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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

As an on-the-spectrum brit who was forced to play "footie" at 9:15am in 5degC frosty september mornings by uncaring, unsympathetic, if not abusive, PE "teachers" at my comprehensive secondary from age 11 to age 16, and previously bullied in primary-school to the point where I tried to hang myself in the toilets with my school uniform tie at 8 because I didn't support any football team and didn't collect those stupid football stickers - stuff like this makes me just feel despondent at the utter lack of any redeeming values in association football.

Burn it to the ground.

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Unfortunately, as a life long fan of football in the UK, this rings true from the opposite side, and I'm sorry you had to go through that.

However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here. It just so happens that it's the biggest sport in the world, hence worth so much money to $REGIME who will do anything they can to capitalise.

I also haven't fully understood the point he's making, like "A shitty person just made me suffer to play a sport, fuck the sport", like wtf

Association football, itself, in isolation, is a fine game. There's nothing inherently bad about it. If actual friends of mine want a kick-around then sure, I'm game.

But it's the culture around the sport in the UK, and greater Europe, that's awful. Remember hooligan "firms" in the 1990s? Those things don't happen in a vacuum. Chiefly, the football culture in the UK is inextricably tied to the entrenched class system, in the worst ways, unfortunately - and I haven't seen the Premier League's televised pundits ever advise their fans to maybe, perhaps, actually be good ambassadors for the sport to the rest of us.

(Okay, Michael Owen is an exception - my perception is the rest are like Eric Cantona: officially reprimanded, but we can tell people are lapping up his then abhorrent personal conduct. The same way people support Trump, I suppose).

FIFA aren't running a tight-ship from the top. The tiers under them aren't coming close, and the conceptual levels below are only worse.

I have issues agreeing with you, I am more willing to think that certain issues are more about the system segregating classes, not educating or giving chances, than violence exists because of football, then of course football is more accessible as you can play it with a paper ball, and has bigger numbers? I would say that violence would still come out as it's there and (used to come?) comes out with football, what should we do? Only follow sports that require better social status and more expensive tools?

Or like yeah there are some example of players that were violent and crazy, as you can find in any place with a number of humans doing it, I'd say HSBC was laudering cartels money and funding terrorist, all bankers are criminals?

> Association football, itself, in isolation, is a fine game. There's nothing inherently bad about it.

Actually one can argue that the rules in football haven't kept up with the evolution of humans. When they defined the size of a goal, the average adult male was a full 10 cm shorter than they are today. People are running faster and jumping higher.

The sport would be a lot more exciting if you increased the physical dimensions of goals and pitches, so you would have 10 goals in an average game instead of 0 to 3.

Average goals per game has been 2.6 - 2.7 since 1962. Highest was 1954 with 5.38.

10 goals has never been an average, to reach that, the goals should be twice the size at least.

I don't thing the size of the goal or people getting taller / faster is the reason we don't see many scoring. A big problem for me is the amount of downtime and the amount of foulplaying. Schwalbes are a real skill. Players fall to the ground way too quickly.

Smaller field would make things more interesting.

My father says that one of the reasons football is so popular is because it is low scoring.

In high scoring games, the best team on the day tends to win.

In low scoring games, there are more upsets, as a single moment can have a greater impact.

Therefore even if your team is objectively worse, you go to the game with some hope in your heart.

Making football into a high scoring game could ruin it.

I'm not a huge football fan, but I'd argue part of the excitement of the sport comes from the fact that it is low soring - individual goals matter a lot, rather than just being a minor tick towards the overall score. Higher scoring games could dull those moments significantly.

> The sport would be a lot more exciting if you [suggested changes]

Do note soccer is currently tremendously exciting for millions of fans worldwide. I understand you mean well, and everyone is free to suggest changes (some of them good), but the sport right now is very exciting for huge numbers of people.

Informally it's a tremendously easy and fun game to pick up. Any kid with a foot ball and some room can play with their friends. It's even how some players start.

I don't think excitement is the biggest issue with football. The biggest issues are probably corruption in the business organizations around it, violence due to hooligans, etc.

No thanks, we don't want it to become basketball.

I've never met a football fan in my life that complains about there not being 'enough goals'.

What an american take that is.

Yeah I was thinking exactly the same thing about basketball, if you think scoring should be worthless then just watch that :D

When sports are so high scoring and close with so many goals they just boil down to the last 5 mins of the game being the only part that actually matters.

Having grown up in America right when soccer was inching towards popularity, and having then lived in Europe for many years, I've always been puzzled by the violence associated with the game.

I can easily see it being a class-related thing in the UK, but the wealthy and cultured are very much into football in, say, Italy and Germany.

I'm very glad that kind of sports-violence culture isn't a worldwide thing, and it makes me sad that the same sport can be innocent enough to be associated with suburban "soccer moms" in one place, while celebrating the wrong team can get you killed in another place.

their point is made for themselves. Learn to recognize cathartic human expressions, it helped them that they wrote it out and looked at it.

