The Czar is glad Americans are watching the World Cup in such numbers, because since last week the number of people claiming baseball is way more boring than soccer has dropped to nearly nothing. No matter how tiring you feel soccer or baseball is to watch, remember that at least neither sport is as bad as golf.

Czar, I’m trying to do my patriotic duty to like the socialist sport of soccer, but cannot for the life of me understand how the rules work with extra minutes and everything. Can you explain to a worthy sort of person, who is perfectly willing to use the Euro to pay for a small sugar-free drink, how all this works?

Dear Moron,

Yes—the sport of soccer is intensely European to the point of disliking Americans entirely. Don’t laugh: even Kareem Abdul Jabbar agrees. Soccer is, for all intents and purposes, a perfect look at multinational Euro-organization. You have a bunch of men on a team—the number increases the worse you feel you are doing—who mostly run around and kick the ball back here and there. The real work is done by the goalie: he’s like the bureaucrat because he misses nearly everything he’s out there to do, but takes all the credit. The other guys, who like the workers spend most of their time running pointlessly around, get little attention…but they do receive tiny numbers on their uniforms.

Here’s how overtime works. Each game is divided into two 90-minute halves, but the time ticks upward in soccer because they don’t run out of anything since either Germany or the US pays for it all. There is a 15-minute smoke break after the first half because Europeans generally can’t go more than 45 minutes without a cigarette.

At the end of 90 minutes, the game doesn’t stop. The judges add up all the time that is wasted during the game—let’s be honest, that’s pretty much the whole thing—and then add it to the clock. This is why it can take 45 hours to finish anything, again keeping in line with the Eurowork model.

If the score is tied at the end of extra time, extra time is added. Unless there is a second tie, in which case extra extra time is added to the first extra, and if no one scores a goal after this, the decision as to who won the game goes before a 13-member committee made up of unelected officials, each from a different country, who produce a lengthy set of forms to fill out. These forms are partially filled out and then rejected because they weren’t all in different languages…including Welsh, even though there isn’t anyone from Wales on the committee. In the event the forms are correctly filled out, a ten-part regulatory compliance tax is added to the initial form to be paid out by non-member states not presently allied with the IMF. This is why Belgium is involved when they technically have no country and Israel is ignored.

The winner is Germany, because historically that’s the only multi-national contest they tend to succeed at, and the loser will inevitably be Americans because of their aggressive cowboy diplomacy during the Nixon Reagan Bush Bush years. Eisenhower hated soccer. And, not coincidentally, Belgium.