Comment by Al-Khwarizmi
4 months ago
I'm from Spain, never watch football or pay any attention to it at all, and this year I noticed the day that the Liga started due to the internet suddenly working like crap. After various websites failing to respond I thought "I bet the football season has started again", I googled it and indeed, it started that day. I resubscribed to my VPN right there and then.
This situation (which has already been going on for a year or so) has made my attitude towards football change from "I don't like it, but live and let live" to outright hate.
I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
It’s the harmless version of “my tribe battles your tribe” for thousands of years, without the bloodshed. We’ve evolved to enjoy competition in general.
Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs.
My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing)
About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
But it isn't even my tribe vs. your tribe anymore since players got to the highest bidder rather than to their country / state / city team.
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F1 I sort of understand, there's a lot of aspects to it even though it is at the end of the day, a bunch of people driving in circles. The memes are good anyhow.
With foot/basketball, hockey, etc. there is no technical aspect if you don't get into pro tier shoe and ball design or whichever non-strictly rule defined straws one could competitively grasp at, but I guess most people relate through familiarity of actually playing it themselves? But there is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there where to play it well enough for it to be actually fun you need to already be a fan and have a good grasp of the rules, otherwise it's just people running back and forth on a court.
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It's one thing to know you don't enjoy it for yourself.
But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
What are you even on about, why would I need sympathy for an optional interest that is by all accounts pretty mainstream and well established worldwide? It's not a disability, it's not an endangered species, it's a billion dollar commercial industry. I just don't see the appeal.
In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. Oh but how will the poor millionaires break even with their overpriced streaming services if they can't destroy the internet to block some pirates? Jesus Christ, the audacity.
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I used to think like you about sports. Until I started doing more sports, like bouldering (although at a pretty basic level).
I appreciate watching e.g bouldering competitions now simply because I can appreciate the difficulty more.
Had I stuck with playing football I imagine I would have had a similar experience now.
Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
Planning around rule interpretations is part of the strategy (if you’re good) (usually)
I am in Spain (not spanish) and I find the obsession with watching sports very strange; in uk us au worse than here but here it indeed is bad. I do not like Musk anymore but did get starlink to not bother with this crap.
It's a fun game
Honestly, it’s quite boring. Many games end 0-0 or 1-0 and they’re just good to have a siesta, barely better than white noise.
Even at the peak of my interest in football here in Spain, when I was ~18 and I loved playing the game (actually indoor 5 on 5, much more technical and IMO “better”) there’s no way I could stomach a game between two mid or low tier teams, it had to have FC Barcelona and/or Real Madrid. But my dad and plenty others did and do watch those games.
Then there’s the worse aspect of it: football attracts the worst kind of people; think hooligans. I know a bunch of people smarter than me that love football so it’s not a matter of “if you like football you’re stupid” but “if you’re stupid you’ll probably like football”. Then there’s football becoming the whole personality of many guys here, you quite literally can’t talk about anything else with them.
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Come on.. anything of interest can be reduced to a few absurd actions absent of any context.
For example. I don't understand how: - moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal - Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal - Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
Agreed. I don't particularly feel inclined to watch millionaires kick a ball around.
What irks me are the grown, drunk people that get infected with hatred towards the other team and its fans.
And break stuff of people who have nothing to do with it like happens so often after this crap. I saw it many times in the Netherlands.
It's (hopefully) unscripted drama. People enjoy drama.
Bread and circuses.
In many football stadiums throughout Spain, chants like "Vaya puta mierda de Liga" and "Corrupción en la Federación" are heard almost every game. It's not the whole of the football world that wants to censor the internet, it's the league and the interests of a few corporations (including, sadly, clubs).
Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. I know many people who used to pay for it; now most of them, including law-abiding citizens who wouldn't normally pirate, are learning how to do it.
> Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games.
It's not only become expensive, but they've also been split up by multiple providers. You want to watch the league games? That's one subscription. Champions League? That's another subscription. Chamipions League on a Tuesday? Need Prime for that. So, much like movie/series streaming has been split up between services, so have the football broadcasts. No wonder people are pirating the streams, when the availability is much better a fraction of the price.
It's because the leagues (and therefore the teams) make significantly more money when the rights are shared vs. when they're owned by a single entity. For example, the National Hockey League is in the middle of a seven-year, $4.5B deal with ESPN/Disney and Turner/Warner; their prior deal with NBC/Universal was a ten-year, $2B deal. Even adjusting for inflation, it's a huge increase from $200M/year to $640M/year over that decade -- an increase that happened despite cord-cutting accelerating significantly over the decade of the prior deal.
On the other hand, the MLS went to basically a single provider (all matches air on Apple's streaming service, with select on terrestrial TV and/or cable), and the numbers on that are still reportedly somewhat soft if you ignore the skewing presence of Lionel Messi (but that's a whole other discussion, because Apple was also trying to do something different and overpaid for the rights to do so, and that overpay was a part of bringing in Messi).
and sadly there is so much money involved in this sport now it dictates everything, it's a mafia