JLS: My personal take on what separates soccer-fans from soccer-haters is whether a person likes control and structure or is more comfortable with spontaneity and creativity. We gotta have timeouts every 5 minutes so coaches can scream and preen and pretend to have some to have some impact on the outcome, just like a Dilbert manager.

JLS, I usually find your comments pretty insightful, and I find the rest of this letter pretty insightful, but I think you're way off on this point.

This is the U.S. soccer fan's explanation for why Americans who don't like soccer don't like it. I don't think it's anything more than a straw man. Have you ever heard anyone say anything like, "I don't like it because there are no timeouts"? Or, "I like football/basketball because of all those stoppages in play." Most people -- all people -- I've ever talked to or read or heard from say they like basketball and football in spite of all the timeouts and stoppages. Look at the favorable response Americans had to Olympic hockey's quick face-off rule, which the NHL has now adopted.

I believe the main reason Americans who don't like soccer don't like it is that there aren't enough scoring opportunities. This is usually expressed as "There isn't enough scoring," or "Another 1-0 game. BO-ring." But I don't think that's quite it. A lot of people who can't stand soccer enjoy a crisply played 1-0 hockey or baseball game. What's missing in soccer is the chances. There might be 30 decent and 15 great scoring chances in a 1-0 hockey game. In baseball, every pitch is a scoring chance.

In soccer, the scoring chances are much more rare, a few a game. The nature of the field means that unless your shot is deflected and/or on goal, it's going out of bounds and the other team gets it. One shot and you're done. Compare that to the buzzing nature of a hockey scoring chance, where the offense might be threatening for minutes at a time. Also, the stringent offside rules -- way too favorable for the defense, in my opinion -- kills a lot of scoring chances before they can even get started.

Basically, I don't think the problem for U.S. non-fans is the 1-0 games, per se. It's the fact that a 6-5 game is unthinkable at the highest levels. And forget about 16-15, which is possible at the highest level in baseball.

But I know it's not the old phony "Americans don't like it when there aren't timeouts" line. The only Americans who feel that way are TV executives, a very small demographic.

I should mention that I'm talking about American non-soccer fans who have actually watched soccer, given it a chance. I'm not talking about people who just don't know it, don't understand it, have never watched it, and don't plan to.

I have no idea how large a percentage of non-fans that group is, but I suspect it's much smaller than soccer fans believe.

Even though, as I've said, I'm enjoying this World Cup and I've come to appreciate soccer in some ways as I've gotten older, I still find the single most annoying thing about soccer is the insistence by its fans, or at least its American fans, that if you don't like the game, you must not understand it, as though it were impossible to watch the game, learn about it, understand it, and just not enjoy it.

haggismold: There aren't many scoring opportunities in a soccer match. Well, possibly. If you take the "shots on goal" stat as something that could at least plausibly have gone in the net, then you'll find that's open to debate ...

At time of writing, through the Tunisia - Saudi Arabia match, there have been 16 games with a total of 156 shots on goal. That's an average of 9.75 per game, but more pertinently the median is 9, which of course means that 8 matches have had 9 or more

If we're going to take "shots on goal" as scoring opportunities because they could plausibly have gone in the net, than for hockey the average per game is 60. That's the figure for this regular season.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's useful to say shot on goal = scoring chance. In both sports, there are plenty of shots on goal that are easy saves for the goalie, and some scoring chances that don't result in shots on goal. Shots that just miss or hit the post or crossbar. But if you want to look at shots, there's roughly one per minute in hockey, about 10 times the rate of the current World Cup.