I just like to be contrarian. If you are extreme, I am pretty much going to ask you questions that challenge your views--it is pretty easy as most extreme views aren't that rational. As for conservatives, there are lots of normal ones that have views based more on money and economic policies than the more colorful ones like nationalism, patriotism and other ism's. Beck and other entertainers like him use things like this to get ratings. The more extreme of his audience love ignorant, provincial garbage.
The popularity of soccer in the USA is a communist plot by Obama to indoctrinate our youth into accepting socialism. After all soccer requires teamwork.
Im more conservative myself, but obviously love football. I do hate it when people I usually listen to bash the sport for its "leftist view." I would think it is quite the opposite when you look at the European leagues as the best get rewarded the worst run clubs get punished.
But it's always an individual who stands out, i.e. the "Man of the Match," "Golden Boot," etc. If it were a socialist plot, there would be none of that. Remember, a team is nothing more than a group of individuals banding together for a common goal. Nothing socialist about that, except when the individual is devalued, and punished for being an individual. Then, the team becomes just a conglomeration of mediocre robots.
I'll sum up this thread in one post: 1) Many of those in this thread are Republicans. 2) They're not supposed to like soccer because they're not sophisticated enough, dumb, insular, provincial, from the Southern US etc... 3) The thread starter took offense to that BigSoccer stereotype and wanted other Republicans to speak out against this. I propose closing the thread.
Trust me, if Fox had the World Cup broadcast rights Glenn Beck would keep his mouth shut about bashing The World Cup. If Clinton and Obama were not involve with bringing the event here Glenn Beck would keep his mouth shut.
Soccer requires players to think on their feet, and make their own decisions on the fly without input from the coach much more than baseball, basketball or American football do. It requires players whose mindset is very different from the sort of uncreative, lockstep thinking that Communism promotes.
Ah, the blank stares and sputtering of the football coaches who were trying to recruit me whenever I made this point...
You can drop basketball from that list. And hockey is very similar to soccer in this respect, yet see the dominance of the Soviet Union. I think that pretty much kills your argument.
There certainly has been some theories put forward on how the Soviet Regime's approach to sport affected the players it produced. I wouldn't put it the way Roger put it, but I think Russian players and teams generally played a certain style. Soviet and Russian players have often said to be relatively uncreative, and Russian teams were often said to be based on rigid team play, with very authoritarian coaches and a near military team environment. It's important to remember that a key difference between a Soviet sportsman and his Western counterpart is that the Soviet sportsman was completely owned by the club and the state and he had no ability to play abroad unless he defected. The It can of course be pointed out that the USSR (or other Eastern Bloc nations) were never as successful at the World Cup as they were in the Olympics. I'm not sure about how that worked in individual sports, but if we take hockey, we should remember that for all of the USSR's success at Olympic Hockey their record against teams with top professionals was mixed. And the USSR did have a successful period in the 60s making the Semis once or twice and winning the Euro. It should be said that the stereotype of the uncreative Russian player was broken by Lev Yashin, who was a very innovative player who changed the way the position was played.
Timeouts in basketball. Line changes in hockey. There's plenty of opportunity for coaches in those sports to tell the players what he wants them to do. Soviet hockey teams, who were amateur in name only, did usually dominate the western amateurs who they played against in the Olympics. When they played Canadian pros, it was about 50/50.
So? Yes, soccer may require "players to think on their feet, and make their own decisions on the fly without input from the coach" more than some other sports. But that doesn't mean that other sports don't require it at all. Especially, basketball and hockey. I'd also argue that communism doesn't necessarily promote uncreative, lockstep thinking. A totalitarian regime might promote that sort of thing, but not always. Meh, why are we even discussing this? PS- I'm not a communist.
I didn't say that other sports don't require it at all. I said that soccer requires it much more. The point I was trying to make is that soccer is the exact opposite of the "socialist sport" that some of the bashers try to characterize it as being.
This is pretty spot on, I think. One addition: conservatism still has a strong streak of isolationism, even after the previous decade. Some people and a lot of talking head types glom on to that with soccer pretty effortlessly. I think most conservatives recognize it as nonsense, but there's a strong contingent that are still repeating thirty-year old France jokes (instead of moving on to newer, more advanced France jokes) who mindlessly repeat the anti-soccer platitudes.
I did. I do know about their internal soap opera and how badly they played, if that's what you meant.
I agree with this characterization of liberals over-thinking soccer. There is just one thing here that bothers me. A lot of us never have had a Manchester United jersey in the first place. Be careful about pigeon-holing us as Euro-fanatics. The most conservative man I've ever known in my life is a diehard Liverpool fan.
I'm a pretty conservative guy, though to be fair I think GWB was one of the biggest idiots I've ever seen (he valued individual decadence over collective sacrifice). I say to each their own. I like soccer. Fascists in Spain and Germany like soccer too. I don't see any correlation between political views on the left-right spectrum and soccer fandom (note I'm much more of a libertarian than a fascist, I f...ing hate fascists, just saying.....) Yeah in the US a few ignorant conservatives dislike soccer, but really the conservative movement in the US overall is a disgrace compared to the beautiful ideals of true conservatism. I'm an atheist as well as a conservative, will prlly never find someone to vote for my entire life, and am generally drunk right now after a Friday night on the town. Please forgive my indulgence.
If you were really a libertarian, you wouldn't put a premium on "collective sacrifice" (whatever that actually is).