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I’m starting to get a hang of this soccer thing. Turns out there are plenty of similarities between the beautiful game and America’s game.
Beyond the competition, the passion and the spirit, the World Cup has managed to capture everything that we love, hate and love to hate about football, especially the collegiate variety.
Take, for example, the ousted Three Lions. The perpetually petulant English tabloids are having a field day trashing manager Fabio Capello and the English national team after crashing out at the hands of Germany.
Ever the masters of understated subtlety, the press spent its South African fortnight yo-yoing between “we’re going to win it all” jingoism and “all is lost” fatalism. The post-mortem has focused on the foreigner and his tactics and the end of the “Golden Generation,” a group of players whose exploits never matched the hype afforded them.
Remind you of anyone?
The hyper-inflated sense of worth? The ridiculous attachment to past accomplishments that have nothing to do with right now? The all-or-nothing mentality?
It’s Notre Dame. Really, all that’s missing was having England’s game broadcast on NBC with a fawning halftime feature on Capello’s schematic advantage.
And just as the Irish have transitioned into the Brian Kelly era, Capello will get his walking-away money and the new guy will be hailed as the man to lead the return to glory.
But for sheer arrogance and hatred of its own fans, FIFA makes the NCAA look positively receptive.
Sure, FIFA president Sepp Blatter apologized to Mexico and England on Tuesday for blown calls in their Round of 16 games, but his organization’s track record isn’t known to inspire confidence. In the run up to this World Cup, we’ve seen an obvious handball to qualify France, the ball itself under fire and now a laundry list of blown calls.
FIFA will launch a committee to investigate the ball, but only after the tournament is over. They will investigate the use of technology to record goals, but not instant replay.
Are they getting their public relations coordinated by the BCS? The only thing missing is a Twitter account.
For all their arrogance and idiocy, at least the NCAA and BCS are receptive to the bottom line. Threaten the money and they react. Not so with the other football.
The United States represents an enormous cash cow. Its corporations represent most of the major sponsors. ABC/ESPN and Univision will pay out more than $400 million to broadcast the 2010 and 2014 tournaments.
FIFA’s attitude? ‘Let’s frustrate the Yanks as the game is positioned to take off.’
That might work in college football, where fans love the game in spite of its inane format for crowning a champion, but it’s an ingrained part of the cultural and sporting landscape. Soccer doesn’t have that advantage.
Americans will put up with bad officiating, be it Pac-10 incompetence or SEC crooks. They’ll put up with mangled replays, as somewhere an Oklahoma fan is still complaining about the onside kick at Autzen. They’ll put up with a system that has and will continue to leave multiple undefeated teams out of the championship game.
Not so with a once every four years novelty.
