Of Balls & Men:
Reflections, Pro & Con, on “Soccer,” So-Called

2,066 words

The ZMan’s Blog is always worth reading, and today is no exception. Avoiding the cliché post about or around Bastaille Day, ZMan digs into the game at the heart of the recent World Cup hoo-haw: football, or as you Yanks call it, “soccer.”[1] ^[2]

Being the ZMan, he makes a number of good points. But, being myself born and bred in Old Blighty (though currently traveling the world, footloose and fancy-free, due to a bit of bother back home), I feel I ought to rise to the defence (or “defense,” as you seem to call it over here).

After some personal reflections,[2] ^[3] ZMan offers a number of observations of more or less interest. He begins by noting that while TV soccer is boring, live soccer is not so bad.

Soccer is boring, dull and tedious on television. The fake injuries are so absurd and embarrassing it is hard to tolerate. In person, the game is much better. When Raul collapses in a heap, acting like he took a cannonball to the knee, the crowd roars in unison, thus making it more like a stage play than a sporting event. You lose that interplay on TV, so it comes off as absurd. That and the Greek fans I was with knew how to jeer.

Watching soccer live is also better than TV, because you get to see the players that are not involved in the play. They are often chatting with one another like they are old friends bumping into one another on a stroll. On TV, the camera follows the ball and the players all look busy. Live, you also get a better sense of what’s really happening. The strategy comes into focus sooner than on TV. Since most of the games are fixed, it all makes more sense when you get to see all of the action and not just the group around the ball.

He even grants that the big events, like the World Cup, are worth watching, as “there is more at stake.”

The Little League World Series gets big TV ratings in the U.S. for the same reason. People don’t watch little kids play baseball, unless it’s their kids. Put the same kids in an international tournament and suddenly the nation gets interested.

In addition, “there’s also the fact that the World Cup features the best players in the world. The fact is, Lionel Mesi or Neymar kicking a ball around will always seem more thrilling than two unknown guys.”

Point, or “fact,” taken. Then, having softened up the soccer partisan to the consistency of a blancmange, he strikes!

Now, what has always turned me off about soccer is the cultural angle. When I was a boy, our betters in America were trying to force soccer and the metric system on us. The people doing it were all loathsome snobs. Worse yet, all of them were the children of working class people who should have known better. But, their parents sent them off to the state college and they came back thinking they were sophisticated citizens of the world, so they loved soccer. Yep, soccer was a Boomer fetish. Even all these year on, I still think of those smug assholes of my youth, whenever soccer comes to my attention.

Now this is an interesting point, and we certainly can feel the ZMan’s pain. Why, some of those assholes were forcing us Brits to metricize too, mate; we held off as long as we could against the “atheistic, inaccurately measured metre.”[3] ^[4]

To make things worse on “the cultural angle,” it’s not even the right culture!

I’ve probably heard “it is the most popular sport in the world” a million times in my life. That is the sort of thing stupid people say when they want to sound sophisticated. In most of the world, soccer is the sport of the poor and lower classes. That means our bourgeois bohemians are aping the mores of chavs. Good job phonies!

Well, there’s something to that, but I must ask, what of the ‘playing fields of Eton’? Here is what my Merriam’s-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions [an American source, note] has to say on the subject:

Playing fields of Eton — English public (meaning private) schools, said to be the source of British leadership, character, and competitiveness which prevailed at the battle of Waterloo. That’s what the Duke of Wellington is said to have said. The implication is that British officers had acquired all important traits through their elite education.
The expression is attributed to the Duke of Wellington and is used today not only to suggest the character-building virtues of sports but to describe the privileged environment of elite private schools both in Britain and the U.S.[4] ^[5]

Not too shabby, that, eh? I know, it’s really “rugger” but basically the same as far as the argument goes. Wasn’t this the game played by the rulers of 3/4 of the globe? Must be something to it . . .

ZMan then expands his vision beyond these pitiful poseurs to a more sinister lot:

Another thing about soccer is the coverage in the American sporting press. The same people who normalized porn, have tried to use soccer in their war on whites. They have endlessly promoted soccer, despite the fact Americans have limited interest. Whenever there is a big match in Europe, we get coverage of how the foreign fans reacted to the result. A standing head in the sporting press is “Watch Fans React To . . .” and then the thing that happened in a soccer match. It’s an effort to weaponize the bandwagon effect.

Of course, now that European teams look more like refugee camps than European, the anti-whites love soccer even more. They use the browning of the traditional World Cup powers as “proof” that the great replacement is going to be wonderful. You can almost hear them saying, “See how much better sports will be when the whites are replaced with the non-whites?” Like so much about society, soccer has become another weapon wielded by the anti-whites in the race war. It is a reminder of what they plan for us.

Just as the poseurs promote as “sophisticated” what is really the sport of chavs (to accept the that invidious characterization for the sake of argument), the more sinister “culture-distorters,”[5] ^[6] sporting press division,[6] ^[7] promote the “multiculturalism” that is really “anti-White” subversion.

