Why even soccer haters can appreciate World Cup
No one's here to discuss the merits of soccer or litigate its worthiness as a sport and global phenomenon. Truth is, I suspect I might grow to enjoy the World Cup if I put in the time necessary to understand soccer beyond the most cursory level, and I understand that remaining willfully ignorant is probably my loss.
But I'm old and set in my ways, and I'm not about to spend any more time or brainpower on sports than I already do. I'm just going to plow forward in life without bothering to learn how to appreciate soccer or why it so grips so many people. Sorry; I've got other stuff to do.
So this post is for others out there like me. Even if you've decided you don't really like soccer, there are things to appreciate about the World Cup when it happens. Here are seven of them:
1. There's a dude who bites people
The dude in that photo is named Luis Suarez. He will represent Uruguay in the 2018 World Cup, and he has a long and sordid history of biting opponents in the course of soccer matches. That's this guy's thing, so far as I understand: He's the bitey guy. To make matters more ridiculous, he often follows biting someone by holding his teeth as though in pain, to try to pretend it was the other guy's fault for jamming flesh into his open jaw.
Probably hardcore soccer fans just want to watch good soccer and hate it when the bitey guy bites people, but as far as I'm concerned, it's an entertaining wild card in World Cup events, and it's really the sport's fault for allowing him to develop the taste for human blood in the first place.
2. There are serious underdogs
There are powerhouse countries that always seem to win up in or near the World Cup finals, but one of the legit cool things about the event is the outside chance of some less likely nation uniting around a Cinderella soccer team. It's like the NCAA Tournament, except instead of the cameras cutting to college kids crammed into a cafeteria at some mid-major school, you get shots of crowded streets of cheering fans in countries you don't know a darn thing about.
People around the world care so, so much about soccer in general and the World Cup specifically, and it's easy to appreciate the global spectacle of it even if the sport itself fails to nab your attention. Without knowing anything about the teams, their players or their schedules, I'm going to go ahead and say it'd be fun to watch Panama make a run as long as everyone agrees there will be no highlight montages set to the very bad Van Halen song Panama.