Spain vs. Portugal kind of shows why most Americans don't get excited about football

When I say football I am not referring to the American notion of football nor do I care to get into any sort of debate about that and all the really lame "handegg" and "footkick" discussions that are just so common and boring right now - and likely always have been a bit boring also.

What I want to talk about is why it is that the rest of the world (for the most part) is absolutely gaga about football and the World Cup while Americans tend to not really care and will just have a small interest once every 4 years or so.

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I tend to pay attention to the betting lines more so than the actual games and other than Ronaldo, I couldn't tell you the name of a single player for either Spain or Portugal. I think that if you were to speak to almost all Americans and they were being honest with you that they would probably have the same answer. I'm not talking about someone that looked it up to try to impress you, I'm talking about someone that actually knows the teams. You wouldn't find very many people that do.

This doesn't mean that American sports are better, I'm not trying to make this very tired assertion. People can just go ahead and like what they like and you should leave them to it.

But this game ended in a 1-0 victory for Spain and therein lies the problem for a lot of American fans. For the most part "our" games tend to have more scoring in them than this and even though I have had football of the soccer variety fans try to point out to me the intensity that is created by scarcity of goals, i'm afraid I just can't get on board with that.

We also have the way in which the goal was scored in this game as well as the relative lack of anything that really even happened in the game up to that point.

For anyone that knows football you already know what all of these marks mean but for the uninitiated the little marks are just occurrences of note that took place throughout the game. Notice how there are zero ticks at all before halftime? Yeah, so that's a problem for American viewers and perhaps, even some of the people from other countries.

That doesn't mean that both teams just stand around but it also means that there wasn't much in the way of excitement.

There were in-fact 25 shots taken in the match but a mere 9 of them were even on target.

After a full 90 minutes nobody had scored and there wasn't a goal at all until extra time. That had to have been really disappointing to Portugal fans to lose in the waning minutes of the game and perhaps players were getting a bit frustrated and hence the yellow cards started flying around that point as well.

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You might be able to find an apologist or two out there that are American and will talk about how they can appreciate the tension of such a low-scoring game but if people are telling the truth I think we would be looking at around 90% of Americans that have a tough time staying interested in a game that has so little in the way of scoring. It simply isn't that exciting to Americans even if it is our own team that is playing.

As I write this the USA is playing Belgium and that already has 3 goals before halftime. One of them was pretty funny because the USA had just equalized and the crowd was going wild only to have Belgium score their second goal a mere 16 seconds later.

Belgium looks like the better team and I'm afraid that they will get one more and then start playing very defensively to run out the clock. We'll see. I'm only kind of halfway watching it anyway mostly because I am nervous.