Dammit, the soccer thing is perfectly understandable.

Ace and Allah and Stacy* to the contrary.  The real reason why Americans don’t watch or particularly want the damned game is simple:

You can’t use your damned hands to play it unless you’re the damned goalie.

Remember that movie Victory? Yes, the supremely silly one* about the WWII Allied prisoners of war that had a match with the Germans?  Remember how they had to give Sylvester Stallone the goalie position?  And do you know why they did that ?  Because Stallone was an American action hero at the time, and the audience would not accept an American action hero that did not have the use of his hands.

This is just the way that it is.  Soccer is a perfectly fine sport.  For other people.

Moe Lane

*Look, I’m sorry, but shoehorning Pele into that plot was an egregious assault on historical accuracy in a WWII film that was only approached by… well, pretty much everything in U-571… twenty years later.