Commentary: Americans, for the most part, see it as 90 minutes of guys in shorts kicking the ball around to no apparent purpose.

You have penciled in on your calendar the weeks of June 12 to July 13, 2014, haven’t you? No? We thought not.

Those are the dates of the soccer World Cup, a sporting event held every four years involving the 32 teams that survive a grueling round of preliminaries featuring hundreds of teams.

It also is that quadrennial period when other nations, most especially those in Europe, ridicule Americans as a bunch of untutored rustics who fail to appreciate the aesthetics and intricacies of what those other nations persist in calling “the beautiful game.”

Americans, for the most part, see it as 90 minutes of guys in shorts kicking the ball around to no apparent purpose, the monotony broken from time to time by a player flinging himself to the turf in the throes of Wagnerian agony only to bounce back up unharmed.

If the teams weren’t named after their countries, most Americans wouldn’t know who they were. This is not stupidity, but lack of attention, because the same couch potatoes can name all teams in the NCAA basketball playoffs and, moreover, will watch each game.

However, an ongoing Associated Press series — the title “The Dirty Game” kind of gives it away — examining the inner workings of soccer shows that, by international standards, the 1919 Chicago Black Sox — figures in the worst U.S. sports scandal — were naive choirboys.

Apparently, soccer in much of the world — Europe, Asia, Africa, to name a few locales — combines the ethics of the Sopranos with the more outrageous excesses of professional wrestling.

According to AP, an 18-month investigation by the European police agency Europol found in that time 380 suspicious matches in Europe and 300 questionable matches elsewhere.

And these were not just some minor league outfits where beer money changes hands, but World Cup qualifiers and Champions League matches, presumably the best of the best.

A Singapore-based crime syndicate seems to be the world leader in fixing matches. One of its members is currently in jail for that particular crime — in Finland.

The governing authorities seem to regard all this cheating with a certain lofty indifference. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing. AP notes, almost in passing, that, “In Italy, match-fixing by itself is not considered a serious crime” — even when you poison your teammates to pull it off.

The goalie for a lower-division team, Cremona, unable or unwilling to enlist teammates as co-conspirators, loaded their water bottles with tranquilizers before a match. Soccer authorities suspected something was amiss when five of the players fell ill and one of them wrecked his car after the match. The goalie was banned from the sport for five years.

Sepp Blatter, the head of the world soccer federation, FIFA, seems like a see-no-evil kind of guy. He said the problems uncovered by Europol have been taken care of.

“Most of the matches which they put in this tray, 600 or 800, already have been analyzed, dealt with and even were at court,” Blatter told AP. You mean he doesn’t know for sure? That’s a discrepancy of 200 potentially crooked games that seemed to have slipped his memory.

He says racism in the sport is a far greater problem than fixed matches. And it’s true. Soccer fans yell all kinds of hideous things at opposing players, especially if they’re African.

Apparently the decorum in the stands matters more than the honesty of the product on the field. Tell us again why it’s called “the beautiful game”?

Dale McFeatters can be reached at McFeattersD@SHNS.com.