Soccer is a weird sport.

Pretty much everyone I know (at least most of the males) played… Soccer is a weird sport.

Pretty much everyone I know (at least most of the males) played youth soccer. It’s a popular sport for ages 5 to 10.

But once most kids hit 10 years old, they quit and never look back. They move on to mainstream sports like football, baseball or basketball.

I played soccer for one year, hated it and played baseball instead. No one passed me the ball, I ran out of breath too quickly, and I’m pretty sure Darkwing Duck came on during most of my games. So baseball it was.

Now, nearly two decades later, I finally have a taste for the sport.

But this isn’t about me. This is about you – the American majority that shuns soccer.

America is pretty much the only country where it is cool to hate soccer. But then again, there is that small percentage of Americans who love soccer, and they’re cool in their own right, just not to the people who hate soccer. It’s confusing, so stay with me.

The argument lies in the complexity and duality of the American populous. The Cool and the cool.

See, most of America is split into three separate groups – the Cool, the cool and the not cool at all. I’ll be using the two different cools – Cool and cool — as two different things from here on.

The idea of Cool, I believe, started somewhere toward the middle of the century with western and noir movies. The guys in those movies (John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart to name just two) were Cool. And, being that they were part of the two biggest movie genres of the time, Cool was inherently whatever was popular.

Then, somewhere in the late 1960s and early ’70s, other ideas of Cool were developed, and the drug culture became cool (notice lowercase c).

The rest of the country continued with the original idea of Cool (mostly disco), while this huge sub-culture was developing cool.

Now, nearly four decades later, most people are still scrambling to figure out what’s Cool, what’s cool and what’s completely not cool at all.

But the whole thing has to do with egalitarian and elitist ideology.

Egalitarianism is the idea that you belong to the big group (think communism). It’s why Chevy makes patriotic ads to make us feel like we are all of the same populous and invoke pride in American-made products.

Elitism is the idea that you are above everyone else – that you are an individual.

Egalitarians believe in group-based things that most other people enjoy, while elitists usually go against what egalitarians like and instead side with whatever the egalitarians hate. It’s like how most people who drink Natural Light because it’s cheap (and Cool) can be considered egalitarian, and the people who drink micro-beers from Seattle can be considered elitist.

But that’s only within the scope of beer drinking, just as the argument of soccer is only within sports.

Now, sports like football get picked up by the egalitarian crowd, so it’s Cool – everyone likes it. Hell yea.

But with soccer – it’s a part of the egalitarian persona to hate soccer – so only cool (or elitist) people really love soccer. And the cool people seem, like, really uncool people to the Cool people. Got it?

The thing is, the rest of the world loves soccer. Loves it. That’s the egalitarian thing to do for the rest of the world, while the elitist thing to do is drink coffee, fight wars and watch American television.

But let’s just stick with the American focus.

So, the Cool (soccer haters) people think the cool people (soccer lovers) are really uncool, and the cool people think the Cool people are really uncool, even though the real uncool people are at home watching Sci-Fi Channel original movies.

And there lies the problem.

Most of the country is raised to believe that soccer is an inferior sport because that’s the way everyone else thinks. Then, they go through their whole lives, never actually watching a game, thinking that it’s not a real sport.

They make up excuses like, “There isn’t enough scoring,” then they’ll go home and watch an NBA game with a score of 110-93. They’ll probably never watch a whole soccer game and see that a 1-0 game of soccer or hockey can be so much more thrilling than a basketball game where one basket rarely ever makes or breaks the game.

My point is that soccer will never be Cool. Just like hockey will never be Cool.

You can throw as many David Beckhams at America as you want, and it still won’t be Cool. It’ll just be cool – a sport that only a privileged few enjoy in America.

Apologies to anyone who read this far and is still lost.