"Taking an interest in soccer indicates a certain cosmopolitanism; the game is an international one. A rooting interest in a British club like Arsenal might indicate Anglophilia, which never hurts in polite society. Soccer-love also says—and this is perhaps most important—that you reject the overweening hype and made-for-TV packaging that surrounds American sports for something that, in theory, approaches a purer experience. 'If you're an intellectual, the kitsch that shrouds, say, football is almost intolerable,' says Franklin Foer. 'If you look at a European soccer crowd, all the shouting is coming organically from the crowd itself—that's so much more appealing.' Soccer, largely divorced from shrieking announcers and Jumbotrons, feels more like an artistic endeavor than a television show."
As the World Cup begins, Bryan Curtis in Slate wonders why American writers have taken such an interest.
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