National Review 'Soccer Is the Sport of Terrorists'

In the annals of unsurprising news, “World Cup start marred by violence and bloodshed” has to rank with the old story, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” After “‘unprecedented’ scenes of disorder” rocked Sao Paulo ahead of the quadrennial world championship Thursday, The Atlantic warned that the upheaval could have a “profound impact” on Brazil, and a CNN anchorwoman asked, “What are these people protesting?” Witnesses told the Telegraph that “they could not recall such unhappy scenes at the start of an event which usually kicks off amid a carnival atmosphere in the host nation.”

In fact, there are few things more precedented than violence and disorder outside a soccer game. The world’s sport of choice is attended by rioting and hooliganism in ways that Americans would expect to see only if the Lakers, Celtics and Bulls all won the NBA championship at the same time and all three teams were composed entirely of UConn graduates. When a player is stabbed and a referee dismembered, you’re talking futbol, not football. When 79 people are killed and more than 1,000 injured in a riot, it’s not cricket and it’s definitely not baseball. When a player is assassinated for blowing or throwing a game, it won’t be the NFL issuing shocked statements about how this kind of behavior is everything the Super Bowl is against; it will be FIFA saying roughly the same thing, in Esperanto, about the World Cup, “the most-watched sporting event on the planet.”

Soccer fans can strike back, accurately, by noting that American sports generate their own levels of face-splitting, artery-clogging fan hatred. Even the peaceful peoples of San Francisco are not safe to travel to Los Angeles for fear of the violence that haunts Chavez Ravine in Dodger Blue. The high number of soccer-related outbreaks could just be a function of mathematics for a sport that is played by many millions and watched by billions, frequently in poor and unstable countries where even the best days would be considered substandard by even poor Americans.

But these arguments will not wash. First, America polices its sports, often to a fault. Plaxico Burress did more time for shooting himself than George Zimmerman did for shooting and killing a high-school student. Donald Sterling is facing the NBA equivalent of a condo-association eviction over remarks he made privately (then expanded on in an internationally televised interview). That’s Labor and Capital both estranged from the product of their efforts by zero tolerance in the land of the free. FIFA takes stabs at punishing bureaucratic threats to its apparatus, but you certainly won’t see that organization’s long line of non-entities engaging in the kind of forelock tugging Americans engage in over non-issues like hypercompetitiveness or the team name of the Redskins.


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380396/soccer-official-sport-terrorism-tim-cavanaugh