I need you to sit down before you read this, but MLS is just OK. NASL, well it’s a little less OK, USL? Yeah. I say this because we need to (I’m including myself in this) stop caring so much about what other people say about the teams, leagues, and sport we love.
Prompting these statements is episode 50,394 of someone slagging off MLS: an innocuous tweet from Jonathan Wilson.
Terrible defending, terrible goalkeeping, terrible forward play. That first 20 seconds of MLS I saw after flicking from the golf was awful.
— Jonathan Wilson (@jonawils) March 6, 2016
Now, in Wilson’s defense, he was watching Chicago Fire v NYCFC and there was some absolutely embarrassing defense on display. Wilson claimed that he was not making a blanket statement about MLS, but simply an observation: “I turned on the TV and this is what I saw.”
What followed was a barrage of tweets: those buffoons who took Wilson’s tweet as confirmation of what they believed all along: “MLS is shite!” and those who took Wilson’s tweet as unfairly maligning their league d’amour. Among that latter group was the CEO of the Portland Timbers and one of those rare twitter personalities to whom Donald Trump says, “you know, maybe you shouldn’t tweet EVERYTHING on your mind.” Paulson apparently called Wilson a snob. The tweet is gone (like most of Paulson’s Mission Impossible tweets that explode after 15 seconds).
Wilson proceeded to call Paulson a buffoon on Football Weekly. A week later, adorable misanthrope Barry Glendenning asked if Pirlo was doing so poorly in MLS because he wasn’t used to playing with such bad players. (I suppose it’s a legitimate question.) Both Wilson and Glendenning support Sunderland, so they could be considered experts on existentially torrid and absolute shit football.
What I’m writing about, though, is the response to Wilson’s tweet. Scroll through the responses and it should make any MLS fan cringe. Are we really this insufferable? Is our skin that thin?
But there’s reason for that thin skin. Literally, as I began to write this, I saw the Star Tribune tweet out:
Tommy Milone through 5 innings today against Miami: 0 runs, 4 singles, 1 walk, 0 strikeouts. Game tied at nil. <–Practicing for soccer
— Star Tribune Sports (@StribSports) March 24, 2016
It’s just. so. lazy. You can read through the bastions of brilliance that are any comments section on that newspaper’s soccer articles to experience a masterclass in laziness. Soccer is: “for immigrants,” “never going to be big,” “sooooo boooooring”; I’m surprised that the most common jibe of my youth doesn’t appear: “soccer is so gay.”
I have many times succumbed to the trolls and lashed out at lazy idiocy, because the trolls are legion. American soccer fans have thin skins because we have to spend 95% of our time in the non-soccer world where every dude thinks he’s the first genius to come up with the brilliant retort: “It’s not a real sport if you can’t use your hands.”
And when we’re finally free from the mouth breathers, we have to deal with those who have watched 12 minutes of US soccer in their lives who pass judgment on MLS with smug security. (Entertaining sidenote: MLS fans do this same thing with a profound lack of self-awareness to NASL and NASL fans to USL.) No wonder US soccer fans are so annoying, we have to spend almost all of our time defending something we love.
But we don’t have to. Join me, my friends, as you let it all go. You can stop caring about whether or not your local news outlets condescend to you with their bro high fives; let team PR people worry about them. You can stop hoping that Barry Glendenning will watch that amazing match between the Whitecaps and Crew; he won’t ever care. You can stop all of this, because the reasons you love watching your team, your league, and soccer have no rational basis.
I don’t love Minnesota United because it is the best soccer in the world. Sure, I love it more when it’s beautiful and more when it’s dominant. But I love it because it’s mine and I love it for absolutely no reason based in reality.
I have reached the zen state of the philosopher Taylor Swift and let me tell you, it’s beautiful.
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