The Case for Watching Soccer | Thomas Hughes
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The Case for Watching Soccer<br>According to a basketball fan<br>Jul 15, 2026
I love watching basketball. What makes watching basketball great is that in every NBA game, there are countless mind-blowing highlights. Countless moments of thinking “Oh my gosh I cannot believe he just did that.” There are classics, like Steph threes and Ja Morant dunks, but if you watch even the worst teams and players in games that don’t matter in the slightest, you will see displays of athleticism and finesse that are downright nutty.
The driving factor here is that basketball has a ton of scoring. The fact that the players actually score in the clips above is what takes the highlights up a level - the acrobatics and shots from the logo only matter if they lead to points on the board. With each team scoring about 50 times in a game, that means there are 100ish moments where the ball might get put in the basket in a crazy way.
This is not the case in soccer. The World Cup this year has averaged 3 goals per match1 - just three moments which have the potential for blowing your mind. Messi’s unreal footwork can be rendered completely moot because it’s so d-mn hard to score in this sport! So, basketball has this tremendous advantage for watchability.
All that being said: I have absolutely loved watching the World Cup this year! And I’ve been trying to figure out why.
It’s not the stakes or the personalities or the fact that the US seemed halfway decent for a moment there - all of this plays a part, but it’s not the primary factor. I will tell you what is.
The case for watching soccer is this: because games are low-scoring, every goal is massively significant, which means in any one of the 90 minutes, the most important play of the match can happen.
One-third of games in this year’s tournament have been decided by a single goal.2
Even in the cases where it doesn’t ultimately decide the match, when a team is winning or losing by a goal, they play completely differently, it shapes everything about the remainder of the game.
Anytime this tournament that I’ve watched a game and somebody has walked in front of the screen for even a moment, I start howling internally - this could be the moment, and I could just miss it!
In basketball, you can really get away with watching only the second half of games, or even just the very end - a breakaway dunk in the first quarter has far less significance than the same bucket scored in the fourth.
In soccer, by contrast, you must watch every single minute (for the reasons stated above). This is what makes soccer so d-mn good to watch.
But one tiny note on the previous paragraph: in basketball, yes, you can skip the first couple quarters - but you will miss out on all the head-exploding highlight moments I talked about above!
This means the final takeaway is:
You must watch every minute of a basketball game because it is so chock full of incredible athletic feats and dazzling moments, made possible by the deluge of scoring.
And:
You must watch every minute of a soccer match because you never know when the most important play will happen, made possible by the rarity of scoring.
What a divinely poetic takeaway! I am a genius!
Thank you Oliver and Luis for explaining the World Cup to me.
And thank you Cici for bringing me to a proper English pub to watch the Beautiful Game football’s coming home it’s coming home etc and so on and so forth
Viva la France!
Footnotes
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a58065b-0cc4-83ea-82c6-4d5fa25ca3d1 ↩
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a580a7d-6ed4-83ea-b6bc-a23de5c91a9c ↩