America needs a bum as much as it needs a savior; it craves those two poles in sports. Americans love ultimates, hard lines, are suspicious of games that work in between those lines. A footy team can dominate, control the time of possession, unleash smart attacks, yet lose because of a fluke play and an otherworldly performance by the opposing goaltender. Sure, this can happen in America's Big 3, but football seems to accept and even enjoy this phenomenon. It's pliable to where even the time isn't hard-fixed. All too often its players are shameless on the pitch - maybe the most damning for American culture.

We can tolerate the occasional heel, even secretly enjoy their foibles, the Dennis Rodmans, the Pete Roses, the Bill Romanowskis, but these are usually of the cheating, bitching, drugging or drinking variety. Flopping and "panty-waist" melodrama is generally reviled. Even the home team's fans, who usually defend the Vlade Divacs, admit amongst their own that they despise the weakness.

Maybe we're ready to accept football? I read somewhere that the men in American letters have turned away from its sexist, sexy age. Maybe the American public is following its literature; no longer are we the Hemmingway, Pynchon, Roth, Henry Miller or Bukowski types. We're Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dave Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Ames, Dave Sedaris, and Gary Shtyengart. Can we accept the dainty, womanly football alongside our hulking, manly football? Maybe our society's ready to publicly accept the Oriental into our Occidental?

"In some situations, you can do everything right, and you still can get screwed."

Ghana players will certainly agree with that. And the worst part is that in their case the game played out exactly as the rules say they should.

Right. I wrote this before the Ghana game, but I think these sentiments describe the outcome well. In that game, it wasn't referee decisions but simply the nature of the field rules.

I feel that the MLB's approach to Armando Galarraga's almost-perfect game was very similar to FIFA's methodology. I think the appearance of American exceptionalism in this circumstance is mostly colored into the scene, bleeding out from much more substantial cases. Football fans (and video game fans) from around the world are capable of disagreements and diversity about how game rules should be constructed and implemented.

It seems that "there are no blown calls in football" is roughly equivalent to their being no crime in the former Soviet Union (apart from sedition and the like). Though I get what you're saying. As sports watchers we know that there are blown calls, because we see them. Our networks, such as they are, for enforcing our perspective on a blown call are somewhat weaker than that of the ref and FIFA.

The refs' position is much like Latour's 'matters of fact', while the fans and commentators are interested in the blown call as 'matters of concern'. So far FIFA has been able to resist the pressure to treat blown calls as anything other than fact, despite evidence to the contrary. Fans and commentators simply lack the ability to translate their determinations into an actual call. FIFA treats the ref's calls as an object or a black box whereas the fans only see a concatenation of things.

Every blown call in any sport turns every sports fan into a sociologist. We immediately reference our knowledge of the rule, examine the ref's application or misapplication of the rule, check with our fellow sociologists for their interpretation (peer review), and watch replays so that we can precisely determine the 'proper' outcome, and some publish their findings on blogs. For many of us this is part and parcel of being a sports fan and I think sports would be much more drab if there were some way to engineer human fallibility out of the game.

As a football fan I can understand your point of view, actually you have described better than anyone why football is a popular game in underdeveloped countries, and I have read a lot of essays and articles about it. But that's the pickle, I'm from Venezuela, we have a political crysis here, and sports, specially football and baseball, are our scape valve, our oxygen mask, so why ruin our only exit to reality with blown calls?. I know how life is, I live it day to day, I dont want to be screwed in a game that serves me as an exit in the same way Im screwed in the real life. I just can't handle that. Ironicly, it's not fair.

You can call it a dellusion, and i can´t be disagree with you, but that's the truth, at least from here.