The four-year cycle has come around again, and it seems like the whole world has soccer (I’m an American. It’s called soccer.) fever. Even America, usually apathetic to the goings on of the soccer world, appears hyped up for the quadrennial tourney. No doubt a large part of that has to do with much of the tournament taking place here in the states, but I also suspect America’s changing demographics is directly correlated with soccer’s rising popularity.

Up until the mass influx of immigrants over the last two decades or so, soccer was on the fringe of American sports. And it just seems like red-blooded Americans have an innate wariness toward the sport. Perhaps because it’s foreign, but that doesn’t explain Americans’ embrace of other sports that originated in other countries: Tennis is believed to have originated in France, and Americans have taken to ice hockey (the modern iteration of the sport comes from Canada) quite well.

If you put on your tinfoil hat for a moment, allow me to offer my theory on why soccer hasn’t caught on in America until recently: it’s spiritually a Third World sport.

True, red-blooded Western sports can be split into three easily defined categories. The first is a military simulation. Football, rugby, and most other team contact sports simulate a classic line of battle. The offensive and defensive lines in football are like two ancient Greek phalanxes crashing together. A flanking move or a daring thrust up the center often decides the contest. Even polo is reminiscent of a cavalry battle. These sports mimic the methods of conflict favored by Western nations: disciplined bodies of men in formation outmaneuvering and outsmarting the enemy.

The second category entails ritualized, almost Homeric duels between two opponents. Boxing, wrestling, fencing, and MMA are the quintessential dueling sports, and the West has a proud tradition of these types of contests stretching back millennia. Tennis and billiards sports represent this category as well. It’s man against man, and he who has the greater skill prevails. You can see the echo of Achilles v. Hector from the Iliad in all of them. Even baseball, if you squint hard enough, is a series of duels between the batter and the pitcher. Maybe that’s why the Japanese love baseball so much — it harkens back to the one-on-one duels of the samurai. And do I even have to explain gun-based sports?

The third category is even older. It’s the contest between man and nature, or man against himself, that stretches back to the dawn of time. Avid golfers will readily attest to this. His opponent is the green itself or his own ego just as much as it’s Phil from accounting. Competitive swimming, skiing, and surfing see men battle against the primal forces of nature.

These categories embody the classic Western virtues of discipline, honor, and the conquest of nature.

In contrast, soccer is a tribalistic sport and mirrors Third World tribal warfare. The vast majority of tribal societies had highly ritualized modes of conflict. Each side sizes the other up and skirmishes for a long time, which usually entails throwing pointy sticks at each other with not much intention to actually hit anything. Bravado replaces actual physical courage, and once they do clash, decisive victory is usually nonexistent, and casualties are typically very low. Now, this made sense because of the low populations of these societies — a traditional Western-style battle could mean the virtual annihilation of a whole tribe.

This is mirrored in soccer. The two sides run around a lot and showboat aplenty, but the actual action of the sport is rather limited and goals are rare. Just look at the scoreboards from the ongoing World Cup. Even a single goal the entire game is often the deciding factor.

Now, the modern incarnation of soccer has combined the disorganized, slapdash methods of conflict resolution from the tribal societies of the Third World with the overbearing bureaucratic nature of the Europeans (what kind of BS is offsides, anyway?) to create a pastime that is fundamentally at odds with the American — and by extension Western — way.

Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the player lineups for even the Western nations in this year’s World Cup matches. Forgive me for noticing, but there sure are a lot of Third Worlders — not to mention the fanbases.

I’m sure plenty of people enjoy the utterly riveting games of almost two dozen guys running around for an hour and a half to score, in a particularly exciting game, a couple of goals. Imagine the uproar from American audiences if NFL playoff games regularly stood at 0-0 at halftime. The American mind simply can’t comprehend that, and it shouldn’t have to.

Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel