Soccer--it's a sport, goddammit!

Major soccer tournaments, they say, are a majestic glue that binds, if only for a month, the palms of bitter enemies as they watch a grand and edifying dissertation in the one true universal language. This European Championships, they say, will be no different.

Bullshit, I say.

It's possible that my essential curmudgeonliness is getting the better of me. After all, I was ripped away from other enthusiasms and into the vortex of soccer by the cyclonic winds whipped up by the 2002 World Cup as a fourteen-year-old.

And I'll admit: the whole geopolitical harmony angle was what did it to me in the first place. It was all in the first result: Senegal 1, France 0. Who could help but revel in the revenge fantasies indulged by this result?

I was hooked--all the sport had to do was reel me in by proving itself watchable. And that it did not with the lyrical displays of that tournament's most accomplished teams--Brazil, Spain, Turkey--that I would later come to appreciate.

The match that opened like a gallows trapdoor the world of soccer was as far as possible from the fluency and harmony soccer tries to cultivate. It was Mexico's violent victory against Croatia in the group stage. It was hideously dramatic and, the impact of Boris Zivkovic's foot on Cuauhtemoc Blanco's testicles also broke ground on a whole new chamber in my heart.

So my love for soccer was born of the same youthful schadenfreude and bloodlust that fueled my childhood obsessions with a succession of violent cartoons, combined with my growing teenage sense that the world was a cruel and unjust place, particularly to the people of the world's Senegals.

But really, few underdogs get their day in soccer--at the World Cup, teams playing their former or current imperial overlords have won only seven games and lost 25. And the record is even less impressive when you remove from the reckoning European countries occupied during World War II and its aftermath by Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States. Then there are only three victories--Argentina over Spain in 1966 and the United States over England in 195o in addition to the Senegal result.

Instead, often, soccer inflames and re-enforces old resentments. The most extreme example is the 1969 Soccer War that broke out between El Salvador and Honduras, essentially, over the result of a World Cup qualifier between the two. But even the most recent European Championships have proven themselves not immune to violence, as the recent arrest of 157 German and Polish hooligans in Klagenfurt, Austria, proves.

And anyway, the heightened emotions associated with soccer lead to resentment. Five years ago, if you had asked an Englishman what he thought of people from Portugal, I have no idea what he would have said. But in the intervening period, Portugal have knocked England out of both the 2004 European Championships and the 2006 World Cup, both in controversial circumstances.

If you asked the same Englishman about Portugal today, he would probably spit out something bitter about playacting and cheating and question the masculinity of Portuguese players like Ronaldo Aveiro and Deco Souza.

Even the seemingly positive and uplifting in soccer often comes to ill purpose. Brazil's 1970 World Cup team is rightly considered the greatest ever to take the field. Its players' names are almost always accompanied by unavoidable saliva as they roll off any soccer fan's tongue--Pele, Rivellino, Tostao, Gerson, Jairzinho, Carlos Alberto. They were charismatic and beautiful to watch, and they played fair.

But their tremendous legacy was tragically politicized, co-opted by the brutal Medici regime in a desperate and successful bid for legitimacy.

So I don't want to hear anymore of this psuedo-profound nonsense about soccer as a unifier or some sort of mystical karmic force.

When an exuberant twinkle of Ronaldinho Moreira's toes leaves a criss-crossed opponent flattened, when a casual swing of Michael Ballack's right foot inexplicably causes the ball to materialize on the chest of a teammate seventy yards away, when a cunning yet imperceptible step to the right by Ruud van Nistelrooy somehow sets him gloriously free of a marker to flick the receive the ball businesslike and flick it into a corner of the goal, that is where you'll find the true worth of soccer.

The rest, I'm afraid, is just the bamboozling of the World Cup's advertisers.