Too late! we’re debatin’ it now, oh yeah. 
It defends fans of football. That’s not the same thing. We can have an honest, fun discussion about video games without necessarily needing to feel guilty about how shitty EA’s labor practices are.
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It was intentional. It’s the same kind of fun when making it, just from the other side of the coin.
That’s why I said “precipitated” instead of “caused”. 
Few accidents have a single cause. Preferring a soccer match over paying attention to the controls is however a fairly important factor.
You don’t have to go too far, actually. I went from memory, didn’t even have to google around much. If you want more, go for various hooligans-related incidents.
Show me a chess-related hooliganism case. Show me a mob marching through the city, overthrowing black (or white) cars, and chanting “Kasparov! Kasparov!”.
Then the sports should stop dressing themselves up as Something Of High Importance, and retreat to dedicated channels. Deal?
Proost.
If chess was as popular as football, I could see it happening.
Some people are tribalistic jerks. Popular fervor gives them an excuse to act on that. I’m not sure that the specific source of the fervor matters so much.
Cf. hockey, where the rioting is much less common, per capita. (And it is as annoying in the media as soccer.) Soccer has something weird in it.
Yes - but then why there is not even a tiny niche subculture of chess hooligans? Or golf hooligans?
I always remember that it rhymes with the first name of Joost Swarte.
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What planet do you live on? Do they not have Google, yet???!?
http://www.newsday.com/sports/library-checks-chess-hooligans-1.263436
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Football is just an excuse. Hooligans will find another excuse if football, or any other sports, didn’t exist.
Because football was everywhere when the hooligans got started.
I spent 2000-2002 working at Carlisle United keeping these arseholes out of the ground, although the worst I had to deal with was someone shouting racist abuse at an opposition player.
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I guess so… 
Yes, except that they don’t need defending. They are in the majority. Football is the most popular professional sport in the United States. Randall Munroe is American, presumably addressing other Americans.
If you buy EA games, you are, in fact, indirectly supporting their shitty policies. I’m not really condemning you (big corporations are all somewhat evil), but that is what’s happening. For some people this may be reason enough not to buy/play those games. Similarly, people being vocal about not liking football may have objections concerning the NFL.
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“Defending” is probably the wrong word. Football fans are the majority in the US, but they’re unlikely to be the majority in xkcd’s readership, which is mostly nerds. And, really, this is an important social lesson for nerds in general (myself included): yeah, other people are obsessed with weird shit, but so are you, so do unto others and don’t judge them.
Randal referenced football because it’s popular and (at the time) topical, but I think the lesson is much broader than that. Judging all sports fans because hooligans exist is like judging all Star Wars fans because Jabba/Leia slashfic writers exist.
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That part’s fine. It’s the insistence that we’re snobs if we decline to participate in the Superbowl festivities that bothers me.
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You’re not a snob if you don’t participate, you’re a snob if you’re, y’know, a snob about it. Skipping the Super Bowl party = okay, sneering at everyone who dares mention it and bitching loudly about stupid meathead sheeple = not okay. (The spectrum between is left as an exercise to the reader.)
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I’ve had years of experiences of being publicly insulted and humiliated for my failure to properly celebrate football games, and the handful of tweets I saw on Superbowl Sunday mocking the Superbowl actually made me feel better. I’m disappointed in XKCD joining the regular annual pile-on, arguing that we’re bad people for failing to participate in football rituals. That was the point of the cartoon – ‘Listening! Hooray for friendship!’
As I said, Munroe seems to be in a bubble where sports fans aren’t a majority and aren’t obnoxiously overbearing. Most of us aren’t in that position.
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THAT.
Plus the exclusion/loneliness factor.
I didn’t really like the implication from Munroe (and here also, to be honest) that you can’t like sports and be a nerd.
I thought it was incredibly patronizing and based on a false dichotomy. Funny that he seems to have upset both people who like and dislike sports with it.
Anecdotally, I find the overbearing sports-fan who loves ‘bants’ to be as rare a beast as the self-righteous vegan I hear people complaining about. But YMMV - the only sporting websites I interact with regularly are self-effacing English cricket ones. 
That said, not being into soccer wasn’t a good thing at school, I guess.
I’m an engineer, in Seattle. There are a lot of nerdy football fans here.
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I don’t know if this is actually true (based on my experience, many nerds tend to enjoy football/sports in general), but it’s probably safe to assume that’s what Munroe thinks.
The trouble is that even copious application of The Golden Rule doesn’t change reality. It’s kind of wrongheaded to criticize nerds for speaking out against football, considering that (in the US, at least) you’re way more likely to find people speaking out against science/math/art/literature, etc. Widespread anti-intellectualism actually has serious consequences, while anti-football…uh…ism really doesn’t matter.
I agree that judging people based on tastes is pretty dumb; it’s just that football (or sports in general) doesn’t seem like a very good way to illustrate the problem.
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Hmm. Maybe we differ greatly in age or geographic background or something, and it might be that “nerd” means a very different thing than it used to mean when I was a kid. I’ve never known many people who were either self-identified nerds or were simply called nerds by other people, who fell into the sports-fan category.
In fact, it was often the sports fans who called us nerds.
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I dunno man, that could be be pretty fucking Metal.
You never met any Strat-O-Matic Baseball enthusiasts, I take it.
