If you want a good chuckle, check out this collection of rants against soccer and youth soccer from the National Review. It never ceases to amaze me that these people get paid to write this stuff. Some of my favorites quotes include:

There is no surer sign of the decline of America’s culture than the craze over this awful European sport. Drive past a park or a schoolyard on a clear spring afternoon and you’re likely to witness a depressingly unpatriotic sight: the baseball diamond lies empty and crab grass grows in the infield, while herds of American children dressed in preposterous polyester uniforms run around kicking a white and black ball in no particular direction and to no apparent end.

Can someone explain to me how it’s unpatriotic that ‘herds of American children’ are having fun running around no matter what they’re wearing? It gets better.

I am convinced that the ordeal of soccer teaches our kids all the wrong lessons in life. Soccer is the Marxist concept of the labor theory of value applied to sports — which may explain why socialist nations dominate in the World Cup. The purpose of a capitalist economy is to produce the maximum output for the least amount of exertion. Soccer requires huge volumes of effort but produces no output.

Wait – what? Baseball scores rarely exceed 10. If we got 7 points for a goal in soccer, you’d think they were American football scores. And this makes us Marxist? Of course it wouldn’t be a good National Review rant without some sexism:

What makes peewee soccer particularly insidious is that boys and girls play together. At this level, the sport has become a giant social experiment imposed upon us by the same geniuses who have put women in combat. No one seems to care much that co-ed soccer is doing irreparable harm to the psyche of America’s little boys.

At this pre-puberty state of life girls tower over boys and typically have better coordination. Last year the Pele of my son’s league was a kindergartner named Kate Lynn. During one game, Kate Lynn repeatedly stampeded over Justin. After the third knockdown, I quietly pulled him aside and advised: “Remember that rule about never hitting a girl? Let’s suspend that for the next forty minutes.” But he never did, because she was likely to hit back.

Um – just wow. And that was only from the first article. Keep reading if you can. The mind boggles.

H/T yhatemetoo