Writer Adam Gopnik tried to explain why by contrasting the boundless optimism of American sports - plenty of scoring, action for its own sake - with the low-scoring, often defensive mindset dictated by the game the rest of the world calls football.
"The World Cup is a festival of fate - man accepting his hard circumstances, the near-certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal," he wrote in the New Yorker. "Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield."
I think Gopnik is on to something. My father, an American, just can't seem to appreciate soccer. The closest he comes to understanding it is when I explain how soccer is like life. It's not always fair. Sometimes the innocent are punished and the guilty get off. Sometimes you work and work and nothing comes of it. Sometimes those who are less competent get lucky and surpass you. My dad can't stand the fact that luck plays any part in it. I love the fact that luck plays a part in it. It's real. It's life.There is injustice, beauty, violence, transcendence, love, hate—everything in life is there. Only a nation averse to reality could not love soccer.
