Note to FIFA: Your Sport is Not Worthy of America

Congratulations to Thpain for their victory over the freaky-deaky Dutch.  With the World Cup now over, we can all now move on to football season.  I mean real football, if there are any pantywaist soccer lovers among my readers.  As far as I'm concerned, June and July are by far the worst months in sports, especially when the Lakers are in the NBA Finals. I'm close to renouncing the NBA as it is, but the Jazz have kept me paying attention for this long, and I'll continue following for at least one more season before the almost certain lockout, then I'll switch over full-time to college.  You know it's bad when you can actually script most of the next year or so.  Next June, it'll be Lakers-Miami, which will cause most of the country to wish both teams could lose, then the collective bargaining agreement is up, but with the current situation untenable, barring a miracle, there will be a major impasse between owners and players that will cause SportsCenter to be overrun with stories on a work stoppage instead of actual sport.

But I digress.  Four years ago I was sucked into the World Cup when Portugal, the country of my mission, took fourth place, and this time around, I expected that I might start giving a crap at any time.  I kept my eye on it virtually the entire time and saw nothing that captured my heart or imagination.  Today's championship game, which I tuned into for a few minutes out of sheer curiosity, was a 0-0 tie until the 119th minute.  It's complete and utter hell, and I don't see how the world can be so wrong about anything.  In Europe and South America, for even a mildly interesting match between two local teams, the streets are empty.  Vacant.  Deserted. So I can only imagine what it's like when the stakes get high.  Spain will probably be hung over until Thursday.

For years, it's been said that America is poised for soccer to break away and garner the same gigantic interest that our other sports generate.  They've been saying that for at least thirty years, despite the fact that most of our guys couldn't even sniff the top leagues abroad.  Major League Soccer?  Please.  At best, MLS is a low-level minor league on the international scene. But this year, the U.S. did show some major improvement and captured the public attention for a moment.  I personally think this was just a hiccup, and most of us won't give soccer a second thought until 2014, but that won't stop the conversation.  For a more detailed view of why I believe soccer will never gain the ground its supporters hope for, articulated as well as anything I could ever say, read Sal Paolantonio's How Football Explains America.

Unless, that is, FIFA's governing body, along with all others involved in the sport, adopt these rules, as suggested by Bucky in today's Get Fuzzy comic.  Bucky Katt is a hilariously antisocial, hostile, and ignorant character, but I feel that in this case, his suggestions would vastly improve the many and varied weaknesses of the game that the world has been so obsessed with over the past month.

1.  Put one of the forward's grandmothers in a dunking booth that drops her into ice cold water whenever his team takes a shot that misses the open goal.

2.  No cleats.  Everybody wears those lead-soled Frankenstein-type boots.  (That should make #1 more interesting too).

3.  All the substitutes are knife-wielding monkeys.  Except the back-up goalie.  He has a slingshot.

4.  All the refs are MMA fighters and every time a player falls down and fakes an injury, the ref steps in and administers to that player the very injury they were faking.

Okay, people, tell me you wouldn't watch this, and that it wouldn't make the matches infinitely more watchable.  Does this not just reek of common sense to rid us of the things that are most contemptible about soccer?  Bucky Katt for President!

P.S.  An interesting note: soccer enthusiasts, especially Brits, have long gotten on America's case about using the word football for our own brutal, far superior game.  But did you know that the term soccer actually originated in England as an Oxford "-er" abbreviation of the word association?  So they're bitching at us for using a term that they created.