No, not the American kind- though to be honest I don’t understand the first bloody thing about gridiron. I’m talking about the European kind.

This weekend there was apparently a massive rivalry grudge match between two top Italian Serie A teams, Juventus and Internazionale Milan. The only reason I know about it is because I was out with my martial arts buddies in a bar after a class shooting the shit and drinking some halfway decent beer.

Now, this was on Dec. 9th, which was the day that New York City decided to indulge in a catastrophically stupid tradition known as “SantaCon”. As far as I can tell, this is a day on which all of the idiots in Manhattan and the nearby boroughs and suburbs- which is to say, roughly half of the entire population of the city– decide to get dressed up in Santa outfits and go on an all-day drinking bender.

That’s it. That’s the entire point of SantaCon- to dress like retards and vomit onto sidewalks.

It’s like St. Patrick’s Day, without the class. (And without the cute slutty red-haired inebriated girls wearing green shirts that say “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” on them. If you are a chick on St. Paddy’s Day and you are wearing one of those shirts in public after having a few too many down at the pub, and you get felt up and smooched by some random guy… that is entirely on you.)

Worse still, there is no such thing as a “hot” girl in a Santa outfit.

… OK, perhaps I might be mistaken about that.

It’s just that I sure as hell didn’t see any chicks that looked hot when dressed up as Santa. The ONE reasonably cute blonde girl that I saw on the subway that day, who was about six feet tall and looked like she might be very fetching when dressed as a Norse Valkyrie, still looked utterly idiotic in her red suit and cloak.

Anyway, add to that the fact that Saturday morning saw a (relatively mild) winter storm hit the city and blanket it with a couple of inches of snow, and it is fair to say that my level of tolerance for stupid shit that day was not exactly at its highest.

And I’m not known for being tolerant of idiots to begin with.

So we got to said sports bar, which VERY sensibly had signs all over it banning those SantaCon dipshits from entering, sat down, ordered food and drink, and proceeded to have a proper manly bull-session. All was, more or less, well and good with the world.

And then the “football” came on.

None of us stuck around to watch what actually happened. I sure as hell couldn’t be arsed. But apparently the game ended in a 0-0 tie.

And that is precisely why I hate European football, or soccer, or whatever you want to call it.

Yes, playing it properly requires tremendous athleticism- in that the players have to be able to run up and down a field for 90 minutes and therefore have to be in damned good shape.

And yes, there is quite a bit of skill required to pass the ball back and forth across the field with just one’s feet. I get that. There is a reason why some of the world’s most skilled and graceful MMA fighters also happen to be excellent football players.

But, I’m sorry, I simply cannot take a sport seriously when it involves two teams of 11 men running back and forth across a field for ninety minutes, and then they happily walk away with a 0-0 tie.

If I wanted to watch a mind-numbingly boring, pointless, utterly useless waste of time for 90 minutes, I’d go watch a game of golf.

And that is before we get to the thing that I hate the most about football: the diving.

I mean, come on, seriously, WTF IS THIS SHIT?!?!

Say what you will about American football, or “gridiron” as the rest of the world calls it. Criticise it all you like about the fact that it consists of a large number of overfed lummoxes stampeding around clad in Kevlar body armour and stopping for tea breaks on the pitch every three minutes.

(Yes, I am perfectly well aware that expressing these sentiments in the American South is legitimate grounds for being shot, and that any halfway decent jury will readily acquit the defendant of Murder-One on the basis of the argument that “he needed killin’ for bein’ a dumbass”.)

At least in gridiron, people actually have to score, and tackles are properly brutal. I may not understand the first damned thing about it, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a proper man’s game.

Certainly much more so than football, anyway.