I am, I confess, a bandwagon U.S. soccer fan.
True soccer fans tend to be younger and more knowledgeable regarding the sport and follow it year-round. They probably even call it football.
But the World Cup draws out the bandwagon jumpers like myself.
We don’t give a flip about soccer, but we are willing to watch and cheer on the U.S. during the World Cup.
If we had beaten Belgium Tuesday, I would keep tuning in to watch the Americans. But after losing 2-1, I doubt I will see another minute of World Cup soccer this year.
I say bring on the real football, which starts in less than 60 days.
People will ask whether this World Cup run to the round of 16 will boost the growth of soccer in the U.S. The answer is most likely not.
We bandwagoners will forget about soccer for another four years, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand where the sport stands with real soccer aficionados, most of them younger than me.
Soccer is now the second-most popular sport for people under the age of 25, and Major League Soccer is more popular with this age group than Major League Baseball, according to recent ESPN polls.
One newspaper columnist writes: “At this point, the question isn’t when soccer will finally catch on in this country, but rather when the middle-aged professional sports establishment will accept that it has already arrived.”
I accept it, but I sure as heck don’t understand it.
I am sick and tired of all these idiots on Twitter acting like soccer experts.
I admit I am a bandwagon jumper and don’t pretend to know much about the strategy of the sport.
I think the offsides call is the dumbest thing in sports. It’s ludicrous to penalize what should be one of the most exciting moments in an otherwise dull game — a one-on-one confrontation with the goalie.
But no, let’s do everything we can to have a 1-0 game. Oh, sorry, match.
And maybe Twitter can return to some form of normalcy, if there is such a thing in the world of social media, now that the U.S. has been ousted from the World Cup.
So many of these “fans” can go back to their real lives and quit pretending they know so much about soccer and give my timeline a little relief.
Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel proved that most American soccer fans are full of it with a recent edition of his hilarious “Lie Witness News,” by asking people on the street what they thought about Landon Donovan’s performance for the U.S. at the World Cup.
Just about all of them praised Donovan’s work, which made them look pretty dumb, considering that Donovan was cut from the team in May.
I have no problem with bandwagon fans as long as they admit it up front. It would have been great for all soccer fans, the real and the fake, to celebrate the Fourth of July getting pumped for a quarterfinal match against Argentina on Saturday.
Belgium ruined that for us, so soccer is already in the rearview mirror for most of us.
Soccer may be the world’s game, but it wil never be America’s.
