Outrageous

I’ll never forget the buildup to Chipotle’s first restaurant in London. I was studying there at the time and the “COMING SOON” signage on Charing Cross Road would hit hard around lunchtime on a Saturday afternoon. A cohort of Americans would stand outside the scaffolding and strain to see inside the darkened edifice for any signs of that spar, industrial interior design coming together. It’s hard to tell how much progress is being made when the piping is always exposed.  

“Variety is the spice of life,” someone once said before doing something obviously stupid and dangerous. But with danger and stupidity comes ingenuity and joy, and that’s the common thread that connects the majority of these bastardized forms of soccer. Here are 10 variants of the beautiful game that are strangely captivating.  

10 Soccer Variations You Should Try Before Death Comes For You

#1. Eisfussball

Women’s soccer is a massive sport these days, drawing more than 1.1 billion viewers to the 2019 Women’s World Cup. Leagues across the planet are growing steadily and women’s footballers are becoming household names throughout the U.S. and Europe. 

It is a new decade and soccer players are wasting no time getting their highlights. We are just two weeks in and we may already have our flashiest PK of the year.

A foul in any sport is almost always detrimental to the team that committed the infraction. In soccer, a single foul can decide the outcome of a match. Mexico can tell you all about it after the infamous Arjen Robben flop at the 2014 World Cup.

Everyone’s got at least one — one memory from playing soccer they just can’t get out of their head, one moment in time they regularly ruminate over years after the fact. 

There are bad calls in every match and then there are the incidents that do not fade from memory. Everyone who has played the game for any length of time has at least one moment of madness from a ref they’ll never forget.

So we at The18 have compiled a list of the worst officiating decisions we’ve ever seen, to let you know you are not alone in your constant chewing over that one call so many years ago. 

Major League Soccer is trying to become a big player in the world of eSports. The Philadelphia Union aren’t helping much right now.

We all get creeped out from time to time when we go to Google to search for something and after three letters it already knows you’re wondering “how fast is mbappe” or “why is my poop green.” 

But sometimes we get creeped out by what others are searching for, and as it turns out, soccer fans are searching for some fucked up shit. 

Nearly every FIFA video game player can recall one moment they wanted to rip their hair out and throw the controller out the window. The reasonings may differ, but the majority of the time it’s because of the most blasphemous and ridiculous spell of play that leads to conceding.

The majority of these instances are defended with “that would never happen in a real game” or “a real life player would never make that mistake.”

Pelé’s always been everywhere. As a player, he appeared at four World Cups spanning three different continents, his Santos side traveled around the world like the Harlem Globetrotters and he even ventured into the backwoods of American soccer with the New York Cosmos. 

But he truly achieved an omnipresence after retiring and transitioning into life as the OG Cristiano Ronaldo, hawking goods and services like a door-to-door salesman while collecting honorary degrees for his contributions to the bicycle kick sciences.