the beautiful, confounding, heartbreaking, gutwrenching game

It's difficult to convincingly convey the excitement of soccer to doubters when even a die-hard fan says that it's boring.  The beauty of soccer is in the Brownian motion of the player-particles using their fundamental forces to try to squeeze a stray quantum from their environment in the right direction; the game is all velocity and zero certainty until that miraculous moment when a goal is scored, a wave function collapse where the path that the ball describes as it crosses the goal line is like the trail left behind by ions in a cloud chamber.  The schemes drawn up by the coaches are like Feynman diagrams that describe perfectly the mathematics involved in the behavior of the player-particles, and utterly fail to describe what happens when those player-particles meet a competing set of laws of physics.  This is not boring.  Yes, goals are rare, but the fact that a goal has not been scored is not proof that nothing is happening.  Many seem to like saying that matter is mostly empty space given the huge distance between nucleus and electron cloud, but matter cannot exist without that space; the space is part of the matter.  The lulls are part of the game.  Soccer is a goat rodeo, a complex system of strange attractors where observing the paths described is as exciting as witnessing their destination.