The Exercise of Watching Soccer

It is common knowledge that the most rabid sports fans could not look less like the athletes they revere, being woefully out of shape; but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these fans are themselves bewildered by the paradox. Many were once jocks and don’t truly feel as if they have ever ceased being athletic: for it may have been almost without noticing it that they passed from real to vicarious exercise, from playing the game themselves to allowing others to do it for them. Why without noticing it? Because watching soccer or any other field sport can serve us as a suprisingly effective substitute for seizing the day ourselves. Our yen to be outdoors gamboling, exercising, competing, earning the peculiar glory of the arena, can be satisfied by staying indoors to watch a game, or, better yet, by being in the stands at a game. On days that beckon me outdoors I almost alway wonder, especially if a soccer season or tournament is underway, if instead I might not find a good game on TV. And it is, I find, on such appealing days – and not, say, in a bar at night – that a soccer match is best watched, that I truly find myself catching the spirit of the occasion. (In light of this, it should puzzle me that Monday Night Football in the US was ever a success, but pro American football is so laden with lurid artifice and showmanship that, like all other showbiz, it properly belongs to the night.)