Ten signs you might be a football (futbol, or soccer) fanatic

Wednesday,
April 28, 2010

Ten signs
you might be a football (futbol, or soccer) fanatic
By Michael Lafferty

A slightly
silly commentary to mark the year of the World Cup

Admittedly, I
am a soccer addict. But no 12-step program for me. I’ll take a scissor move,
rainbow or a Cruyff, Rivelino or Maradona. One-touch, or two, but 12 touches are
simply too many …

Having played
the game for the majority of my years on this planet, and having coached for
better than 20 seasons, I’m still involved with the sport – playing when I can
and coaching when the opportunity and a position presents itself. I watch, I
analyze, but most of all, I enjoy. And I’m not even close to being alone in
that. In another month and a bit, the world will focus on South Africa for one
of the greatest worldwide sporting spectacles – the World Cup. The Olympics pale
in comparison.

Oh, I know, you
think I jest. Ok – let’s look at some numbers. The Vancouver Olympic committee
estimated that during the 2010 Olympics 3.4 billion people viewed the games.
Sure, that’s an impressive number. According to the Nielsen ratings, the 2008
Summer Olympics had 4.7 billion viewers worldwide (if you watched five events on
television, that would count as five views, just as a reference; these numbers
do not mean individual people) – so we are up to 8.1 billion television viewers
combined for two Olympic games. FIFA, the governing body of international
football, or soccer, calculated that the last World Cup, the 2006 Germany
edition, had a total cumulative television audience of 26.29 billion. Maybe
‘pale’ was not a strong enough word.


Well, we have
boiled down the essentials of what it means to be a die-hard fan of the world’s
most ‘beautiful’ game. Forget that stuff about knowing which countries are in
the World Cup, or which promises to be the ultimate ‘pool of death,’ or what
players are injured and can’t play – this list is about those individuals who
take it to the extreme. Those who are not futbol fans (or football fans; aka –
soccer for those in North America) likely won’t understand part of this, but for
the rest – here are the top 10 signs you might be a tad fanatical about the
sport:

10. All
the environments in your dreams consist of flat green grassy surfaces.

9. The
boundaries of your home’s yard are marked with corner flags and chalk.

8. You
follow Manchester United.

7. Your
children don’t have last names and all their first names end with “inho.”

6. If
something goes awry in your life, you flop on the ground, grab your leg and
contort your face in pain. But not to worry, you can go on.

5. When
on a date with a new girlfriend, your hands flirt with going offsides (no second
base or other such nonsense for you!) and if she grabs your hand and removes it,
you feel as though you fell victim to the classic offside trap.

4. You
eat with your feet by popping food up to your mouth and knock on doors with your
head.

3. There
is no new year, no leap, only World Cup years; everything else is a lead-up year
to the World Cup.

2. You
don’t yell at your children. If they do something wrong, you give them a yellow
card for minor infractions of house rules; if it’s a major infraction, they get
a red card, and … well, let’s not go there.

1. You
wear cleats and shinguards to play FIFA video games.