Again, as his staff would say to Lord Copper, “up to a point, my Lord.”[7] ^[8] I’m sure the uber-douchebags want to rub our faces in our Brown Future, but after all, American sports have been blacked and hispanized for decades now; not much of a difference here, it seems to me.[8] ^[9] Sports along with ethnic food is still the main argument for “darker is better.”[9] ^[10]

Although I can follow him only “up to a point,” ZMan should be congratulated for formulating some new arguments against the World Sport, rather than the same old “they wear tiny shorts” nonsense.[10] ^[11]

Moreover, at the heights of abstraction, reflecting on The Poseur As Such, ZMan formulates a diagnosis that seems pretty usable generally:

What’s odious about the poseur is he turns his self-loathing into your problem. The poseur apes the styles and attitude of others because he hates himself and cannot stand the sight of himself. His comical pretensions force everyone else to play along, in order to be polite. Everyone knows the poseur is full of crap, but the guy who says what everyone thinks, risks being castigated for being rude. These people turn our morality on its head, by making our virtues into vices. They deserve to be hated.

Sounds like those transsexual and gay-marrying fanatics, who demand not merely to be left alone (remember “get the state out of our bedrooms” or “the privacy of one’s own home” memes?) but insist on the rest of us joining in on their fetishes, lest we be “haters.”

And finally, what do I think about soccer? Well, at least it’s not cricket.

Notes

[1] ^[12] “Why I Hate Soccer ^[13].” Technically, a repost: “This is a rewrite of a popular post from four years ago, the last time I had a reason to think about international kick-ball. I’ve expanded on the topic a bit and updated the references to make it more timely. This will be the last soccer post for four years.”

[2] ^[14] I must say, one thing I don’t “get” is how you American bloggers seem to delight in retailing your personal histories; even some writers here, like Jef Costello or James O’Meara, are some of the biggest offenders. Stiff upper lip, boys!

[3] ^[15] The Radical Traditionalist John Mitchell promoted the “Anti-Metrication Board,” whose “mockery of the bureaucrats and Eurocrats of the metrication Board” had “lasting effects on both sides of the Atlantic.” See his Introduction: A Prophetic Vision” to his collection of essays by (the now late) John Mitchell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist (Waterbury Park, Vt.: Dominion Press, 2005).

[4] ^[16] Further: “It is doubtful that Wellington ever actually said these words. Elizabeth Longford, one of his biographers, says there were no organized games at Eton during his three unhappy years there. She also notes that the quotation did not make its appearance until 3 years after the duke died. A French writer [perhaps Montalembert in De l’Avenir Politique de l’Angleterre, one of the favorite reading materials of my great grandpater, Lord Peter] quoted Wellington as saying during a visit to the school, “It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won.” No mention of playing fields; that was added by later writers.”

[5] ^[17] See Francis Parker Yockey, The Proclamation of London; with an Introductory Essay by Michael O’Meara (London: Wermod & Wermod, 2012).

[6] ^[18] “Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.” Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream) (New York: Random House, 1971), Chapter 13, “End of the Road…Death of the Whale…Soaking Sweats in the Airport.” I’m proud to burnish my American sporting cred by noting that Dr. Thompson was accompanied on his legendary trip to the Kentucky Derby by a distant relation of mine, Ralph Steadman, whom Thompson describes as ““some nerve-rattling geek all covered with matted hair and string-warts.” See “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved ^[19].”

[7] ^[20] In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938). “Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be an amalgam of Lord Northcliffe ^[21] and Lord Beaverbrook ^[22]: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with him, answering “Definitely, Lord Copper” and “Up to a point, Lord Copper” in place of “yes” or “no”. Lord Copper’s idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer.” Wikipedia ^[23].

[8] ^[24] See “The Racial Caste System in Sports” by J. B. Cash, here ^[25]; as well as his website, castefootball.us.

[9] ^[26] For food, or at least guacamole, see my “Cooking with Counter-Currents Or, We Need Immigrants for, What, Again?” here ^[27], which also included Diane Kennedy’s no-immigrants-needed guacamole recipe.

[10] ^[28] Not really a sporty type, so I may be out of my league here (hey, a sports metaphor!) but it has always seemed to me that American black–ball, with all its absurd padding, guards of various sorts, shields, helmets and other sci/fi tech, is clearly less of a game for ‘real men” than the relatively unprotected soccer players. When he can tear himself away from obsessing over his own personal history, O’Meara can make some good points about cultural history; for example, his discussion of how American men – terrified of seeming “gay” and convinced that negroes are “real men” – have switched to absurdly baggy shorts (even impractical, almost Victorian “board shorts” for swimwear); see the title essay and elsewhere in The Homo & the Negro (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012; 2^nd. Embiggened Ed., 2018). Jim Kunstler, for example, was nonplussed when shopping at your amusingly named Dick’s Sportswear: “All they had were clown trunks. By this I mean a garment designed to hang somewhere around mid-calf, instantly transforming a normally-proportioned adult male into a stock slapstick character: the oafish man-child.” See his “We’re All Ninja Turtles Now,” here ^[29].