Am I Too Old For Soccer?
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Am I Too Old For Soccer?
FCC transcends generations. How many?
The Bailey
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Is it hard to become a soccer fan?
For an OG, I mean.
I’m not talking about kids. They’re born into soccer, the way the old guys were born into baseball. A couple generations back, life without the Reds was barely worth living. Now, life with the Reds is barely worth living.
Not talking about the 20-, 30- and Teen-Somethings, either. They’re all part of the ongoing generational waves. We’ve moved to an age now when 30-year-old mom and dad are taking 5-year-old son and daughter to TQL Stadium. This shows no signs of abating. It’s known as Built-In Fan Base and it’s very good for attendance numbers.
FC Cincinnati is edging toward a phenomenon not often seen. Fans go to the games now just to go to the games. Of course, winning fattens the gate, and always will. But FCC seems on its way to being insulated from lousy attendance years. The Event is the thing.
Call it the Wrigley Field Effect. You go there to go there. For decades, the Cubs had little incentive to field a winner, because the main event was the field trip to the ballpark.
FC Cincinnati sold out for the 7th time in nine home matches this year. TQL Stadium seats 26,000. FC is averaging 25,513 a game. (In comparison, the Reds are drawing 19,199 souls a night.)
The excitement at TQL Stadium is tribal. I’ve had people who don’t know futbol from foot fungus foot tell me they went to a game and had a surprising blast. You might not understand or especially enjoy what you’re watching. You do enjoy what you’re experiencing.
Wrigley
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So. . . is it hard to become a soccer fan?
For someone like me, the game can seem a little, I dunno, disorienting. If you want to win, why do you allow some of your best players to leave midseason, to compete for their home countries?
Clubs “lend’’ players to each other. What?
Soccer has tournaments right in the middle of the season. FCC hosts Pittsburgh Tuesday night, in a US Open Cup quarterfinal. Maybe the Bengals should host a playoff game or two in mid-November.
We claim baseball is boring, yet we’re good with 1-nil outcomes in soccer. In FCC’s 1-0 win Saturday over the Chicago Fire, the home goalie had exactly zero saves. The Fire made no attempt on goal that qualified as a shot. In the entire game.
And all that play-acting, when players are trying to get an opponent penalized. The NBA T’s up players for that.
That said, the FCC Experience is so good, if you don’t take part, you feel as if you’re missing out as a Cincy sports fan.
And running time is awesome.
Are you a convert? The TML demographic runs the gamut, but many Mobsters grew up playing baseball, not soccer. Are you a convert, or at least have you added soccer to your roster of games you follow?
Do tell.
THE STADIUM NEEDS A NICKNAME., because, no disrespect, Total Quality Logistics Stadium isn’t likely to inspire fear among opponents.
It needs to be something menacing, foreboding, inhospitable to opponents. But also welcoming to the home nation. The Trap might work. The Dungeon, maybe not.
The Graveyard, The Crypt, nah.
It’s hard. The team itself has no nickname. No Bengals in The Jungle. It’s just that Euro-cutesy FC.
Death Valley. . . The Swamp. . . (Between The) Hedges.
(Welcome to) The Roar, The Lair, The Moat. The Pit.
The Dreadful. Welcome to The Dread.
Give it some thought, Mobsters. It’s important.
WHAT WE LEARNED from the Reds weekend that was. Actually, I dislike that way of analyzing a baseball team. In a sport that convenes 162 times a year, a weekend is barely a sip of coffee. What we learn is that 162 game is a long season.
That said, the Reds have had a few chances lately to show they’re ahead of schedule and flubbed them both: 0-6 at home v. the Yankees and Brewers. No big points for taking down the Cubbies and St. Louis.
The series with the Crew, which concludes tonight, has been especially disappointing. Milwaukee has 14 guys on the IL, and the Brewers weren’t formidable to begin with. We take solace in the hitting — the Reds are 13th in baseball in runs scored — and the arrival of Elly De La Cruz. But there is no amount of Elly that can compensate for bad starting pitching.
Graham Ashcraft made another ghastly start Saturday. Ashcraft had a 2.10 ERA in April and a 9.21 ERA in May. Saturday he allowed 10 runs in four innings. The Reds’ starting pitchers ERA is 29th in baseball, ahead of only Oakland. And this year was supposed to be about the emerging development of starting pitching.
All of which leaves you wondering about the future that never seems to arrive. Are the Reds the team that just won five in a row, or the team that looks headed for 66-96?
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Elizabeth and Judd Weiss
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AMONG THE BEST half-day trips here happens every year on the first Saturday in June. Art In The Garden blooms in Augusta, K-Y. If you’re from Ohio, you drive down the river road (US 52), past Grant’s birthplace, to the ferry that takes you across the Ohio to Augusta. Augusta’s downtown in quaint, pretty, interesting with several nice shops and restaurants.
Art in the Garden is a five-block wave of canopies protecting locally produced arts and crafts. We’re not talking little cedar boxes. It’s very nice work by very accomplished people.
Each year we see something at the Garden we’ve never seen before. This year, it was a booth run by Elizabeth and Judd Weis, co-founders of Augusta Distillery. Of course, I sampled their bourbon and of course, the wheated bourbon was sublime. I’m thinking we might have to make it the official adult beverage of The Morning Line.
