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Ann Coulter is not pleased that the United States is embracing the world's sport. Despite comments in recent years about how much liberals hate the USA, she is now awfully upset that "liberal moms" and "new Americans" are picking up flags and waving them around willy-nilly in support of the United States. Apparently, only certain forms of patriotism are acceptable - and this isn't one of them.
A recent post on her blog begins, "I've held off on writing about soccer for a decade – or about the length of an average soccer game – so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay."
One wishes she would have held off writing about it for another decade or ten.
She goes on to list all the reasons that soccer is terrible. And, while it's easy to see that Coulter's goal is to draw liberal outrage (you can almost hear her cackling with delight as we write this), we couldn't resist pointing out why her complaints about soccer are...well...just plain dumb. Even her premise that soccer games are too long is absurd when you consider that you could fit almost 2 full matches (including half time) into the average length of an American football game.
What other idiotic assertions does Coulter make? For our money, here are the top 5:
Dumb Assertion #1: "In soccer, the blame is dispersed...There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability."
It would be hard to walk away from a single match of World Cup football and make this assertion. Which leads us to the conclusion that Ann Coulter has not, in fact, watched a single match of World Cup football. Instead, much like Sarah Palin claiming during the 2008 election to have read "all of them" in reference to magazines and newspapers, Coulter's experience with soccer seems more imagined than real. Based on her numerous references to "soccer moms" and "juice boxes" in her article, we would guess Coulter's experience with soccer was driving by a youth soccer match, once - much as Palin's experience with foreign policy was looking out her window at Russia (and, even then, perhaps more than once).
If the Suarez debacle doesn't convince you that there are most definitely losers in the sport, perhaps the recent penalty shoot out between Greece and Costa Rica will. It's hard to look at the images of Greece's doomed Fanis Gekas before and after he missed a crucial penalty and not see the weight of an entire nation crashing down on his head:
(Photo: ESPN broadcast)
But perhaps these subtleties are lost on Coulter. If this is the case, we suggest she watch ESPN's "The Two Escobars," which chronicles the fall of the Columbian National Team in the 1994 World Cup and the price paid by team captain Andres Escobar. Spoiler alert: the punishment isn't public humiliation, personal disgrace or bruised self-esteem (which Coulter assures us are minimum requirements for a sport to count as "real").
Dumb Assertion #2: "Liberal moms like soccer because it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression..."
Remember when [insert quarterback name here] fired a 30-yard pass from mid-field and [insert wide receiver name here] threw himself into the air at full speed but, instead of using his hands to catch the ball, he used his head to lob the ball through the uprights for the most amazing field goal you've ever seen?
Yeah, neither do we. That was Robin van Persie scoring a goal in this World Cup.
Dumb Assertion #3: "No other "sport" ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer...Even in football, by which I mean football, there are very few scoreless ties - and it's a lot harder to score when a half-dozen 300-pound bruisers are trying to crush you."
Let's look at this one by the numbers.
During the group stage of World Cup 2014, teams scored a total of 136 goals across 48 matches. This averages 2.8 goals scored per match. It's pretty clear from this simple analysis (which, incidentally, any grade-schooler with an abacus could conduct) that the majority of matches played thus far in the World Cup are nowhere near scoreless. In fact, only 2% of matches from World Cup 2014 have gone scoreless.
Admittedly, soccer matches have lower scores than American football games. During the "perfectly average" NFL game from the 2013 season, the score ended at 29 to 17.8 - rounding up to a total of 47 points scored, or 6.7 touchdowns plus extra point conversions. If we call a touchdown the equivalent of a goal in soccer, then the American football league outscores World Cup matches by roughly 2:1. Does this qualify as American football vastly outscoring European football? I'll let you be the judge.
The best part of Coulter's argument, however, is that "it's a lot harder to score" in American football. Clearly, the more you're able to score, the harder it must be.
