Soccer is a game in which everyone does a lot of running around. Twenty-one guys stand around and one guy does a tap dance with the ball.

Murray’s quip is a deliberately reductive, comic caricature of soccer from the perspective of an American sports columnist steeped in faster-scoring U.S. spectator sports. By exaggerating the amount of “running around” and minimizing meaningful action to a single player’s “tap dance,” he highlights two common criticisms: that soccer can appear low-scoring and that much of its drama is positional, anticipatory, and tactical rather than concentrated in frequent discrete plays. The joke also plays on the mismatch between soccer’s continuous flow and an observer’s desire for obvious, repeated climaxes—turning subtle teamwork into the image of many idle bodies orbiting one moment of skill.