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Curb your soccer enthusiasm, America

In the most pompous link we here at IIMKI have unearthed, the historian and author Michael Mandelbaum wants you to know you shouldn’t get too excited over this World Cup thing. You see, he wrote about all this stuff in a book before. 

Not only is soccer unnatural to the American psyche, but the way the World Cup settles matches in the knockout stage ought to be truly repulsive to our tastes as well:

“In these games, if the score is tied after the regular 90 minutes of playing time and an additional overtime period, the winner is determined by a competition in penalty kicks, in which players take shots at the goal from short range with only the goalkeeper to stop them. This is a ludicrous way to decide a championship. It is as if the Super Bowl were to be decided by a field goal competition, or the college basketball championship won by a contest in shooting free throws. The failure to devise a more appropriate method smacks of the kind of reactionary Old World lack of imagination that Americans have scorned for three centuries—in this case rightly.”

So think about that when you’re watching the Ghana match tomorrow.

Mandelbaum also natters on about nationalism and why Americans don’t need to identify that way through a sport. That’s because we have people who wear other kinds of uniforms — camoflaged ones — to make us feel better about ourselves.