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I'm from Spain, never watch football or pay any attention to it at all, and this year I noticed the day that the Liga started due to the internet suddenly work

• moffkalast 1y ago
  I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
  • gtowey 1y ago
    It's one thing to know you don't enjoy it for yourself. But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
    • moffkalast 1y ago
      What are you even on about, why would I need sympathy for an optional interest that is by all accounts pretty mainstream and well established worldwide? It's not a disability, it's not an endangered species, it's a billion dollar commercial industry. I just don't see the appeal. In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. Oh but how will the poor millionaires break even with their overpriced streaming services if they can't destroy the internet to block some pirates? Jesus Christ, the audacity.
      • arcfour 1y ago
        Because you are acting like smug asshole. People don't like smug assholes, and you aren't helping the world or yourself by being one.
        • moffkalast 1y ago
          That's alright, I don't like people, so they're free to not like me back, I think that's fair.
          • arcfour 1y ago
            Edgy.
      • ikurei 1y ago
        It's not that you _need_ sympathy, or that football deserves or needs your sympathy like it's a good cause. It's just generally good to try to understand others instead of distancing yourself from them. I find F1, jazz, finance, and so many other things to be really boring and uninteresting, but I try to get the people who like those and connect with them. F1 people and jazz people are often more interesting than their interests; I haven't gotten there with finance yet. The world is more interesting this way, but you're under no obligation. > In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. In a just world LaLiga and FIFA would've been sued into the ground like five scandals ago, but I don't think gtowey was suggesting you try to empathise with them, but with people who like football.
  • durag 1y ago
    It's a fun game
    • Xenoamorphous 1y ago
      Honestly, it’s quite boring. Many games end 0-0 or 1-0 and they’re just good to have a siesta, barely better than white noise. Even at the peak of my interest in football here in Spain, when I was ~18 and I loved playing the game (actually indoor 5 on 5, much more technical and IMO “better”) there’s no way I could stomach a game between two mid or low tier teams, it had to have FC Barcelona and/or Real Madrid. But my dad and plenty others did and do watch those games. Then there’s the worse aspect of it: football attracts the worst kind of people; think hooligans. I know a bunch of people smarter than me that love football so it’s not a matter of “if you like football you’re stupid” but “if you’re stupid you’ll probably like football”. Then there’s football becoming the whole personality of many guys here, you quite literally can’t talk about anything else with them.
      • grigri907 1y ago
        I've seen some incredible, riveting 0-0 matches, 1-0, etc.
      • int_19h 1y ago
        This last bit is a team sports thing, not a football thing specifically. Which sport it is (or several, sometimes) depends on the country.
      • Yeask 1y ago
        You find baseball more fun than soccer because the scores are higher? What about Waterpolo?
        • anonzzzies 1y ago
          or tennis
  • atonse 1y ago
    It’s the harmless version of “my tribe battles your tribe” for thousands of years, without the bloodshed. We’ve evolved to enjoy competition in general. Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs. My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing) About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
    • moffkalast 1y ago
      F1 I sort of understand, there's a lot of aspects to it even though it is at the end of the day, a bunch of people driving in circles. The memes are good anyhow. With foot/basketball, hockey, etc. there is no technical aspect if you don't get into pro tier shoe and ball design or whichever non-strictly rule defined straws one could competitively grasp at, but I guess most people relate through familiarity of actually playing it themselves? But there is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there where to play it well enough for it to be actually fun you need to already be a fan and have a good grasp of the rules, otherwise it's just people running back and forth on a court.
      • atonse 1y ago
        Yeah I actually used to find soccer boring until I started watching it with my son, the sheer skill levels, there’s a lot of strategy involved. Yeah they don’t go into shoes or anything. But for example, forcing a foul at just the right time, or causing offsides by positioning yourself, etc. those carry some level of strategy, at least how much I can grasp. But the one common thing with every professional sport is the skill level for that particular skill in the sport is unlike anything we can comprehend. I remember a friend recalling a professional baseball game he attended, and he described how those guys were warming up, and they were just playing catch to warm up their arms… they were able to throw the ball to within inches of the recipient’s glove every time from hundreds of feet away. That sort of skill makes it enjoyable to watch human performance levels if you can appreciate how hard that particular skill is, especially if you’ve tried it. Equivalents in F1 are how a race engineer will tell a driver to slow down by half a second over the course of a full lap to preserve their tires, and they more or less do it.
  • jimbob45 1y ago
    Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations. Planning around rule interpretations is part of the strategy (if you’re good) (usually)
  • rolandog 1y ago
    Agreed. I don't particularly feel inclined to watch millionaires kick a ball around. What irks me are the grown, drunk people that get infected with hatred towards the other team and its fans.
    • anonzzzies 1y ago
      And break stuff of people who have nothing to do with it like happens so often after this crap. I saw it many times in the Netherlands.
  • Insanity 1y ago
    I used to think like you about sports. Until I started doing more sports, like bouldering (although at a pretty basic level). I appreciate watching e.g bouldering competitions now simply because I can appreciate the difficulty more. Had I stuck with playing football I imagine I would have had a similar experience now.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • antihipocrat 1y ago
    Come on.. anything of interest can be reduced to a few absurd actions absent of any context. For example. I don't understand how: - moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal - Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal - Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
  • jurip 1y ago
    It's (hopefully) unscripted drama. People enjoy drama.
  • anonzzzies 1y ago
    I am in Spain (not spanish) and I find the obsession with watching sports very strange; in uk us au worse than here but here it indeed is bad. I do not like Musk anymore but did get starlink to not bother with this crap.
  • csomar 1y ago
    Bread and circuses.
• fHr 1y ago
  and sadly there is so much money involved in this sport now it dictates everything, it's a mafia
• ikurei 1y ago
  In many football stadiums throughout Spain, chants like "Vaya puta mierda de Liga" and "Corrupción en la Federación" are heard almost every game. It's not the whole of the football world that wants to censor the internet, it's the league and the interests of a few corporations (including, sadly, clubs). Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. I know many people who used to pay for it; now most of them, including law-abiding citizens who wouldn't normally pirate, are learning how to do it.
  • addandsubtract 1y ago
    > Football piracy is on the rise, because watching football has become extremely expensive in the last few years, even if you just want to watch your teams games. It's not only become expensive, but they've also been split up by multiple providers. You want to watch the league games? That's one subscription. Champions League? That's another subscription. Chamipions League on a Tuesday? Need Prime for that. So, much like movie/series streaming has been split up between services, so have the football broadcasts. No wonder people are pirating the streams, when the availability is much better a fraction of the price.
    • ascagnel_ 1y ago
      It's because the leagues (and therefore the teams) make significantly more money when the rights are shared vs. when they're owned by a single entity. For example, the National Hockey League is in the middle of a seven-year, $4.5B deal with ESPN/Disney and Turner/Warner; their prior deal with NBC/Universal was a ten-year, $2B deal. Even adjusting for inflation, it's a huge increase from $200M/year to $640M/year over that decade -- an increase that happened despite cord-cutting accelerating significantly over the decade of the prior deal. On the other hand, the MLS went to basically a single provider (all matches air on Apple's streaming service, with select on terrestrial TV and/or cable), and the numbers on that are still reportedly somewhat soft if you ignore the skewing presence of Lionel Messi (but that's a whole other discussion, because Apple was also trying to do something different and overpaid for the rights to do so, and that overpay was a part of bringing in Messi).