Okay, we get it: skiing and football (or soccer, to our North American friends) don’t have a whole lot in common. One’s an individual sport, expensive and generally catered towards the wealthy. The other is a team endeavor, universal and accessible to anyone with a ball and a place to kick it around.

Nevertheless, it’s World Cup time, and that means our attention is temporarily distracted from snowy slopes, in favor of flat, grassy rectangles. And in the interests of driving clicks to this ski website during World Cup fever, it’s imperative that we find some points of similarity between these two sports.

Skiing and football do have a few things in common, after all. Both have brilliant, iconoclastic, sometimes controversial talents: Christiano Ronaldo and Andri Ragettli seems an obvious comparison, while Candide Thovex has something faintly Messi-like about him. The top tiers of competition are both managed by opaque, unpopular organizations  that get a lot of criticism—even though we end up watching their productions anyway. And, if nothing else, we’ve got this wild video from 2015 thanks to the guys from Real Skifi and their buddies, which opens up entirely new realms in the field of cross-disciplinary sports. I don’t know about you, but the next time I see a ref giving a yellow card, I’m going to imagine him doing it like this.