As is often the case in June, several huge soccer tournaments currently are under way in various parts of the world; furthermore, both men’s and women’s soccer will be front and center at the upcoming Rio Summer Olympics. This reminds me of a post I wrote a year ago about the greatest soccer match ever . . .
The United States national soccer team, after a strong performance, was eliminated last Tuesday from the World Cup. 
Millions of typical American sports fans were stunned the following morning to find that the World Cup would continue, even though the only team that anyone cares about is no longer playing. But keep watching, because the World Cup every four years, along with the Olympics biannually, provides American sports fans with an opportunity to be just a little less parochial than usual and to challenge their innate superiority complex. It’s a tough sell, though, beginning with the fact that the rest of the world calls soccer “football
,” while everyone with any sense knows that football, as in NFL, is the multi-billion dollar game played by millionaire gladiators in helmets and pads on gridirons.
There are many reasons American sports fans give to justify their lack of respect for the world’s favorite game. For instance,
It’s boring, says the couch potato who has no trouble watching several consecutive hours of hole-to-hole coverage of the Masters or US Open golf tournaments.
There’s not enough scoring, says the baseball purist who considers a 1-0 pitchers’ duel to be a work of art.
I
don’t understand the rules, says the hockey fanatic who is apparently unaware that hockey is essentially soccer on skates, played on a much smaller field covered with ice by gladiators with helmet and pads similar to American football.
It makes no sense that a team can lose (as the US did to Germany) and still advance to the elimination round (as the US did), says the fan who has no trouble understanding something like the following that happens for several teams at the end of every NFL season: Team A will make the playoffs if: Team A wins on Sunday OR Team A ties on Sunday and Team X loses OR Team A loses on Sunday but both Teams Y and Z lose OR Team X loses by more than 20 points OR the rapture occurs.
Don’t get me wrong—I am not a soccer fanatic. But I very well might be if world-class soccer got the same 24-7 air time in the US as baseball, American football, basketball or hockey. I have never played soccer, probably because its only appearance in the northern Vermont of my youth was a week during the late winter/early spring in Phys Ed when the instructor had run out of things with which to make our lives miserable. I grew up fifty years too early, apparently, since I am told that youth soccer is huge nowadays. There was no such thing in my youth.
The first full World Cup game that I had the opportunity to watch this time around was Costa Rica vs. Greece. That’s one of the many cool things about the World Cup—countries that get very little face time in the news or anywhere else all of a sudden have their 90 minutes (or more) in the sun. I’m pretty good with my geography, but I would have had to take a moment to pick Costa Rica out of a Central America map lacking the names. I do know that it was the last of the Central American countries to visit my blog (after El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua and Panama).
Aside: I was appalled, but by no means surprised, when only one of five twenty-somethings interviewed in Chicago’s Soldier Field prior to the US-Belgium game could locate Belgium on a map of Europe. One might hope they would know where it is after Belgium beat us, but I doubt it. (It’s #7).
When watching the World Cup, I tend to favor the small, lesser known countries unless I have a vested interest, so I was pulling for Costa Rica. And sure enough, they won a nail-biter with a 5-3 advantage in penalty kicks after 90 minutes of regulation and 30 more minutes of extra time produced a tie. Soccer purists don’t like penalty kicks, but they provide a guarantee that the game won’t last twelve hours or more (something that baseball could use), and are very exciting. 
The best part of the Costa Rica-Greece contest, though, was this accolade tossed by the announcer to a Costa Rican defender: “He did a great job of holding off Socrates.”
How to hold Socrates off is something Thrasymachus, Euthyphro, Glaucon, Adiemantus, Laches and any number of other Socrates-abused conversants in Plato’s dialogues would have loved to learn, I suspect. Athenians eventually decided that the only foolproof way to hold off Socrates was to kill him, which turned out to be a good career move for Socrates since he is now generally considered to be the godfather of Western philosophy. 
But fans of Monty Python know where I am going with this. One of the greatest Monty Python skits from the seventies (my personal favorite) is the soccer match between German and Greek philosophers. The Greek squad, captained by Socrates, includes Aristotle, Empedocles, Sophocles, Heraclitus, Epictetus, Archimedes, Plotinus, Epicurus, Democritus, and Plato in goal. The German team is captained by Hegel, who is joined by Wittgenstein, Kant, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Beckenbauer (“bit of a surprise, there”), Jaspers, Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Leibniz in goal, with Marx coming off the bench in the second half for Wittgenstein. 
The Greeks play in togas, while the Germans are wearing various period costumes and wigs. The head referee is Confucius, who is keeping time with an hourglass. He is joined by Augustine and an appropriately portly Aquinas, both sporting halos.
As one might expect, nothing happens at the opening whistle other than the twenty-two philosophers wandering around the field individually or in pairs thinking hard and/or explaining the fundamental precepts of their philosophies to anyone within earshot. The first half ends in a scoreless tie; early in the second half there is a bit of excitement when Nietzsche accuses head referee Confucius of having no free will and Confucius responds by giving Nietzsche a yellow card. Marx substitutes for Wittgenstein later in the half, but accomplishes little. 
Then in the eighty-ninth minute, Archimedes has one of his classic “Eureka!” moments and decides to do something with the ball. In quick succession, the ball is passed from Archimedes to Socrates back to Archimedes to Heraclitus to an obviously offside Empedocles on the wing to Socrates who sends a beautiful header past the helpless Leibniz into the net. While the elated Greeks run around in joyful celebration, the Germans are outraged. “Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.” But to no avail. The final grains of sand run through Confucius’ hourglass and the Greeks win. As they should—they are the fathers of Western philosophy, after all.
So enjoy the rest of the World Cup as well as the highlights of the historic match between the Greek and German philosophers. Had the German philosophers only been able to find a Costa Rican philosopher to play defense for them, they might have been able to hold off Socrates.
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