Here comes “soccer puritanism” — the meme that “‘entertaining football’ is a crass Americanization” of the sport, “a romantic revision born in Mexico 1970,” and that real fans revel in officiating howlers, negative tactics and the “soccer mirrors life” theory of connoisseurship as masochism. Soccer should be entertaining — to argue otherwise is delusional. “I just wish sometimes we could do away with this canned romanticism that insists we should be grateful for whatever the game gives us.” (Richard Whittall/A More Splendid Life)
(Image credit: tarrariffic7/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
