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By Allan Wall
07/23/2014
The 2014 Soccer World Cup, held in Brazil, ended on July 13th with the victory of Germany over Argentina. It was the first World Cup held in the Western Hemisphere (known in Spanish as América) in which a team from the Western Hemisphere did not win. So the Germans broke that tradition.
I wrote three columns for Mexidata.info about the World Cup. The articles focus on the Mexican soccer team, but also contain plenty of general information about the World Cup (which is a one-month tournament involving 32 national teams) and how it works. The columns are here, here and here.
The focus of my VDARE.COM article on the World Cup was on fans of the Mexican national team, many of whom reside in the United States. Many of these fans, including U.S.-born Mexican-Americans, flew to Brazil to cheer on Team Mexico. See Guess Where Mexico’s World Cup Fans Came From?
In that article, I reported Mexico’s loss to the Netherlands on June 29th, which eliminated Mexico from the tournament. I wrote that " … Team Mexico was eliminated by Holland in a game with a questionable call." I should have written "a game with a controversial call."
What happened is, Mexican player Rafael Marquez received a foul for tripping Dutch player Arjen Robben. The Mexican coach and fans thought it wasn’t a foul, and Mexicans went on and on about it on social media. At least one pinata of Arjen Robben was spotted on a street in Mexico.
Later, after watching videos of the incident, and having seen still photos of it, it looks to me like Marquez did trip Robben. Of course, Robben exaggerated his fall by "diving" or "flopping", but that doesn’t change the fact that he was fouled. After all, over-dramatizing and exaggerating is a part of professional international soccer.
The Mainstream Media lectures Americans as to how soccer is the world’s game, and that Americans are provincial or even racist if they're not soccer fans.
It’s true that soccer is the most popular sport in the world. But it’s not true that it’s the most popular sport in every country but the U.S.A. Click here to see this useful map. It shows the favorite sport in every country of the world. You can see that plenty of other countries have other favorite sports besides soccer. And consider that China and India are the world’s most populous countries. In China, the favorite sport is ping pong, in India it’s cricket.
So there are plenty of people worldwide whose favorite sport is not soccer, it’s not just Americans.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.