As the soccer haters climbed onto their “penalty kicks are stupid” soapboxes after the conclusion of the 2022 World Cup men’s final (and let’s be clear – that final was the greatest single sport anything to have ever occurred anywhere ever) something truly bizarre happened just hours later: the conclusion of the Patriots’ game, in which the Las Vegas Raiders kept their playoff hopes and dreams alive with just three seconds left on the clock because of, well, honestly, there is no real explanation for what happened, other than deeming it the most inexplicable play in any sport, ever.
And yes, please remember: I’m a Red Sox fan and thoughts of Bill Buckner did run through my head. This was no World Series. But still.
Yet rather than heap blame on Patriots’ wide receiver Jakobi Meyers for making an epically bad decision – I mean, a really really bad decision – in the heat of the moment of a tie game with the clock near zero, or fuss and fret about how soccer’s grand dénouement came in a shootout, let’s pause for a moment and acknowledge something that we rarely do: sports are really hard.
I remember years ago spending the day at Montreal’s Musée des Beaux Arts exploring an exhibit on the history of baseball in the city. While I was most interested in the displays that centered on Jackie Robinson’s time with the Montreal Royals, the farm team of the Brooklyn Dodgers, there was an interactive simulation that let visitors attempt – virtually – to hit a fastball. My friend Don and I stepped up to bat, confident we could swing with the best of them.
We were wrong.
The two of us spent an inordinate amount of time utterly positive that this next pitch was the one…and then missing. Every time. Other visitors came and went, and we stepped out of line to let them try as well, and we all failed. Every single time. Indeed, the physics of hitting a fastball are intense, to say the very least, with the ball – which is, mind you, really small – coming in at some 90 miles per hour, giving the batter a literal blink of the eye in which to make contact.
While baseball might have the most extreme physics, scoring a goal in soccer isn’t much easier. Players have to move the ball – again, a relatively small ball – across some 100 yards of uneven pitch through 10 opponents without use of arms or hands only to come up against one last player, the keeper, who can use their hands, forcing a powerful yet accurate attempt (sometimes by foot, sometimes by head) to get said ball into the net. When successful, soccer players celebrate like no other, whether it is Lionel Messi raising two fingers to the sky, Thierry Henry’s classic knee slide, or Brandi Chastain ripping her shirt off to display the sports bra seen round the world after scoring the pivotal penalty shot for the U.S. in 1999.
But just as Americans have no patience for awkward pauses in conversation, feel the need to gulp a cup of hot coffee at their own peril, eat a food actually categorized as fast, and engage in something called speed dating, they continue to have little tolerance for how a goal in soccer is built often minutes before it actually happens.
It is no longer correct to say that Americans hate soccer. Millions watch, if television ratings are any indication; millions play, filling fields and parking lots, public parks and private schools, with youth leagues and pickup games; and the U.S. Women’s National Team is one of sports’ great dynasties. Indeed, the women’s team encompasses two things that Americans do love: skill and success.
But setting all of that aside, Americans still have a hard time overall with soccer, exemplified with Fox rushing the epic World Cup final off the air in order to get down to business with that other kind of football. The U.S. men’s national team did fairly well at this World Cup, the scrappy young players getting themselves into the knockout round after failing to even qualify four years ago. But they didn’t score very much, with the good look that star Christian Pulisic got against the Dutch early in their last match likely haunting the squad for weeks to come.
Opportunities like that one don’t come very often in soccer, and didn’t come again for the U.S., falling to the Netherlands 3-1. But that score shouldn’t mean the game was boring. Rather, it is evidence of just how hard it is to succeed on the pitch.
So with just a few hundred days before it is the women’s turn, and just four years before the men’s World Cup comes to North America, U.S. fans have time to find their patience and wrap their heads around a game so difficult, it sometimes has to end in a shootout. Because sports are hard.
Amy Bass is professor of sport studies and chair of the division of social science and communication at Manhattanville College. Bass is the author of ONE GOAL: A COACH, A TEAM, AND THE GAME THAT BROUGHT A DIVDED TOWN TOGETHER, among other titles. In 2012, she won an Emmy for her work with NBC Olympic Sports on the London Olympic Games.
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