LIBERAL WEENIES COME FOR FOOTIE.

Seriously, Adam Kadlac?  "Should you feel guilty about rooting against the US in the World Cup?"

Every four years polite Americans pretend to be interested in men's footie.  Cold Spring Shops, not so much, with only 42 posts getting a "footie" label in going on two dozen years, and most of those professing benign neglect with a little snarking, e.g. "Ordinarily, that would be reason enough for Cold Spring Shops to continue its policy of benign neglect of the game popular with adolescent males in the third world and eight year old girls here."

The liberal weenies, though, make themselves figures of fun, starting with calls for a boycott of the Stateside games that prompted my "I have no plans to attend or to watch any World Cup games. Where can I sell carbon offsets?"

Mx Kadlac, however, sees an opportunity to sell a few more books, or something.

The 2026 World Cup promises to be the planet’s most-watched sporting event. It’s also poised to generate its fair share of controversy.

Taking into account the history of corruption in FIFA, the sport’s governing body, it would be hard to blame anyone who decided to ignore this year’s competition.

However, some viewers of this summer’s tournament may face an additional dilemma.

Political tensions are high in the U.S., where most of the tournament’s matches will be played. The Trump administration is historically unpopular, and its critics are already concerned about sportswashing: when governments use the spectacle of athletic competition to burnish their image and distract the public.

As I point out in my 2022 book, “The Ethics of Sports Fandom,” fans who are critical of their country’s behavior sometimes feel ambivalent about rooting for their national sports teams – and may even feel compelled to root against them.

After all, it’s one thing to pull for your national team when patriotism feels uncomplicated. It’s quite another when you aren’t feeling very proud to be an American.

The Cold War made it easy for many Americans to rally behind the 1980 U.S men’s hockey team in its victory over the Soviet Union in the “Miracle on Ice.” But what do you do when you don’t see your country as the “good guys”?

The book?   Routledge, paperback $55, abstract redolent of pop psychology.  Hard pass.  Those Cold War era Olympics?  There are probably back issues of The Progressive or The Nation with articles about how wrong it was to use the Olympics to judge the value of ideologies, and how the money spent on developing Olympians could better be used for other purposes.  There surely were works of social criticism about how Big Time Sports existed to "sportswash" or to distract; Jim Bouton's Ball Four qualifies.

I mean, Mx Kadlic could have simply put out a tweet answering "NO" to his question, rather than laboring mightily to come up with a "never mind."

Success or failure on the pitch isn’t likely to bring about meaningful political change. After all, whether a government has the right legislative agenda or approach to foreign policy is totally divorced from its national soccer team’s ability to score goals.

Viewed in this way, rooting for your country’s national soccer team doesn’t imply blind loyalty to your country or ignorance of its flaws. It simply means that you want the athletes who represent your country to win the game they are playing on that particular day.

Or we could take a small win here:  Communism was a lousy social system whether the Soviet basketball team could steal a gold medal in 1972 or the Soviet hockey team was the best skating commissioned officers in all the Russias.