American soccer scores a massive own goal

Posted by Pointman on July 17, 2021 · 11 Comments 

Soccer has never been a big game in America. For most of its sports history, baseball was the number one sport by a country mile, with American football perennially lagging far behind. The prolonged player strikes of the mid nineties knocked baseball off its nearly century long perch and American football replaced baseball as America’s sport. The basic lesson to be learnt from that tectonic event was that the millions of fans were turned off by what they perceived as the unmitigated greed of the players. Essentially, the fans not only couldn’t identify with the players any longer, but also began to actively dislike them.

Baseball players went from being national icons that were loved and revered, to being regarded as a bunch of spoilt, greedy, pampered and self-entitled prima donnas.

American football ruled the roost for the next three decades until some third stringer quarterback decided to take a knee while the national anthem was being played. He got lots of coverage about his brave gesture to highlight the brutal suppression of blacks in America. He was the son of two extremely rich IBM executives, he’d never missed a good meal in his life and even though he’d only rarely been a starting quarterback, was already on the usual obscene multi-million dollar football salary. He’d be the black version of a self-righteous white liberal.

The media, the woke and big tech got behind his heroic action and taking a knee rapidly spread to every football game. The problem was the fans didn’t give a damn about whatever the cause was, you don’t disrespect the flag. In a deeper sense though, they didn’t want politics injected into the simple pastime of watching a game.

The abandoned football in hordes. Attendance and viewership plunged with the big networks and for the first time ever they had to honour the clawback clauses with the big advertisers. A clawback basically says if you can’t attract a certain minimum number of viewers, I want some money back. The Shakespeare phrase about Hell having no wrath like a woman spurned nearly applies, but in this case it was more like Hell having no wrath like a wife who learns she’s been sleeping for years with a husband who’s turned out to be an alien.

Sports fans love to watch and discuss sport. Suddenly all the ex-football fans were on the hunt for another sport to watch. They looked at baseball but by that time the taking a knee disease had metastasised to there as well, so screw baseball too. The NBA and ice hockey were going the same way. The only thing left was soccer, so it duly began to enjoy a slight uptick in consumer’s attention.

The skinny on soccer in America is that despite several attempts to launch it as a mass viewer sport, it’s never really taken off. There’s always been pockets of interest in it but they were confined to the Hispanic American areas on the east and west coasts such as Florida or California. The result has been few domestic professional teams and those that do exist could be blown away by a 4th division team from any of the countries around the world that are passionate about the game.

Also, outside the Hispanic areas of America, it’s always suffered from the vague taint of being girly and only for well-to-do wives, known as soccer moms, driving young Cynthia or Prudence to soccer practice at their very expensive private school in a mock humvee tank costing about three times the average deposit on a house. It’s not the sort of image that Joe Schmo the truck driver is particularly attracted by.

On the plus side and especially true in business, when one door closes, another one opens. With football, MLB and the rest imploding and leaving a vacuum behind, it’d be easy to insert soccer into it after some simple work on its image which would be a cake walk for the mad men of Madison Avenue. Things were moving in that direction quite nicely until a single recent event blew the whole sunny prospect out of the water.

The US women’s soccer team were preparing to play a game against Mexico but when the American national anthem was being played, members of the team turned their back. What made it particularly egregious was the anthem was being played not by a massed band but on a simple harmonica by a 98-year-old veteran of WWII. You can see it on twitter, if big tech hasn’t deleted it already.

The US soccer organisations are in full panic mode trying to salvage a golden opportunity that’s now in ruins. The lying media and dissembling “fact checkers” at places like Stopes have since denied it ever happened or if it did, it was all some sort misunderstanding.

It’s a long anthem, especially when being played solo by so elderly a gentleman in a vast stadium, so there was plenty of time to correct any mistakes about which way your back should be pointing. They’re just yet another bunch of entitled athletes marring what was an especially touching moment. They can burn in Hell, the lot of them, for either showing such disrespect or standing by and doing nothing while their team mates did it.

As for Pvt. Pete DuPre, WWII veteran, US army, I wish you, Sir, strength of arm and length of days.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Soccer, Taking a knee