TML sez ckout Augusta Distillery.
TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . A rarity from the frontman for Mott The Hoople.
Am I Too Old For Soccer?
"If you want to win, why do you allow some of your best players to leave midseason, to compete for their home countries?"
The clubs don't love it, but soccer exists at two levels...the club level and the international level. The best players, in addition to playing for their professional club teams, also represent their respective nations in international competitions. International play extends very far back into the sport's origins...for example England was playing matches against Scotland in the late 19th century. The fact that (apart from a one-off during the London Olympics) there is no "UK" national team, but four separate national sides (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) speaks to how how important national identities, and international competition, are to players and fans alike. Clubs therefore have to deal with that.
For someone who has only ever followed North American sports, which exist in a bubble separate from the rest of the world (yet still has "world champions")....yes this can be "disorienting". But the way soccer manages to exist at both a local and international level is, to many of us, quite remarkable.
I guess different strokes for different folks!
"Clubs “lend’’ players to each other. What?"
Players who are not getting on the starting 11, rather than gathering dust on the bench, are given opportunities to stay sharp with other teams (as long as those teams pay the wages for the loan period). Usually, players are loaned out to other leagues so as not to compete against their parent team. Seems like a good way to keep players active and help with the wage bill all at the same time. Often, loans can lead to permanent moves to the other team.
"Soccer has tournaments right in the middle of the season. FCC hosts Pittsburgh Tuesday night, in a US Open Cup quarterfinal."
In most hard core soccer nations, the tournaments preceded the formation of the league. For example, in England the FA Cup was first played in 1876, whereas the actual football league structure was not formalized until the late 1880s. The Cup survived as an open competition for every team under the auspices of the FA, from semi-pro teams all the way up to your Manchester Uniteds and Liverpools, and still exists in this form today. When the league was formed, with its separate divisions, the FA Cup continued and simply layered into the playing schedule. When a team is able to win both the League and the Cup, its called "doing the double". Seems like the MLS wanted to have also want to have this model of a league + separate Cup competitions. Fans love it...it gives the team multiple opportunities to win trophies during a season, and the do-or-die tournament format can be a nice respite from the more grinding nature of the league schedule.
"We claim baseball is boring, yet we’re good with 1-nil outcomes in soccer. In FCC’s 1-0 win Saturday over the Chicago Fire, the home goalie had exactly zero saves."
I agree, sometimes soccer is boring. But I've been bored by basketball, football, boxing...virtually every sport I enjoy at times has produced boring games. The point is that soccer is very often not boring, and can be exhilarating under the right conditions. I've been to many Ohio State football games, which are fantastic, but none of them have matched the atmosphere that I experienced in trips abroad to see, say a game between Liverpool and Everton (a huge local rivalry), or watching A.C. Milan and Inter at the San Siro.
All in all, I'm not sure what to make of your recent comments about soccer. I grew up in Cincinnati when you were at your pomp at the Enquirer, I was one of those kids who chose soccer as his main sport, and I remember that a) you rarely covered soccer and b) 95% of your comments about it were derisive. It's international appeal meant nothing to you and aroused no curiosity whatsoever. You clearly disliked the game and did not want to spend any mental energy learning about it. I read you for your knowledge on other sports and your insightful, justified and often hilarious criticism of the Bengals.
I don't think anything has changed. Most of your questions about soccer could easily be answered with a little bit of research. And they're not so much questions as thinly veiled jibes...."hey look at this strange thing that the silly soccer people do."
After all of these years, you still seem to assume that if soccer is doing something different than how we do it in America, that is is "weird" and therefore inferior...as if the American way is always the default correct way. There doesn't seem to be any inclination to give the game the benefit of the doubt...to consider that perhaps its different ways of doing things have some rationality behind them, or at least some interesting historical reasons.
Your attitude towards the game, by the way, is very similar to the way other sport writers (and fans) from your age cohort across the pond view traditional North American sports. About 20 years ago, I got into a heated argument at a pub in England when I was defending American football...my older English interlocuters all seemed to think that literally all American football players were "fat, padded up poofs". It didn't matter what facts I threw back at them...in their minds football/futbol/soccer was the "real" football, and believing lies about "fat American football" players just made them feel good. They had zero interest in learning anything that might challenge their false belief that American football was a ridiculous sport.
Likewise, I think for you, in a deep emotional way that is impervious to any rational argument, that association football, aka "soccer" aka "football", despite its deep history and international dominance, is somehow not a real sport. To you and many Americans of your generation, it will always be an oddity and self-evidently inferior when compared to the True Sports of baseball, American football, and basketball. And maybe we have to question basketball now that Johnny Foreigner seems to have a knack for it, at least the FIBA version.
Just stick with baseball and American football then. And big-time college sports, which is a completely unique American institution. No one will ever challenge our hegemony in American football, because no one else plays it. And even though Central America is becoming the real source of talent in baseball, they all still want to play here. Ignore the World Baseball Classic, pretend it doesn't exist, especially when America loses.
Soccer is weird!