United States out of World Cup and I Don’t Care

It was fun while it lasted but I’m not unhappy with the United States to loss to Belgium that forced their elimination from the World Cup tournament yesterday. It’s not like the US treats football with any sort of respect, or that anyone, outside of a few weeks every four years (World Cup or Olympics, take your pick), is really a fan and follows or covers the sport. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no press or television sports coverage of football during the three years of qualifying play that leads up to the World Cup, so our interest in the game during the tournament (and the Olympics) is, for the most part, little more than bandwagon jumping and a collective national shrug of “Soccer: Who Cares Anyway?”.

This is sad because football is really a far superior game to the trance-inducing and mind-numbing product that hijacks our television sets nearly every day of the week for six months each year that’s put out by the NFL

I’m also not unhappy with our elimination from the World Cup because I’m tired of the “We’re Number 1” mentality that permeates everything sports-related in America. I think it’s refreshing to realize that we’re not always the be-all and end-all in the world of sports and it’s a valuable lesson to find out that sometimes there are others who are better than we are.

It’s unfortunate that football’s not a bigger sport here in the US. Sadly, this great game will now disappear from our collective conscienceness until the 2016 Summer Olympics when we can once again jump on the national bandwagon of sports superiority.