Okay, so this is not going to be a financial blog.  What the heck, it's my blog and I am not in a financial mood this morning.  Instead, I want to talk about the World Cup.  Is it me, or is soccer the elevator music of sports?  I mean, could anything be as boring as 2 hours of no scoring?  Or is it the sports equivalent of World War I, meaning that basically two sides slug it out to no result and until one is so exhausted that it just throws in the towel?  That's how the final winning goal looked to me.  Kind of a limp thing when the Dutch goalie was out of gas.

Hmmm...maybe this is going to be a financial blog after all, as soccer may be the equivalent of our entire current economic folly.  Lots of running around and looking like something important is happening with no result.  It's confusing to watch and sooner or later you lose interest. Meanwhile, the referees arbitrarily make rulings where no apparent foul took place and the supposed "victims" of various infractions fall to the ground in obviously fake pain to highlight their suffering in the make believe attacks.  Then, they are rewarded for this fakery and the whole, long, boring things keeps on rolling to no obvious result.  Sounds like Obama-nomics.

Then when the scoring actually happens and owing to the fact that the crowd by this point is comatose, the announcer screams "Goooooooooaaaaallllll!!!" at the top of his lungs, this to make sure everyone notices that something has happened in this game of nothing and also it makes a great highlight for ESPN later on.  People who missed the whole boring mess will think that it was exciting from the enthusiasm of that moment I suppose.

I shared this whole point with a soccer fan friend of mine who quickly pointed out that it is the "ultimate team sport" as if basketball, football (American style), and baseball aren't. She scolded me for not appreciating the beauty of all this teamwork and I pointed out that if my business team made as much ado and accomplished nothing I would fire them all.  She was not amused by this, of course, but come on, even baseball scores boatloads more than this road to nowhere sport.

Finally, it seems that the ultimate argument of soccer enthusiasts is that it is the most popular game in the world and therefore I suppose we Americans are cretins for not making it ours.  Maybe, but I think just plain old economics are to blame for this unfortunate fact.  It takes a lot of money to outfit an American football team, build a proper basketball court, and play baseball. For soccer it only takes a ball and four rocks to outline where the goals are.  You don't even need shoes to play this really. 

Maybe instead of our usual foreign aid that never seems to make a meaningful dent in anything we ought to export decent sports equipment to exciting sports and have Peace Corps volunteers coach Pop Warner Football and Little League baseball all over Africa and other impoverished countries.  It will bring them a little joy and spare all of us the act of pretending we like the most boring team sport in the world so that no one can call us Americans unsophisticated. Just a thought.