I can’t take credit for this general thought and maybe this has been thought out  further elsewhere, but this idea has been swirling in my head for some time now, and credit to anyone that has written this thought out further than I.  Soccer, in many ways, is very much like sex.  Before you scoff, especially if you’re an American, know that I too am an American.  I played football.  Worked within the game for many years. But I’ve recently converted to soccer, the  beautiful game, because of my role in coaching, and then playing, the sport. So despite America’s general gut-wrench response to this game, due in no small part to the theatrics of players falling and rolling as though they’d been hit by a random bullet from which they might never recover, and the interminable challenge of zero-zero ties, I proffer the following argument for you to reconsider by thinking about soccer as similar to sex.

The game has lots of starts and stops.  That’s foreplay.  It gets you ready for the exhilaration of a score, a penalty shot, a perfect header (additional innuendo accepted here).  Slowly the game builds as time elapses.  Sometimes there’s a premature score within the first few minutes of the game, but it doesn’t mean you want to stop, oh no, keep going…don’t stop!  I want another!  Thankfully they keep playing, building the excitement, fulfilling the emotion and contact needed to make for an erotic experience.

So when a point is scored, the players elate as though they’d come in their Underarmor…hell some of them have to get naked by yanking off their shirts (ala Brandy Chastain of US Women’s National Team circa 1996). Regardless if you were cheering for the team or not you find yourself elated with the player or feeling jealous that you didn’t get your score yet.    And when you score, whether it was an easy, soft score or one of those heavy, emotional built up scores; you explode with relief.

A high scoring game, say 3-2, assures that each person got the thrill multiple times.  Sure you might want more, but you got some and it was good.  A 3-3 draw might even be better because you both got the same amount of satisfaction.  But what about that terminable 0-0 tie?  So much foreplay and so little satisfaction.  The way I see it, even a 0-0 tie is hot and exciting, but it just wants me to come back sooner to see if we can’t score sooner in the next game.  Lord knows the longer we wait the more relief that score will provide.

Oh yes, soccer is indeed like soccer with all the foreplay and the complete relief when the score finally comes.  No, I don’t love the 0-0 tie, but I’ll come back next time and work a little harder; then who knows how many scores we’ll get?  ;->