Last Saturday I had one of my peak 2025 experiences, at the MLS semifinal between the Vancouver Whitecaps FC (hereinafter “Caps”) and Los Angeles FC (“LAFC”). Both those FC’s stand for “Fútbol Club”. 53,095 other fans were there with my son and I; we came home smiling. I’d like to share a bit of the joy and an unexpected side-effect: I’ve gone off most other TV sports.

Earlier this year I wrote about becoming a Caps fan. Anyone who enjoys this will probably like that piece too.

Let’s set the scene with pictures.

Supporters gather pre-game at a nearby Irish-flavored pub.

Supporters march to the game.
When you’re in a frivolous parade, everyone smiles at you,'beven the drivers hemmed in by paraders.

The banner is what’s called a tifo.
I have to admit I failed to parse it.

The game · It was 120 minutes of ridiculously over-the-top psychodrama. I was exhausted at the end. If you want a full retrospective, type “whitecaps lafc” into any Web search to get the particulars. Or hit this. But here’s the short version:

1. The Caps came out sharp and fast and had LAFC pretty well flummoxed through most of the first half, scoring two goals, one of which was a jaw-dropper. They also managed to contain LAFC’s superstar Son Heung-min.

2. In the second half, the visitors reconfigured and were much better. Son did the superstar thing and scored two goals, one another jaw-dropper, just as the game was ending, to tie things up.

3. The Caps lost two players, one for fouls, one to injury, and were down two men through most of overtime. LAFC’s assault was relentless but the Caps held on, getting more than a little lucky.

4. So it went to a penalty-kick competition. Son, shockingly, missed; he was exhausted and limping. At the end of the day the Caps scored four out of five to LAFC’s three and got the win.

Suffice it to say the the dramatic peak wasn’t any of the flashes of brilliance, but rather the errors that happen when people are at the limit of their endurance. Vancouver made one fewer, that’s all there was to it.

That sound · There’s not another like it on this planet. I mean tens of thousands voices in a big stadium greeting a home goal. Fútbol specifically because its goals, compared to North American sports where points come in dozens, are such huge markers. The sound-pressure wavefront, coming from every direction, of all those inarticulate howls of joy, all in the same tiny fraction of a second, is a whole-body experience.

The side effect · I’ve long been a televised-sports fan; the only TV show that isn’t scripted and thus has real drama. But since getting mixed up in fútbol, I’ve sort of gone off the other sports I used to watch. I had to think a bit to figure out why.

It’s the ads. The football, basketball and hockey broadcasts screech to a halt every ten or fewer minutes for a couple of minutes of advertising. Most of the ads are dumb, many are offensive, and the relentless addiction-promoting gambling pitches are both. On top of which there’s the bone-headed repetition; someone somewhere thinks I’m gonna lean toward this generic SUV as opposed to that one because of the 138th time they’ve run that commercial where hip young people with fulfilling lives are going to have sex because of its dashboard geometry and motorized hatchback. I mean, the other SUVs have that stuff too, but this one’s actors are more convincingly likely to be headed for bed?

Being in the room with this shit makes me angry even though my mute-button skillz are sharp. The world being what it is, I really don’t need to be around something that angers me several times per hour. So, while when young I loved playing both football and basketball, and while the pro games are good entertainment, my patience seems to be running out.

Fútbol, on the other hand, has two fiftyish-minute chunks of continuous action, so you can sink into the flow of the game. The contrast, switching back and forth between that and the other North American sports, is stark.

(Except for I’m mostly forgiving baseball because its natural rhythm is full of stops suitable for hot dogs and beer and admiring cute babies and T-shirts and discussions of etymology and epidemiology. I mean, the ads are still mindless repetitive shit, we’re just more accustomed to switching attention away when nothing’s happening.)

And I’m not claiming that fútbol is more virtuous or less dirty than any other sport; after all, its global organizing body FIFA has repeatedly been exposed as galactically corrupt. I’m just saying it offers a better experience.

Soccer? · That word is an awkward invention by nineteenth-century British toffs based on abbreviating “association”. I accept that on my continent “football” means gridiron, but people who enjoy “soccer” still say it so in print I offer “fútbol”, which is a typographically nice little cluster; please humor me.

Anyhow, you might want to check out your local team; in North America, the prices are lower than the other sports, who could be against cheap happiness with fewer gambling ads?