BLIND SOCCER

Yep.

It’s a thing. And they play it at the Paralympic games.

I’d like to start this post by saying that I am an avid soccer fan who played the sport for a decade of my life. I absolutely love the sport at it’s purest state. Some of you are going to rail on me here, but soccer is becoming a sport I don’t want to watch anymore because of the sheer ridiculousness of “cheating” or “faking”. It makes me sick about the complaining that goes on in soccer today.

So, how do you make the game fair? Let those who are legally blind play the game!

These dudes are legitimately blind and they dribble the ball around and have a feel for the field, with their heightened sense of sound, with skills that surpass some professional soccer players with sight. Never would I make fun of blind people, so I am going to make fun of soccer players who fake things on the pitch in order to get their way…*cough* the entire Spanish National team *cough*. Especially Fernando Torres in this clip.

I mean, look at that diving form!

Hopefully you get the irony behind this photo

Now, back to “blind soccer”.

It’s really called Paralympic association football and only the impaired can play the game. The rules used in the game are those equal to ‘FIFA’, but the difference is, obviously from the video, you play on a smaller pitch with either 5 or 7 players per team, the seven-player-team consisting of players with cerebral palsy  These games are also genuinely called 5-a-side and 7-a-side football.

I’d like to say that the system in which the ‘divisions’ or ‘conferences’ are split up might be more fair than any sport in the world and the playoff system makes sense as well. Here’s to 2015 Bud Selig. Essentially they break up conferences into the magnitude of how impaired each player is. It’s simple, fair, and efficient.

The first organized event for ‘blind soccer’ was apparently held in 1978 and was added as an official Paralympic game in the 1984 summer olympics.

To add some final thoughts about the sport after you now have been so elegantly exposed to its rules and history, I’d just like to say the game would be way more entertaining if the referees were also blind. Maybe Roger Goodell, Lance Easly, and the NFL crews can lend a hand.

ZING!