2014 WORLD CUP - SOCCER IS GHEY PART DOIS.

[CT III]

The soccer World Cup makes me wish the IIHF could finally get their shit together and do a hockey one at regular intervals. That would fucking rule.

In addition to the Winter Olympics? So you would have your regular seasons interrupted every two years instead of four? I'm not arguing against it but is that something you would want? How would you make it better than the Olympic tournament if you ran the zoo?

They had this non-Olympic tournament a few times under varying names and there was one in particular when the USA won it and I remember being extremely excited about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_World_Cup_of_Hockey

That's the ticket. Have a pre-NHL season tourney, while everyone is healthy.

Although, it's easy to want this as an American, since the US is one of the four countries (the others being Russia, Canada and Sweden) who are in the medal round of every international tournament from Juniors up.

Just like baseball!

Seriously, I don't see this happening.  As Fork pointed out, there's 4 countries that could definitely drum up interest, maybe 6 if you count Finland and somehow reunited Czechoslovakia.

Other than that you're going to have a bunch of countries getting their asses handed to them while fielding teams full of 4th generation Canadians whose great-great grandfathers came over from Ireland or Spain or Poland.

Which is pretty much how the preliminary rounds of the Olympics go.

So you can put me down as a "present" vote.

[Gilgamesh]

The soccer World Cup makes me wish the IIHF could finally get their shit together and do a hockey one at regular intervals. That would fucking rule.

In addition to the Winter Olympics? So you would have your regular seasons interrupted every two years instead of four? I'm not arguing against it but is that something you would want? How would you make it better than the Olympic tournament if you ran the zoo?

They had this non-Olympic tournament a few times under varying names and there was one in particular when the USA won it and I remember being extremely excited about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_World_Cup_of_Hockey

That's the ticket. Have a pre-NHL season tourney, while everyone is healthy.

Although, it's easy to want this as an American, since the US is one of the four countries (the others being Russia, Canada and Sweden) who are in the medal round of every international tournament from Juniors up.

Just like baseball!

Seriously, I don't see this happening.  As Fork pointed out, there's 4 countries that could definitely drum up interest, maybe 6 if you count Finland and somehow reunited Czechoslovakia.

Other than that you're going to have a bunch of countries getting their asses handed to them while fielding teams full of 4th generation Canadians whose great-great grandfathers came over from Ireland or Spain or Poland.

Which is pretty much how the preliminary rounds of the Olympics go.

So you can put me down as a "present" vote.

The only difference with the Baseball "World Cup" is that the sport is no longer in the Olympics, but aside from that, I think that for soccer and hockey, having just the one major international competition suffices for most.

While I don't normally care for soccer, I typically will watch a few games (or moments of a few games) during the World Cup, but I don't watch any of it in the Olympics, mostly because it's superfluous compared to the World Cup.  Part of what make Olympic hockey so appealing, on the other hand, is that it is the sole international competition for the best players, which doesn't dilute the impact of the event.

Adding another international hockey competition would do that, I believe.

But I'd probably still watch it.

[PenFoe]

The soccer World Cup makes me wish the IIHF could finally get their shit together and do a hockey one at regular intervals. That would fucking rule.

In addition to the Winter Olympics? So you would have your regular seasons interrupted every two years instead of four? I'm not arguing against it but is that something you would want? How would you make it better than the Olympic tournament if you ran the zoo?

They had this non-Olympic tournament a few times under varying names and there was one in particular when the USA won it and I remember being extremely excited about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_World_Cup_of_Hockey

That's the ticket. Have a pre-NHL season tourney, while everyone is healthy.

Although, it's easy to want this as an American, since the US is one of the four countries (the others being Russia, Canada and Sweden) who are in the medal round of every international tournament from Juniors up.

Just like baseball!

Seriously, I don't see this happening.  As Fork pointed out, there's 4 countries that could definitely drum up interest, maybe 6 if you count Finland and somehow reunited Czechoslovakia.

Other than that you're going to have a bunch of countries getting their asses handed to them while fielding teams full of 4th generation Canadians whose great-great grandfathers came over from Ireland or Spain or Poland.

Which is pretty much how the preliminary rounds of the Olympics go.

So you can put me down as a "present" vote.

The only difference with the Baseball "World Cup" is that the sport is no longer in the Olympics, but aside from that, I think that for soccer and hockey, having just the one major international competition suffices for most.

While I don't normally care for soccer, I typically will watch a few games (or moments of a few games) during the World Cup, but I don't watch any of it in the Olympics, mostly because it's superfluous compared to the World Cup.  Part of what make Olympic hockey so appealing, on the other hand, is that it is the sole international competition for the best players, which doesn't dilute the impact of the event.

Adding another international hockey competition would do that, I believe.

But I'd probably still watch it.

I tend to agree with this.

Especially for sports like soccer and hockey that don't have the full mainstream crowd in the US, it's a lot easier to just know when is the one time you're supposed to watch. 

For the non diehards, we know to watch the World Cup for soccer and the Olympics (and the Stanley Cup) for hockey.

Anything beyond that is for the diehards - that's a tough sell financially in the U.S.   

[J. Walter Weatherman]

[Saul Goodman]

RIP Landon.

[Powdered Toast Man]

Soccer is, without a doubt, the dumbest, gayest, piece of boring shit sport to watch ever.

And I routinely watch baseball.

[InternetApex]

Soccer is, without a doubt, the dumbest, gayest, piece of boring shit sport to watch ever.

And I routinely watch baseball.

[Tonker]

It's your loss, guys.  Seriously.

[flannj]

It's your loss, guys.  Seriously.

This guy here, he knows what he's talking about.

[Eli]

Sometimes people are interested in different sports and things.

[Eli]

Some people like soccer. Others use 'gay" as a pejorative multiple times in a day.

[J. Walter Weatherman]

Some men just want to watch the TIME TO POST.

[Yeti]

I don't know that it's the gayest dumbest sport. I'd put up a good argument about Figure Skating.

That being said, I pretty much fall on the side of what Eli said. I don't really get the allure of soccer, but a shitton of foreign people like it. You may believe Americans like soccer, but really that's just a bunch of Twitter accounts that Slaky has created.

[SKO]

Look, four years ago when I was younger and dumber than I am now I carried the flag of anti-soccerism as far as I could. Like all good Americans I do think it's boring and that foreigners are weird.

But really I just respect soccer fans at this point. How you muster up that much excitement for something that appears to be so uneventful is beyond me. I don't even say that as an insult or whatever. I gather that to soccer fans there's a million things going in in that seemingly interminable distance between goals that will never make sense to me or excite me. Yet most of the world lives and dies for it. Good on you.

Also it's like roughly 1.2 million times better than NASCAR, and that's a purely American boring ass sport.

[SKO]

Also if we can refrain from the SOCCER IS GHEY shit I would hope soccer fans can refrain from the old FASTEST GROWING YOUTH SPORT IN AMERICA retort. It's not going to happen, people. Those kids are just running around learning the basics of organized sport before they go on to play something more American. The only way it actually becomes one of the dominant American sports is if Obummer keeps lolly-gagging on building the giant electrified fence with gator moat to keep all of the illegals from taking our jobs and demanding more boring roundball instead of 18 minutes of kickass football sandwiched between 2 1/2 hours of beer commercials.