Libertarians and market-oriented folks have no excuse. Two billion people cannot be wrong.

Rather than stoking nationalistic resentment against our Canadian neighbors, we should be joining with them to defend our common North American football culture against the rot of international soccer. The World Cup has given rise to yet another surge of pro-soccer propaganda. Like the Communists and the Third World despots of the 1970s, soccer partisans claim to represent the wave of the future and see the United States as the decadent, wheezing past. If this line sounds familiar, it's because we've been hearing it for more than 25 years. Growing up in the '70s, all of us kids played soccer. My brother and I wolfed down bowls of Kix, a sphere-shaped cereal that marketed itself as the breakfast of soccer players. But when we got old enough, everybody started playing football, and by high school soccer was largely relegated to shaggy athletic misfits. Kix, meanwhile, has abandoned its soccer theme. All this demonstrates the great flaw in the sport-of-the-future claim. In most of the United States, soccer is a sport for younger children--who develop foot-eye coordination before hand-eye coordination--who then progress on to other sports. Assuming the sport of the next generation is soccer is akin to assuming the drink of the next generation is apple juice.

Also like the Communists, soccer's fellow travelers routinely smear their opponents as rabid right-wingers. In his pro-soccer screed in this space last week, Franklin Foer called soccer critics "Buchananite." What the soccer elites don't grasp is that Americans, not unreasonably, associate soccer with weakness. In football, the kicker is the smallest, wimpiest player on the field--so presumptively unable to defend himself that there is a special penalty--"roughing the kicker"--to prohibit the other players from harming him. The kicker is like the nearsighted, asthmatic cousin your parents forced you to include in the game: Necessity compels his participation, but he is treated more gingerly than everybody else and is mildly scorned for it. When Americans see soccer, they see a game consisting entirely of kickers. Yes, soccer hatred has a certain socially retrograde element. (My high school football coach would not even deign to utter the word "soccer"--he called it "communist homosexual activity.") But the simple truth is that no football-playing nation has ever lost a war to a soccer-playing nation. Perhaps this is why Foer and his soccer-loving comrades persist in trying to import their system to American shores. He gleefully predicts that soccer will bring about "not the Americanization of the rest of the world, but the reverse." While his football- and freedom-loving countrymen see "Americanization" as the great hope for the world, Foer uses the word as an epithet. Call Franklin Foer, and tell him to stop his negative attacks on the United States of America.

Americans don't like soccer because it is a game for sissy communists.

Personally, I hope soccer never becomes a major spectator sport in the USA -- who needs the greedy owners and the soccer equivalents of Daryll Strawberry, Lawrence Phillips or Allen Iverson?