I was dimly aware that the US got knocked out of the World Cup yesterday. Oh, well. Don’t really care, like most of my fellow Americans. Why?

In the U.S., soccer is for kids. Over here soccer means orange slices at halftime and colorful beribboned scrunchies on golden ponytails. The attempts to build up a pro soccer league have been hampered by the fact that in the U.S., talented soccer players go on to play football, basketball, and baseball teams, which have a higher profile and better funding at the college level. Any would-be goalkeepers are playing shortstop. Anybody with good feet is a running back. So pro soccer players in the US are B-list athletes, and that makes the game boring. America hasn’t had a David Beckham because instead we have Magic Johnson, Joe Montana, Willie Mays, and Brian Leetch.

Soccer is also generally thought of in America as a sport for crybabies, masochists, and psychotic knife-wielding Scottish people. (Thank you, Saturday Night Live.) And the reputation isn’t undeserved; people routinely shank each other over the outcome of fútbol matches in Latin America, and even those oh-so-civilized European fans frequently come up in the news after beating each other up in bars. Americans get spirited about sports and have refined trash-talking to an art form, but with the exception of certain parts of Boston and Chicago, fistfighting is frowned on, and the idiots who trash their city’s downtown after winning a championship tend to be gangbangers looking for an excuse, not sports fans.

And then there’s the players! Professional soccer players must spend half of their training time on the set of a Mexican télenovela. If you can’t fall down, scream, cry, hug your legs, and roll around and whine begging for a penalty. When American teams do this, even the Wall Street Journal makes fun of them. American sports fans are merciless when it comes to crybabies. Whine, and your opponents will mock you, and your fans will tell you to suck it up or suffer the consequences.

Probably the biggest thing to overcome is that soccer lives in the stone age when it comes to technology. Videography at the World Cup, to use the technical term, looks like ca-ca. The NFL provides lush HD coverage, cool animations, computer graphics to help demonstrate how a previous play went, and flying overhead cams. This stuff counts, and the austere, unpolished pitches on ESPN3 don’t impress eyes used to some flair. Even basketball uses several cameras, including Steadicams and rim cams. A world cup match uses film techniques that the NBA abandoned in the 1980′s, and the commentators usually sound like two bored British guys. Oh, wait.

The Super Bowl, the crowning glory of American sporting events, provides a lush mythology complete with commercials, cheerleaders, halftime shows, and special effects at the end of the game. The World Cup offered us . . . the vuvuzela, a device that makes a sound similar to if you fitted a cat’s rear end with an air compressor and blew the air backwards through its digestive system.

The biggest piece of missing tech from pro soccer is use of sensors and video cameras to compensate for the fact that referees seem too busy arguing with crybaby players to pay attention to what happens in the match. As I type this, England is losing to Germany, likely because of the damage done to their morale when referees failed to note a ball that landed a full two feet behind Germany’s goal line. The impact of bad calls seems to be massive on players; with that much at stake, is it that difficult to do what the NHL did and install some frakkin’ sensors? Would it really destroy the game to introduce video review of controversial calls? A soccer fan told me that doing this destroys the “human element” of the game and lessens the excitement. I told him he was a masochist.

They keep saying soccer will catch on in the U.S., but I think it may have missed the boat. Even ol’ Becks couldn’t get people in LA to care, and he was supposed to be the Great British Hope for MLS. As long as scores are low, players are second-rate, officiating is questionable, and tech is outdated, the fans won’t come around. Could it change? Maybe, but not without pretty substantial shifts in culture. Until high school and college soccer gets as much attention and funding as football, the good athletes and coaches will continue to drift away to more exotic and lucrative grounds. In the meantime, all you soccer fans keep nursing those ulcers. I’ll be over here waiting to high-five someone when football season starts.