Spacetime Soccer, known outside the United States as '4D Football' is a now-defunct sport. Infamous for referee decisions hinging on inconsistent definitions of simultaneity, it is also known for the disappearance of many top players during... [more]
This comic proposes Spacetime Soccer, a sport consisting of a "regular" soccer field with a gravitational well in the center of it. This comic was likely published in relation to the 2022 FIFA World Cup which, due to numerous controversies surrounding policies and conditions in the host country, Qatar, was prevalent in the 2022 news cycle for weeks.
Judging by the size of the blackest part of the indentation, presuming that indicates the event horizon of a black hole, the radius of its event horizon would be approximately 9.6 meters and the singularity's mass would be around 6.5×1027 kilograms, or more than 1082 times the mass of the Earth [1].
Not only would it be impossible for human players to travel through more than three spatial dimensions at will, it would also be very difficult to keep track of score and rules such as offsides.
Offside is a rule in soccer that applies to players who are in certain positions relative to the boundaries of the pitch, the ball and the second-last opponent on the opposing team. Players in such positions are eligible for being judged guilty of an offside offence if they become involved in the ongoing play before rectifying their status. It is of special importance to know the different players' positions at the exact moment the ball gets passed, rather than when the passed ball may be received or the offside player is otherwise considered active. However, in relativistic spacetime, there is no universal definition of an exact moment beyond a single point, as time may run at different speeds for multiple observers in varying situations (where they are moving relative to each other, are influenced by differing local gravity or – as seems very likely in this example – both). An additional joke is that even in regular soccer, the offside rule is notoriously difficult to fully understand (or explain to someone).
The title text is written in the style of the beginning to a Wikipedia article on the topic. It alludes to the fact that most countries in the world refer to the sport with that particular obscure offside rule as football (or some translation thereof, like fútbol or Fußball) while the USA, Canada, Ireland, Japan and Australia all tend to call it soccer, which comes from the British shortening of "association football", because they already used the name "football" for gridiron football, Gaelic football or Australian football (which share a common ancestry, along with "rugby football", hence the name).
A Spacetime Soccer field can be found in 2765: Escape Speed.