Yeah I actually used to find soccer boring until I started watching it with my son, the sheer skill levels, there’s a lot of strategy involved. Yeah they don’t go into shoes or anything.

But for example, forcing a foul at just the right time, or causing offsides by positioning yourself, etc. those carry some level of strategy, at least how much I can grasp.

But the one common thing with every professional sport is the skill level for that particular skill in the sport is unlike anything we can comprehend.

I remember a friend recalling a professional baseball game he attended, and he described how those guys were warming up, and they were just playing catch to warm up their arms… they were able to throw the ball to within inches of the recipient’s glove every time from hundreds of feet away.

That sort of skill makes it enjoyable to watch human performance levels if you can appreciate how hard that particular skill is, especially if you’ve tried it.

Equivalents in F1 are how a race engineer will tell a driver to slow down by half a second over the course of a full lap to preserve their tires, and they more or less do it.

I like to think of it as the game within the game. There’s “the game” with the set of rules and lines, etc. But then there’s “the actual game”, where you can watch the strategy, the skill, and that’s at a completely different level. Similarly, once you can watch a football/soccer game and appreciate how someone is moving on the field without the ball, then I think you’re just starting to understand the game.

To me, that’s the technical aspects of soccer — watching the strategy play out, aside from where the ball is, or what the score is.