Maybe Soccer Just Sucks

At The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses "Conservative Soccer-Hate" with a familiar trope:

[A]ll I'm coming up with is a kind of crude nationalism that resents having to compete in an international competition that we may not win.

If that were true, wouldn't there have been a huge outbreak of hockey-hate during the Vancouver Olympics? Instead, the Olympic hockey games (which even a Southerner like me--who still believes that "icing" is something you find on a birthday cake--found completely riveting) were a ratings smash, and nary a trace of "hockey sucks" rhetoric was in evidence, even after the U.S. lost.

Here's what I think:

Besides the fact that it's an incredibly boring sport, my guess is that most conservatives--like most Americans--hate soccer because they've been exposed to whiny, pretentious, pushy yuppie soccer parents and/or fans (most of whom also happen to be liberals). It also doesn't help soccer's popularity any when its adherents insist that anybody who doesn't love it is stupid, racist, backwards, imperialistic, etc., etc.

Note that this explaination can also apply to the question, "Why don't conservatives like Obama?"