None of this is new and doubtless much of it is meant in jest. Equally it's no more tedious than British hacks' witless attacks on baseball or American football. But still, the American right has a weird obsession with soccer and its supposed cancerous impact on the moral well-being of the United States. Consider this 2006 example from the pages of the Weekly Standard which argued that
Our country has yet to succumb to the nihilism, existentialism, and anomie that have overtaken Europe. A game about nothing, in which scoring is purely incidental, holds scant interest for Americans who still believe the world makes sense, that life has a larger meaning and structure, that being is not an end in itself, being qua being.