Tallahassee, FL - An exhaustive search for, "real soccer," lead former soccer fan Geoff Elder to the sport of Baseball as his endless critique of North American soccer finally sucked every last little bit of fun out of the game, entirely.
This is real, ok? Not some overly affectatious soccer team or supporters that try to copy Italian ultras. No, this is two women wearing oversized ring hats, with a nonsensical sign, in a mostly filled ball park surrounded by people who want to do the wave, drink beer, and talk about the upcoming NFL season.
"I looked over and over for real soccer in the United States and Canada with no success," stated Elder to The Nutmeg News.
"I knew I couldn't support Major League Soccer, because that's definitely not real. You can't be friends with anyone cool in soccer if you support an MLS team. Everyone knows you have to hate on MLS all the time, or you lose cool points. I couldn't support the NASL or the USL because those two leagues are both either part of the global USSF/SUM conspiracy against promotion relegation or painfully inadequate, teetering on the brink of insolvency, and filled with delusions of grandeur. I then took to the minor leagues of the United States to look at the NPSL, but honestly supporting an NPSL side is akin to pounding nails into your forehead. Most of the teams are terrible, the soccer is awful, the players are terrible, the game day experience is terrible and suffering through terrible referees on an awful plastic pitch in the middle of nowhere isn't a signification of real soccer."
Elder reportedly tried to follow a few teams across the United States in multiple leagues with limited success as he ranted in a multi-part tweet storm, "None of this is real soccer. None of these teams have been around for 120 years. None of these fans have any history. There's no realness to showing up for a team in a league in the United States and Canada. First you have terrible names back in the 70s, and then the teams followed that by appropriating naming like European teams. Both options are terrible. Everything is terrible. The San Jose Earthquakes are just as bad as San Jose FC, which would be just as bad as AC San Jose or San Jose United Clash FC. There is nothing real about soccer at any level in any league anywhere in the United States."
According to insider sources, Elder even gave the Canadian Premier League a try, but noticed that it doesn't even exist yet.
"Finally I just caved and went back to baseball where the tradition is real, and I can sit around without having to worry about the fact that I'm missing out on a real soccer club that is getting hammered with overripe contracts as it plummets in a free-fall down the soccer pyramid until it is bailed out by a multi-billionaire with shady military arms contracts in somewhere like Cambodia or Laos or Thailand. Real Soccer is defined by the ability to have multi-generational despair over a club as it fails, repeatedly, over the course of your entire life only to have brief moments of happiness as it chases promotion to a sub-par league before it fails under the weight of bad acquisitions that will doom it for another 5 to 10 years. Baseball doesn't have franchises, or weird salary mechanisms, or promotion/relegation worries. I can just sit back and enjoy the crack of the bat, the smell of the popcorn and the fact that I don't have to worry about there being a better league."
The Nutmeg News will have more on this as Elder just randomly picks the Yankees to support.