I watched the U.S.’s World Cup game against Iran last week out at lunch with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. Or rather, I didn’t watch it, because I was at lunch with this friend. But the game was on in a room across the bar, and we made a few observations.
The first is that it is very easy to follow a soccer game without watching it so long as there’s a group of invested people watching it within earshot and you know which team they’re supporting. We knew the game was 1-0 in the United States’ favor without checking the score because there had been one loud cheer and no loud exclamations of disappointment. There was one moment of confusion, when a different room cheered but the U.S. room didn’t cheer, but upon looking at the people in the cheering room, we were able to guess these were not fans of the Iranian national team and therefore must be responding to something in England vs. Wales.
The second is that the concept of stoppage time is un-American. It’s too relaxed. Too arbitrary. Talk to someone who only watches soccer once every four years and a topic which inevitably arises is stoppage time, a concept that’s met with incredulity. In American football we attempt to measure plays down to the inch. In basketball we hold lengthy replay reviews to get the correct tenth of a second on the clock. Even in baseball, the long-nebulous strike zone is under attack, already replaced in some ways by a clearly defined boundary and soon replaced by an automated, objective zone. Stoppage time? Where the ref just gets to decide how much time is added onto the game? We can’t tolerate that kind of unknown in our sports. Which probably isn’t why soccer has never fully caught on here, but might have something to do with that.
