “worldly” friends who love anything other countries appreciate have probably told you the World Cup is happening, and you probably (hopefully) looked at them kind of cockeyed and went back to not giving a shit about soccer (which, by the way, those friends will call football, even though this is America and the sport is called soccer here, because we speak American English). People who are trying desperately to be cultured by pretending to appreciate soccer will always come to you with their one point – soccer is the most popular sport in the world, so it must be worth liking. “Untrue!” I say. McDonalds is like the most popular restaurant in the world, but does that make the food good? No. It’s popular because it’s cheap and fast. The same reasons soccer is popular.

That’s right. Soccer is the disgusting fast food of sports. It’s popular because it can be thrown together for six cents and anyone can play it. Have a field? Have anything to kick? Then you can play soccer! You don’t need a bat, or a special stadium, or any sticks or any talent, or even a ball! You could play soccer with a chicken, or a rock. Literally all you need to be able to do is run. Or in the case of being a goalie, all you need to be able to do is stand in the way of things. How could soccer not be the most popular sport in the world when it can be played everywhere from the richest cities in the world to the poorest villages? That’s also why youth soccer is so popular. Before kids have any kind of coordination, they’re able to run after a ball and tire themselves out.

But eventually, we grow up and like more complex things. Soccer is just too simplistic. There are some rules, such as:
1. If a team kicks a ball into a goal, they score
2. The team who scores the most wins
3. Don’t use your hands
4. If someone looks at you, fall down on the ground and start crying like a bitch and writhing in pain

Far as I can tell, that’s about it. And as far as strategy goes, it seems to be “run faster than the other guys, and if you can’t do that, then try a pass in front of the goal and hope someone who’s standing there can bonk it with his head into the net” because for some reason you can use literally any part of your body except the hands.

Soccer also blows because its penalties are stupid. Aside from the aforementioned “hand ball,” you can get penalized for touching someone while trying to steal the ball from them. You slide to get the ball, you accidentally touch the other guy, and then we spend 15 minutes watching him cry for mommy, then pop right back up and start running around again. I’d love to see some of these pussies actually take a hit, like in real sports. And to top that all off, if you actually get someone out in front of all his defenders and you pass to him, you get called for offsides! Unbelievably, in the world’s most boring, lowest scoring sport, they actually penalize you for creating a good scoring chance. It’s like soccer fans are really just in it for the running, and not so much the scoring. Soccer is like watching a 90 minute long race that doesn’t have a finish line and nobody wins.

Speaking of 90 minutes, the clock in soccer anticlimactically climbs upwards to 90 minutes, never stopping, before some arbitrary amount of “stoppage time” is added by a referee. So when they’re resetting the ball after it goes out of bounds for the 750th time that game, or some wiener is laying there acting hurt, the game is technically still going on, so there’s no kind of strategizing with the clock. Just kicking the ball back and forth lazily until 90 minutes has gone by. There’s a half time so these distance runners can adjust their shin guards, but aside from that, nothing. And just to sap any excitement that might be left out of the sport, you don’t even get thrilling countdown moments where the clock has entered the last minute of play and it’s counting down…ten…nine…eight… Nope! After the clock counts UP to 90 minutes, the game goes on for a few more minutes and then it just ends when a ref has decided he’s ready to go home.

If you like your sports played in binary, soccer is the score for you. Let’s take a look at the scores from the first round or whatever of the World Cup. 1-1, 1-0, 1-1, 0-1, 0-1, 1-0, 1-1, 0-0 (!!). Granted, every once in a while you get a blowout like South Korea over Greece (2-0), or you’ll have a game where a continent forgets to send players (Germany’s 4-0 over Australia). But the vast majority end in some variation of 1-0, with some games even ending with no score, which would make a normal person feel like they’d just wasted hours of their life watching it. And that’s another thing. Ties!? In a tournament!? I mean it makes sense in that if we had to play to a win, games could take months, years even. But I feel like the World Cup is essentially the playoffs of soccer, and what other sport lets a game tie in the playoffs?

Look, even if we ignore the God-awful fans of the sport, soccer blows. It’s engineered to be as boring as possible, with penalties for anything exciting and a clock that counts up. If you love watching people run, just watch track and field. At least someone wins every time.