The Quintessential Socialist Sport

As I write this the US World Cup team has once again been robbed of a goal by a dubious call.  The same thing cost us a win against Slovenia, and depending how this game turns out that stolen goal today could keep the US out of the finals. (UPDATE:  USA scored with barely 2 minutes to play to win the game and go through to the knockout rounds.)

American Thinker has a piece on soccer today, and I excerpted a small section that demonstrates why this is not a big sport in the US:

Consider other ways in which it is the quintessential socialist sport:

Soccer is biggest where the "national teams" are the main sports focus of a nation. Hey, you can't get much more socialist than that. And everyone on every street and in every town pulls for the same team. Wow. Isn't that exciting? Whom do you pull for? Oh yeah, the national team.

And let's not forget the off-sides rule. Without getting buried in minutiae, suffice it to say that off-sides in soccer is like making the bomb illegal in football or the fast break illegal in basketball. This is a socialist sport. We can't be having any risk-reward equations here. You see, in soccer, it's not fair that you might take a chance to weaken your defense in order to spring a man deep downfield behind the defense. That would be unfair in a free-market, venture-capital-type way. No, no, no! You must let the defense be behind you. You cannot beat them downfield until you have the ball. That would be unfair and, no doubt, mean-spirited.

So ingrained is this into the soccer psyche that many of the world's best defenses employ what they call "the off-sides trap." In other words, they use the socialist rules to the hilt. Here, a defenseman gets beaten downfield on purpose to get a call against his opponent.

It's a lot like using high tax rates and the IRS to keep everyone's financial strata the same.

I've got to think a lot of Americans will be turned off by soccer if America misses the final rounds because of bad officiating calls. I saw this Tweet on the issue:

RT @mattyglesias: Anti-American refereeing highlights failure of Obama's public diplomacy.

Heh. And what good is it to be a world superpower if we can't intimidate soccer officials enough to keep them from stealing our goals?