Perhaps we can try this experiment: Let's give soccer teams 6 timeouts each during regulation play and 2 more each if the match goes to overtime. This way, at crucial moments, they can pause the game for anywhere between 40 and 110 seconds to discuss the many ways they might put the ball into the back of the net. Then, we'll give them another way to earn points, just in case it ultimately proves too difficult to execute their plan to score. Perhaps we'll let them kick the ball over the goal instead of into it, and we'll award them 1/2 a point each time they do this. Finally, we'll sprinkle in a bunch of other breaks throughout the match just for fun – because, I mean, who really wants to run around for 90 minutes straight? That's ridiculous. Just like the assertion that it's harder to score in the NFL.
Dumb Assertion #4: "It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not 'catching on' at all, is African Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it."
Oh boy. It's hard to know where to start with this one.
Maybe we go for the obvious. Can we really give merit to the statement that soccer isn't "catching on with African Americans" when over 1/3 of the U.S. Men's National Team is, in fact, African American. (We're sure Coulter would have something to say about the German-Americans among them - but let's not open that can of worms.) Either way, we're sure Tim Howard and Jozy Altidore are probably with Coulter on this one.
Looked at a different way, isn't Coulter's statement a little like saying [insert a sport that isn't football, basketball or baseball here] isn't catching on among African Americans? Which is to say, slightly racist and highly uninformed?
You've got to question blanket assertions like this one that give little regard for facts. For instance, a recent study by consumer research giant Mintel showed that African Americans are actually more likely than white Americans to purchase sports apparel for soccer. This is just one data point – and isn't to say that soccer is exploding among African Americans – but demonstrates the idea that maybe Coulter is relying more on sterotype than fact.
And then there's the question of why she's even bringing up African Americans in relation to the idea of soccer as "foreign" anyways. Is her idea that this demographic doesn't like foreign things? Is she placing African Americans in contrast to other minority groups in the United States who are more "foreign?"
On this last point, it seems pretty clear that an underlying message in Coulter's rant against soccer is anti-immigrant. After all, she ends her piece with the statement, "No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time." (This is a good time to see comments above about slightly racist remarks.)
No matter where you fall on the issue of immigration, it is pretty clear that the American landscape is changing and perhaps Coulter's response to the popularity of World Cup 2014 is just the fear of "foreign" becoming "mainstream." After all, one of the demographics driving the growing popularity of soccer within the United States is Latinos, who represent around 17% of U.S. population today and rank soccer as their #1 sport. With the predicted growth of this demographic to 25% of population by 2025, asking whether or not soccer is "catching on" is a little like standing in a storm asking if it's going to rain.
Dumb Assertion #5: "Soccer is not catching on...The USA-Portugal game was the blockbuster match, garnering 18.2 million viewers on ESPN…Run-of-the-mill, regular-season Sunday Night Football games average more than 20 million viewers."
Apparently, Ann Coulter is the world's worst trend spotter. (See above re: standing in the rain.)
Case in point: her definition of "catching on." In order for something to qualify as "catching on," it turns out, it must have become the most popular thing of its kind in the known universe. And, maybe even then, it has not quite caught on.
Is Twitter catching on? Don't ask Coulter - she'll tell you that because Facebook has more monthly users (at 1 billion+), Twitter is definitely not catching on. Nevermind the fact that Twitter has 255 million+ monthly users. Those people are silly and probably foreign.
Speaking of Facebook, nevermind the fact that World Cup 2014 has generated more social buzz than the Super Bowl, Oscars and Olympics combined. The 500 million people talking about the World Cup on Facebook wouldn't know a trend if it hit them in the head and then bounced into the goal.
Also, nevermind the fact that more Americans streamed the USA vs Germany match online than did this year's Super Bowl. Why are they watching their television online, anyways? What are they, communists? Good old-fashioned Americans watch their television at home in the living room with a TV dinner in front of them, just like their great-great-great-grandfathers did before them.
And nevermind the fact that 30% of U.S. households today contain someone playing soccer, more than both American football and hockey. Those people are probably just playing soccer as an ironic, hipster gesture to show their true dislike.
Finally, nevermind the fact that 1/3 of the United States population is under 35 and rank soccer as their #2 favorite sport. Those people are young and impressionable. Just wait until they turn 52 like Ann Coulter. Then they'll be wise enough to stare unblinking into the headlight of an impending train and say, "Don't worry, it's not real."