Empathy not your strong point?

> However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here.

I have a book that convincingly makes the case that physical exercise, sports, is a favorite tool of the fascist. To my knowledge, it's never translated from Dutch, but I think there must be research on this in English as well.

Ahem, it sounds like your problem is not with some people enjoying a sport, but with being bullied and forced to do what you don't like?

(I don't like football either; neither watching nor playing, but I don't mind if other people engage in it.)

I'm sorry you had that experience. The school system failed you by not helping you as a victim of bullying.

That being said football is a source of joy, entertainment, and camaraderie to hundreds of millions of people around the planet. There's really no "lack of any redeeming values in football". You should perhaps come to a grassroots football match, away from the multi-billion dollar dirty business the sport at a highest level has become, to see that.

Oh good, I’m sorry to hear that. I was also bullied mostly because I was fat in primary school so i sucked at playing sports. But I still liked to watch football and play fifa afterwards, like i think in secondary school it all changed and I became a fan

On the flipside of this i think i learnt a lot about myself on the rugby pitch around this age.

There is a lot to take away from it, simple things like organisation and schedule keeping to team building, sportsmanship and determination.

Cold winter morning / evenings on the pitch or at the lake made me a better person im sure.

I know it's a terrible cliche but the old joke that "Football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and Rugby is a hooligans’ game played by gentlemen" isn't entirely inaccurate.

I had to play football at the extremely low ranking state school I went to and found the whole experience utterly miserable. My son attended a public school and played rugby there and I enjoyed watching him play and he seemed to get a lot out of it, while the on the pitch experience was far rougher than football the culture around the game seemed far more civilised. Of course that could just be the context of the different type of school but I thought it went deeper than that.

Edit: A nice touch at our school PE department was that they were mostly ex Paras and they seemed to treat us more like recruits than schoolkids. There was one ex Royal Marine who while working us just as hard was at least good natured about it, whereas the others seemed to be in a state of continual anger.

For non-British readers: a public school in Britain might not be what you expect it to be. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)

> "Football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and Rugby is a hooligans’ game played by gentlemen"

In Argentina at least, football is linked to the people, low and upper class; it's a "popular" sport. In contrast, Rugby is linked to the elite; mostly well to do spoiled kids (in the public perception, at least). There were a couple of beatings/murders linked to spoiled rich kids who were Rugby players, enough that in our public perception today a Rugby player is definitely not considered a "gentleman" but a rich brat potentially prone to violence.

There is definitely an element of elitism in the UK around rugby, I can't deny that.

However, I'd draw the comparison between a large crowd of rugby supporters leaving a match and a similar sized crowd of football supporters. I used to live near the Easter Road football ground in Edinburgh and that was pretty unpleasant and threatening on match days (particularly when Glasgow Rangers were playing...). I've never encountered the same level of sheer nastiness from a rugby crowd (and Edinburgh gets a lot of them) as from football crowd.

I remember once getting the last train from Glasgow to Edinburgh the day of an Old Firm match - one set of supporters at one end of the carriage, the other set of supporters at the other end and a few of us non-combatants sitting in the middle desperately trying to pretend that nothing was happening. That was fun.

NB Scotland does have a weird sectarian angle to football which doesn't help - although I don't think this is nearly as bad as it used to be.

Oh, the fans can be rough, agreed! Not a soccer fan and so I don't go to watch matches (TV set for me, if at all). But yes, rival football fans can get nasty. They scare me.

I was thinking more about the actual players. It's also not a real statistic, just public perception: that Rugby players are spoiled rich kids prone to beating up other kids if they don't like the color of their skin.

Simple evidence: when there’s rugby at Wembley the bars are open, when there’s football they aren’t.

Simple evidence of what?

> Football is a gentleman's game played by ruffians, and rugby is a ruffian's game played by gentlemen.

Jesus Christ. That is not a healthy outlook on things.

With apologies for the hyperbole. Theres nothing wrong with the sport, I want to stress that. What I want to see gone is the corrupt FIFA as its officiating body, and I want to see the background culture of the football scene, where empathy is “gay” and where any complaint, regardless of legitimacy, is dismissed as “whinging”, turned on its head.

Nah man, all good. No need to explain yourself.

It was just a bit sad to read, as it sounds exactly like something my grandfather would say. He's in his mid-to-late 70s now and still eaten up by things that happened in his childhood and early 20s (things that plenty of other people go through and don't allow to destroy their entire life).

His inability to deal with it in a healthy way has made the last 5 decades of his life miserable, and it kills me to see another person go through this as well.

I understand this is not a simple task for the average Aspie, but please try to understand what happened and integrate it into your outlook in a way that allows you to function as a healthy adult.

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