The Unbearable Lightness of Soccer

Finally saw my first Mexican soccer – sorry, football – game last weekend. The atmosphere was amazing. Both the home and away teams had their vocal fans in the end zones, drumming on drums, chanting chants and generally having a good time. Extra points for the very serious-seeming away fans, dressed in dark blue, confined to a packed section in the away end zone and surrounded completely by police in full riot gear. I’d never seen humourless cheering before: people expressing their support for their team with military precision, complete with expertly memorized cheers and choreographed one-arm salutes. It was all very menacing, in a rote, going-through-the-motions Disney World Magical Football Hooliganism Ride sort of way.

As a Canadian hockey fan, I’d always envied soccer fans their passion, their chants, their non-scoreboard-directed cheering and their general rowdiness, but I'd never understood what was really going on. During this soccer – sorry, football – game I realized that all the chanting, all the hooliganism is a way for fans to distract themselves from the fact that soccer is, even at the top levels, a crashing bore.

Did a player skin his knee? Call out the ambulance! Fetch the stretchers! Oh, look: another nifty play at midfield that failed to develop into anything. What fun: a sport where the big question isn’t, “What will the final score be?” but rather, “Will anyone score? At all?”

A corner kick! Will it result in a goal? (Answer: No.)

We’re talking about a game whose shootout, on a net the size of a garage, has exactly the same odds (and therefore drama) of football’s – sorry, real football’s – starting coin toss.

The beautiful game? Maybe, but an oil painting can be beautiful, too, and I don’t see many people heading to the National Gallery to heckle the Group of Seven.

Come to think of it, the typical soccer game moves about as fast as an oil painting.

It's not like there aren't sports in which stuff actually happens on a regular basis. Like hockey. Or basketball. Or baseball, which really doesn’t deserve its knock as a boring sport. With baseball, the drama develops in staccato bursts that build upon one another.

Not so soccer, the Seinfeld of sports, best understood as the Brits’ overcompensating apology for cricket, a sport in which a game’s score can run into the thousands, if not millions, and that requires missing a week of work in order to attend. I mean, really: where’s the moderation?

We drink to forget. Were soccer crowds to stop their cheering and focus intently on the, um, “action” on the field, they would soon be ripping out their fingernails from the sheer boredom – the ennui, if you will – of it all. From there it would be only a few short steps to the contemplation of the meaningless of existence, existential despair and, finally, mass suicide.

Why do soccer fans cheer? To avoid staring into the abyss.

Oh, and the game’s final score? 1-0.

Of course it was.