But I think there’s more to the relationship of fans and boredom than just magic moments. I want you to like soccer if you don’t already, so I probably shouldn’t admit this. But the game gets in your head. Following soccer is like being in love with someone who’s (a) gorgeous, (b) fascinating, (c) possibly quite evil, and (d) only occasionally aware of your existence. There’s a continuous low-grade suffering that becomes a sort of addiction in its own right. You spend all your time hoping they’ll notice you, and they never do, and that unfulfilled hope feels like your only connection to them. And then one day they look your way, and it’s just, pow. And probably they just want help moving, and maybe they call you Josie instead of Julie, but still. It keeps you going. And as irrational as it sounds, you wouldn’t trade this state of being for a life of quiet contentment with someone else. All you could gain would be peace of mind, and you’d lose that moment when the object of your fixation looked at you and you couldn’t feel your face.
Soccer is, in other words, both romantic and tragic, and the soft agony of a bad game is an inescapable part of this. You spend all your time hoping something will happen, and it never does. You get a surge of adrenaline every time the ball flies anywhere near the goal, and you’re always disappointed. But then, every once in a while, James McFadden will score from 30 yards at the Parc des Princes to give Scotland an impossible 1-0 lead over France, and a ponderous game will go all kinds of nervous-breakdown crazy. And for fans it’s practically an out-of-body experience — not just because it was a great play, but because it was so unlikely that this match could have been graced with a great play to begin with.
So it’s not that a boring game is purer than an entertaining game or that there’s something moral about enduring tedium (although I know fans who might make that argument). I watch soccer to be amazed. One of my favorite books about fandom is Soccer in Sun and Shadow, by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, whose guiding principle is “a pretty move, for the love of God.” But the beauty of the game matters more when you know you can’t take it for granted — when it arrives, as Galeano writes, it’s a “miracle.” There was a moment last Sunday when I was flipping between the extremely exciting Swansea-Arsenal match and the generally-not-in-any-way-exciting Athletic-Levante match. Just as I switched over, Athletic’s Oscar De Marcos, who had previously failed to score on an easy rebound, dribbled straight through two defenders into the area, drawing the goalkeeper out to the right side of the six-yard box. Then he lofted a high cross that dropped a foot from the goal line, just inside the left post, just as the lurking Fernando Llorente, who’d sneaked behind the defense, appeared in precisely that spot to head it into the empty net. In its weird, furtive way, the goal was better than the undeniable drama going on in Swansea. It was like a wink from the eye of the abyss. One of those lovely, foolish moments when you think that soccer might love you too.
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