Better hot dogs though.
Agreed. But if I’m not mistaken many fervent fans of the sport who have played themselves and post here don’t speak English as their mother tongue and thus quite often lack the appropriate vocabulary to talk about the intricacies you mentioned without having to rely on writing verbosely. Try to explain the more complicated conceptions in American football in Spanish, French or German (or whatever secondary language you have learned at school) and see for yourself.
If I wanted to talk about tactics and their training that involved … well, positional play, I could refer to “Schattenspiele” though I have no idea if “shadow play” was the correct term in English; of course, I can explain that it’s a kind of training that deals with the problem that a player who wants to have the ball needs to (re)position himself to leave the “shadow” of an opposing player, otherwise he either won’t be seen by the player who has the ball or makes a direct pass too risky. All players on the field need to learn constant repositioning to stay as shortly as possible in a defender’s shadow. (First step)
Then they need to find not just a free position (this is pretty simple and usually made easier by a defending team that doesn’t rely on full court pressing but zonal marking as long as the free position is harmless) but a position that allows them to either support the defence or the offence or both and their positioning should be ideal for direct passes or passes into a free space that either leads to a position to setup some play or is already a free lane towards the opponent’s goal. (Second step)
Then the players learn to do this repositioning with their partners on the field (the defensive and offensive players on each wing, for example) and they add tactics to confuse the opponents (crossing) and/or shift their positions to create space in the middle. (Third step)
Next, they learn to deal with the movements of the whole team while in attack or defence (Fourth step) and with the mobility of players who are allowed more freedom than set players and can be found everywhere but are most of the time somewhere inbetween the lines, trying to be free agents to create a play (Germany’s Özil, for example) or destroy one (Portugal’s Pepe) (Fifth step).
Perfect positioning is tactics, not strategy but the respective strategy devised by the coaches changes the positional play fundamentally. When Spain played its 4-2-3-1 shape against Switzerland’s 4-4-2 they were not just unlucky to not score, they were also badly positioned quite often and therefore failed to exploit the opening spaces far too often to have a high enough number of first class chances to score with reasonable certainty.
A football fan won’t miss it when one player failed to step three metres forward in one situation while another narrowed the field too much by cutting towards the middle instead of going vertical – but I don’t get the impression that you see it; it might indeed just look like “left-right” to you and so you miss at least some of the “intricacies” of the sport played on an international level.
The side zonalmarking has already been mentioned often; if you are interested in football tactics and why matches you are interested in played out a certain way, this is a good starting point. And if you want to know more about some developments in football (for example why we abandoned the sweeper and why he might come back), you can also try Jonathan Wilson at the Guardian.
But I have already said it in some other thread: talking about superiority of one sport over others is useless. And while you might not understand how so many people enjoy football, doesn’t change the simple fact that they do. This makes football a spectator’s sport per definition. And the numbers make it the most successful one world-wide.
But you don’t understand. “American” Football is just better.
I see more people flat-out saying that soccer is superior (obviously not including wintertimes’s excellent post; thanks!) than I see people saying American football is superior.
I have long maintained that there is more strategy in American football, and when I see excellent posts like wintertime’s I grow more and more confident of this fact. All that positioning stuff is in full force in American football, be it receivers trying to shed press coverage or the offensive and defensive lines going to town on each other, and every other aspect of soccer strategy is also mirrored in after-the-snap on-the-fly strategic decsion-making. They are roughly equivalent in every respect, but then American football brings a thousand-play playbook to the table, and soccer has nothing to compare with that. It is so clearly and obviously an objective fact that American football has more strategy than soccer that I continue to be astonished that anyone would argue differently.
The disconnect is that having more strategy isn’t a sign of superiority, and yet soccer fans seem to react like I kicked their dog whenever I bring it up. I can’t help but interpret this reaction as a massive inferiority complex.
This is the kind of question I no doubt ask about soccer all the time. The number of different routes is missing the point much like how only a relative handful of elements make up all the myriad materials known to man.
Most positions have a dozen or so different routes they run, though each different position has a different dozen. Peyton Manning makes a habit of running the “passing tree” with his favorite receivers a couple hours before each game, where they repeatedly run each of 11 different routes they’ll be doing in the game, one after another, to ensure they have precision timing.
The route itself represents very little strategy. Or at least fixed routes do; many (if not most) routes at the NFL level are option routes, where both the QB and his receiver (WR, TE or RB) pick between three different routes (eg: curl/slant/out, or post/go/corner) depending on what several defenders are doing. This is very much like soccer, I would imagine. It has many If…Then conditions, but it may be helpful to just think of it as running to the open spot.
