From "The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup"

These particular paragraphs resonated with me today ... Especially having read a bunch of soccer bashing in the past few days (We get it - you don't like the game. You don't understand the game. Why do you have to spend thousands of words talking about how much you hate the game?) And remember now, football here means soccer!

"...Football is difficult to describe. Its texture is elusive and words make a poor fit with the game's graces and beauties; I don't quite know why. But I think at some deep level that the reason football snags us, and the reason it is difficult to write about - to write directly about what happens on the pitch - is connected though the idea of beauty. Good football is beautiful, with a strangely delicate beauty, a beauty you begin to learn about as you begin to play the game. Every time you kick the ball, it's more likely to not go where you aim it than it is to go there; or to go at the wrong speed, or to bounce too much; or it does go where you aimed but an opponent was standing there, or the teammate you were aiming at wasn't looking, or moved away, or failed to control it, or was tackled, or fell over, or immediately gave it away to an opponent. (Let's not forget the opponent. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "in football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.") It's easier; far, far easier to under-, over- or mis-hit a pass than it is just to pass. It's easier to knock yourself out, score an own-goal, or completely miss the call than it is to manage even a half-decent header, the kind any semi-pro in a graveyard league can execute flawlessly without thinking.

That's what you learn as soon as you start to play and watch football: that football is difficult and beautiful, and that the two are related. Players kick the ball to one another, pass into empty space which is suddenly filled by a player who wasn't there two seconds ago and who is running and full pelt and who, without looking or breaking stride, knocks the ball back to a third player who he surely can't have seen who then, also at full pelt and without breaking stride, crosses the ball at sixty miles an hour to land on the head of a fourth player who has run seventy meters to get there and who, again all in stride, jumps and heads the ball with, once you believe how hard this is, unbelievable power and accuracy toward a corner of the goal just exactly where the goalkeeper, executing some complex physics entirely without conscious thought and through muscle-memory, has expected it to be, so that all this grace and speed and muscle and athleticism and attention to detail and power and precision passion comes to nothing, will never appear on a score-sheet or match report and will likely be forgotten a day later by everybody who saw it or took part in it. That is the beauty and also the strange fragility, the evenescence of football."* By John Lanchester


*Many of the commas in that paragraph aren't as printed and are mine, as I refused to put this on my site as it was written.