Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet
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the quotes that follow say nothing about soccer being "socialist"......they say that Americans don't like soccer.....they say Americans don't like socialism.....that doesn't mean that soccer is socialism.....
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Soccer As A Metaphor For Socialism: Lots Of Effort With No Reward
by
bconngemini
in NFL Football / NFL General
Soccer reflects the euro-socialist beliefs in not rewarding effort with reward (scoring) and creating a deadlock without clear superiority of one team over another.
America is the land where effort is rewarded through a merocratic system where individual talents are praised and brought up to the apex of success by promoting fair, transparent system of reward where the formula is: "x amount of effort = x amount of reward". In addition, natural god-given talents are the reason for success, where the successful are inherently more worthy of the rewards than those who fail. For example, in football the bigger one is and teh heavier they weight, the more force they can assert in gaining enemy territory and the reward is always given for every action in terms of yardage and countless other statistics. Soccer has none of this. In soccer, there is no reward only tedious strain and effort expended. There is no quantifiable advancement in soccer except for a goal and those are so rare and so miserly that soccer is in essence a game of starvation where the poor must wrangle for the tiny amount of satisfaction with expending more effort than in any other sport. Every sport Americans enjoy provides continual satisfaction for every action, a batter only needs to run a few yards to get to a new base, a running back could take only one step forward before being tackled and still accomplish something. In soccer, a player could run 10km and achieve absolutely nothing. In fact the majority of players on a soccer team are completely not achieving anything, with generally only 1 or 2 players actually creating a statistic (goal).
Americans would never invent a sport where the higher the level of competition, the lower the scoring. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, so little winning, so little ego satisfaction?
There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer's success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.
Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and television are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.
Soccer as a metaphor for socialism: Lots of effort with no reward - RootZoo Sports Articles
Former congressman and star quarterback Jack Kemp once said that "…a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalist, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport,"
Capitalist Soccer and Socialist Football by Sergei Boukhonine
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