In addition to option routes there are hot reads, where the hot receiver must read the defense after the snap and if they blitz, he must break off his route (whatever it was) and run the equivalent of a short curl, allowing the QB a safe dump-off option if the blitz overruns the OL immediately.
Again, American football is chock full of these on-the-fly conditional tactics that form the foundation of continuous games like soccer, rugby, and hockey.
The difference is in the playbook, which can rightly be described as “an elaborate and systematic plan of action.” That also happens to be the definition of “strategy,” and quite frankly I don’t see a lot of systematic plans of action in the continuous games, because the very nature of them prohibit such plans.
Back to the original question, it’s the route combinations that matter, not the routes themselves. Those combinations – which can go together in an endless variety – are probably half of what make up an offensive playbook. (The other half being blocking schemes, of course.)
I think the lack of blocking in rugby is a more fundamental difference than the other three combined. American football very quickly adopted but didn’t always have the forward pass, and for quite a while all players played both offense and defense, but even then it was still much more closely related to the modern game than to rugby.
Blocking is what fundamentally altered the nature of American football compared to rugby. Imagine if the offensive line weren’t allowed to block the pass rushers.
The lack of holding (apart from when tackling) and hence the inability to form rucks and mauls is an even bigger difference IMHO.
I’m coming from the position that just about every time this is brought up (and it is brought up a LOT) we are told that American Football is “real” football, the men are real men, the sport is so much tougher, the participants are so much better athletes, the sport is so much more intelligent, the sport is for adults and not children etc etc etc.
And many here will agree with you that there is more strategy in American football. The problem is, you don’t just say that. You actively try to argue that there is next to no strategy in soccer and when you do so it rapidly becomes clear that your argument is based purely on ignorance of the sport in question.
Well, once you accept that the portrayal of American Football in this thread and routinely on this forum isn’t just about it being strategically superior (and whether you think it is or isn’t a sign of superiority, the way you have argued makes it seem that you think it is) but about it being superior as a sport and the athletes themselves being superior. It is the sporting equivalent of when Americans tell us that they won World War 2 for us and that if it wasn’t for them we’d be speaking German. It happens a lot, is born out of ignorance and is often said purely to get a rise out of people.
But you always have the problem that it is rare for a play to last longer than about 30 seconds in American Football - and I’d love to see the average, I expect it is down between five and ten seconds. Are you really saying that in that short amount of time an American Football player has to deal with as many variations and on-the-fly decisions as a soccer player, that can go for minutes without a stoppage and even then very few stoppages allow for a complete reset of positions?
I have no idea how many elaborately preplanned plays exist in American football but I am confident that football has just a fraction of them; you’re right: the rules of the game don’t give us the well-defined starting points of action that, among other things, allow “pre-arranged” positioning that make such elaborate planning in American football neccessary and particularly advantageous.
Strategy in football plays a crucial role in four areas: 1. in the adaptation to the rules of football (the coach of Barcelona, Pep Guardiola, was one of the first to really understand the consequences of the slight changes in the off side rules that were established in the past decade; his masterplan of a different team shape, formation and style “exploited” the changes like no other team before); 2. in the development of a particular scheme, a specific kind of football that is going to be played by a team; 3. in planning for the season that involves for the better teams the national league, the national cup, the continental tournaments, intercontinental encounters and tours and, of course, the influences and disturbances caused by the challenges for the players of a club in their national teams.
And 4. in planning beyond the season by establishing or improving the selection, training and general education of talented children, by scouting world-wide to not miss the next Pele, Beckenbauer or Messi, by observing developments in football (world-wide again) to stay competitive on a club-level or as a national team internationally, by developing and adapting intriguing incentives, innovative ideas, surprising tactics and more efficient training methods to gain a lead nationally but more so internationally (the revenues from the tournament “Champions League” alone for Bayern München/Munich were around 70 Mio. Euros this year – a nice incentive to stay in the elite of the European clubs).
Something similar is likely true for American football too, the difference here is the scope in 3 and 4. The European football clubs of the big leagues are long past the point where they can focus on a relatively small region of the world; instead, they have to operate world-wide to stay competitive.
Strategy in football has a lot to do with a plan to deal with the future in a highly competitive, almost limitless and interdependent system.
But it’s also still about the game and how it changes with every new adaptation to someone’s success: a year ago, Barcelona’s gameplay and -plan was the envy of everyone, the holding midfielders, possession and passing flourished; now, Inter Milan has beaten two of the most successful advocates of this style with a highly flexible, very particular defensive mobility that nevertheless focused on well-chosen opportunities to counterattack with enormous speed.
