Your Competitor is Not The Enemy

The World Cup is a great event.

It comes every four years, and every four years you forget what it does to a summer. A match in the afternoon. Another in the evening. You can watch closely or leave it running in the background, and it works at both levels of attention. Not many other sports are like that.

Countries you never think about become characters in your July. There are little surprises like how the Congolese national anthem sounds like the soundtrack to a Japanese video game.

And just like every World Cup, the same question inevitably returns: Why isn’t soccer more popular in America?

I’ve never heard anyone give a really good reason for this. It’s strange.

"It’s too low-scoring." If Americans hated low scoring, baseball and hockey wouldn't have a massive following. "It arrived too late." Basketball and hockey both became huge long after soccer was already established here. “There isn’t enough happening.” Baseball proves Americans can tolerate long stretches of waiting.

We know it isn't the game itself. Soccer is the most popular sport on earth for a reason. It is fluid and beautiful. It has almost no breaks in play. Goals are rare but aesthetically pleasing to watch. The world is not wrong about soccer. It is objectively a good game.

Here is my theory. Soccer is a lower-body sport, and America is an upper-body culture. The culture is fixated on shoulders, arms, and torso, and the fixation is invisible to us for the same reason you cannot hear your own accent.

Take American sports for example, they are all built around the explosion of the torso . Basketball, Football, Baseball, Hockey, in all of these sports the lower body serves the upper body. The kicker is the most soccer-like player on a football field, and he's the one nobody respects.

Soccer inverts the entire arrangement. The upper body exists purely in service to the lower body. Twenty-two men agree not to use their hands. To an American eye, there is something unnatural about it, like watching amputees chase a ball across an enormous field. It is bizarre on some fundamental level. Because of the upper body bias.

But it runs deeper than sports.

Watch how Americans walk. We lead with the chest, shoulders heavy, arms swinging wide. There’s a classic comedy bit about it. Other nationalities walk from the core, or belly-first, or with the hips. If you go on vacation this summer foreign, pay attention on how different nationalities walk. You can identify the Americans from a distance. The gait is the giveaway

How often do you really pay attention to the way people walk? There is is a lot of information in how we walk.

This upper-body bias bleeds directly into fashion. Classic American clothing has always emphasized the shoulders. The denim jacket, the bomber jacket, the varsity jacket, the leather jacket, the military surplus coat, these clothes are designed to widen the shoulders and square the frame. The national silhouette is a V shape.

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"Never skip leg day" is a joke that exists because people reliably skip leg day and just want to upper body bulk. Hollywood understands this. When it needs to build an ideal American male body, it forces actors to transform to inflate the upper body. Even to go so far as to make actors do steroids to achieve a gigantic upper body in superhero and action movies.

Even boxing is the classic American combat sport for the same reason. The American fighting imagination is built around the punch. It is not built around the high kick of karate or taekwondo. Kickboxing never became truly popular here. Even though kicks are superior distance weapons, you can kick much farther than you can punch.

This upper body bias is all over the culture.

What’s going to happen is what always happens. The World Cup arrives, the ratings spike, someone announces that America is finally becoming a soccer country. For a month, it feels plausible. Then the tournament ends, football season returns, baseball keeps going, basketball waits in the background, and soccer slides back into its usual American place, present, but still outside the center of the culture.

The Social Benefit of Playing Sports

You can usually tell when someone played sports growing up...

Not always. There are obvious exceptions. Some former athletes are idiots. While some people who never played sports are naturally competitive. But as a general rule, lifelong athletes carry a certain competition IQ. You can see it in people who you work with.

Sports teach a kind of practical social intelligence that school rarely focuses on.

In a game, you learn how to compete aggressively without making it personal. You learn how to lose publicly. That is one of the reasons former athletes do better in professional work than people who never played a sport.

But the most important thing a game teaches is bounded conflict.

When the game ends, it’s over. You shake hands. You go home. You do not drive to your opponent’s house, burn it down, and shoot at the first responders.

