If you try to explain why soccer is so great to someone who doesn’t follow the sport, you won’t be able to find the words.
It is strange that such a global sport cannot be easily described. However, the feelings generated through the game provide its colloquial namesake. Soccer is a beautiful game.
Life, especially in the modern age, can feel frustrating and empty. We have more conveniences at our disposal than ever before. Yet the world seems to be lurching from one chaotic disaster to the next.
For example, the policy is triggered. You can barely start a logical debate with someone online before the vitriol hits.
Soccer is far from immune to these inconveniences of the modern world, but at its core, it remains pure and beautiful.
State-owned Manchester City, Newcastle United and Paris Saint-Germain being able to spend a bottomless pit of money is not a great advertisement for the sport. But the beauty lies in the game on the pitch.
What makes soccer the best sport?
As fun and immersive as American sports are, there’s always the feeling that you can know when to look at your phone or when to go to the bathroom and not miss a thing.
Soccer doesn’t have that. The pace of the game is amazing. The speed at which momentum passes from one team to another is scary. He always has you on the edge of your seat, even if you don’t have any particular emotional attachment to the teams that play.
You can see moments that defy description on the soccer field. Thierry Henry’s magical first touch and volley against Fabien Barthez in 2000. Lionel Messi running through an entire team before encircling the goalkeeper and onto the world stage against Getafe in 2007. Those are moments that happen in the blink of an eye. eyes, but they stay with you for a lifetime.
When played well, soccer can feel like an orchestra hitting all the right notes. Things that are hard to achieve for the average person can seem so easy to these generationally gifted athletes.
Football fans enhance the show
While soccer fans can sometimes go overboard, the presence of fans makes the game what it is.
Soccer in empty stadiums during the COVID-19 pandemic was horrible. There was no feeling, no pressure, no anxiety. These feelings are the soul of the game.
Who cares if Manchester United make more drama in stoppage time if no one is around to see it? It was a farce to watch Liverpool end decades of league suffering when they lifted the Premier League trophy to the backs of their chairs.
Soccer can be an escape for many. It attracts young people who suddenly have a sense of belonging to something perhaps for the first time in their lives.
They are no longer an anonymous person in the school, but immediately part of a fan base, all wanting, desperate for the same result, the three points.
When you write this down on paper, it doesn’t seem like magic. That’s why non-soccer fans find it all so strange. It’s hard to explain, it just makes you feel a certain way.
Soccer connects generations
It has become something of a cliché, but soccer has the potential to forge strong bonds between family members.
You will see some of the best father-son moments that two people can describe in the football stadium of their choice.
Again, it’s a moment of pure inconsistency in the grand scheme of things, but just remember the incidents you’ve seen with your father or mother, and relived over and over again for years. Soccer can create such lasting bonds, and no matter how much money seeps into the game and where it comes from, soccer will still be the best sport and experience ever invented.
PHOTO: IMAGO / Sven Simon