A competitor is not an enemy. A competitor is a rival in a non-zero-sum game that ultimately improves the environment.

Anatomy of a Competitor

A competitor wants to beat you inside the rules of the game, but they don't want to destroy the game itself. They are a partner in tension. They expose your weaknesses and force adaptation, and make you better.

This is why competition improves entire systems. A great restaurant opens on a street of mediocre ones. The old restaurants need to improve or will go bankrupt. If they go bankrupt, they are replaced by restaurants built to the new standard. If they improve, the whole street eats better. Either way, the neighborhood wins.

Nobody thinks of Starbucks as good coffee. That is because Starbucks already did its job. It arrived in a country of diner coffee, burnt, thin, reheated since morning, and raised the floor of coffee quality. Open a cafe today and your coffee has to beat Starbucks just to exist. The baseline has moved up. Which is one of the reasons why America has developed such a good artisanal coffee culture in the past few decade. A new café now has to beat Starbucks just to exist.

The Anatomy of an Enemy

An enemy is a different thing entirely.

An enemy wants to eliminate you. Your destruction is the prerequisite for his victory. This is the zero-sum world. Against an enemy, you will destroy parts of yourself, your resources, the ground you both stand on, to guarantee his defeat.

Total warfare. Civilians die, businesses close, infrastructure becomes rubble, because both parties are trying to eliminate the other's capacity to exist. In a war, you want him gone forever.

This is why legal business is different than illegal business. The legal one is under a referee, the government. You can take my customers, and force me to improve my product. But you cannot burn down my store and kill my employees. The law keeps rivalry inside the game.

Remove the referee and business becomes war. That is what a mafia is, commerce without a referee. And it’s bad for the environment.

The destruction never stays contained. Businesses stop investing. Workers leave. Property values fall. Every ordinary transaction acquires a security tax. The neighborhood pays for it. The exact inverse of the restaurant street that is improving over time.

Female Competition Turns Personal

The mafia proves that without an institutional referee, rivalry turns into total warfare. But you don't need organized crime to see this mechanic in action, you just have to look at how different genders manage conflict.

"Women fight only to kill." -- Charles Newman

There is an asymmetry in how the sexes handle rivalry, and everyone has seen it even if no one is allowed to say it. Men often tend to separate the competitor from the enemy. For women, the line blurs. The rival and the enemy merge into one type of figure, and the competition becomes a personal one.

Anyone who has watched women fight inside a social group knows this. There is almost no such thing as a neutral competitor. There is the woman inside the circle, and the woman who threatens the circle.

This shows up in politics and in other areas.

No one really knows why this asymmetry exists, but one plausible theory is that male competition is easier to referee because it is overt. It is physical and visible. You can write rules around visible and physical phenomena with rules, contracts, and lawsuits.

Female competition has historically been more covert. Gossip, reputation damage, exclusion, social freezing, alliance-building, subtle humiliation. These are harder to regulate. You cannot write laws forbidding rumors. You cannot always prove when exclusion is the strategy rather than preference.

Female intrasexual competition can be fierce in some ways.

 A 2024 study called “Off with her hair” found that women who scored high in intrasexual competitiveness advised other women to cut off more hair, especially when the other woman had healthy hair and wanted only a small trim. You can see how this degrades the environment, everyone looks worse. That’s the problem with enemy mindset. It’s zero-sum thinking.

Covert competition has no clear start, no clear end, and no obvious referee. That is what makes it structurally closer to warfare than sports. It is not that women literally fight only to kill, it is that a fight without boundaries or a whistle has nowhere else to go.

Jocks vs Nerds Has Turned into Striver vs Non-Striver

Because sports are the ultimate incubator for bounded conflict, they have been entirely recontextualized by the middle and upper income classes. The old twentieth-century school myth was jocks versus nerds. But now sports are no longer the opposite of school. They are part of the same achievement machine.

The new divide is organized ambition versus disengagement. Strivers vs Non-Strivers

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