The way Germany played against England in the second half was almost a copycat of Milan’s gameplan: far less well done because the team neither has the talent to apply the principle as good nor has it the endless repetiton in training to work that well together. But the deployment of players was very similar and England fell for it as badly as Bayern Munich did … and now, some of their players deployed the very idea that beat them against another team in another tournament. That’s football.
But no point I mentioned is a unique characteristic of football; and neither the mentioned points nor any other feature of football make it superior to other team sports.
And I am always looking forward to hear from “outsiders” how they perceive the rules and the matches and how the experience compares to their favourite sport. It’s fine to honour the traditions of football by preserving its essence but it’s also neccessary to reflect on changes. Other sports might already have an answer to a problem that blemishes the beauty of the game. Most ideas are bollocks, of course, but this is true for the ones that come from within too.
Anyway, Ellis Dee, you have raised some interest in me to know more about American football. If you can guide me to a competent introduction online, I’d love to know the address.
Honestly, if you want to understand American football, play Madden. It’s how I learned the basics, and the rest came with time.
Soccer, IMO, is more like a series of battles with an overall goal of winning a campaign, or war. The “war” might be the championship of a particular pro league, the Olympic gold medal, or the World Cup; the “battles” are the individual matches that make up the particular soccer “contest” (e.g. the Champions League trophy in UEFA or the Scudetto in Italy Serie A).
In a war, some battles end in a draw. Of course there is strategy utilized to attempt the best result during any particular battle, but that is secondary to the “meta-strategy” (shall we say) employed to win the overall war.
A particular battle may be more important for one combatant than the other, so certain situations might call for a greater immediate expenditure of resources (at the expense of having those resources available later in the war), or taking greater risks of revealing too much information about one’s morale, force strength, or strategies and tactics.
In such a situation, whe, might be quite happy with a draw, because even though it was not a definite victory, it did serve to weaken Combatant A’s overall position in the war.
That’s why a draw in soccer can be so exiting. Depending on the overall situation, it can often be seen as a clear victory or defeat for one team.
I think top-level soccer simply has a different overall philosophy than most American sports (ironically, that includes most American soccer, and therein lies a large part of our indifference to it). If you are willing to (or want to bother to) engage in this philosophy, the richness and excitement of the sport, at least as played at the higher levels, becomes clear.
If you just want a thrill from one isolated game without any need of knowing at least some of the wider context surrounding it, soccer probably isn’t for you.
I love world football. I love American football. I think Rugby, Gaelic, and Australian Rules are interesting but I’m not a big fan. I come by my appreciation and respect for each sport for entirely different reasons.
Projecting your own insecurities is not a valid practice, no matter how mean the big bad American bullies have been in the past.
No I do not. Cite that claim, please. Or is this just more projection?
Again, there is more of that coming from soccer fans. Which is an odd thing for soccer fans to do if they really find such behavior so distasteful.
I’ve seen this kind of resentment expressed before, and I crack up at how assholish the stereotypical “Without us you’d all be speaking German!” American tourist douchebaggery is. (Killing Zoe had a particularly funny example.)
But the flipside of that coin is the equal narcissism of the Europeans, as if they were the only thing that mattered. You guys realize that the European theater was only half of what America was dealing with during WWII, right? It’s like Asia doesn’t even exist.
Russians are particularly sensitive to this, always quick to point out Americans’ eagerness to overcredit themselves for WWII. Who was it who fought back the Japanese, again, while the Russians signed a non-aggression pact with Japan?
The most stark example of this is D-Day. The week of D-Day, Americans launched two roughly equal assault forces: One on the beaches of Normandy, and another in the Pacific. Granted the Pacific invasion met no resistance and thus is forgotten to history, but try to imagine that for a minute. America’s D-Day invasion effort was fully mirrored halfway across the globe with an equally massive amphibious assault at the same time. But Americans take too much credit for WWII. Right.
I appreciate that, though it’s a quite difficult for a non-soccer fan to get any kind of thoughtful response from soccer fans around here. Years of experience have taught me that any suggestion will be met with derisive dismissal and accusations of ignorance unless you first go to extreme lengths to appease their fragile egos.
I know of no such source, sadly. If there were I’d read it myself. Most knowledge of American football comes through osmosis alone. The best analysis of American football strategy I’m aware of is NFL Matchup, a 30-minute weekly show ESPN runs during the regular season.
Here is a short 52-second youtube clip of some random guy videotaping a seemingly random segment of NFL Matchup just to give a feel for what it’s about. Here is a second minute-long segment taped by that same guy, who it appears may have Parkinson’s disease. heh.
I’m not insecure about it at all. I just found the typical American blowhards like you to be boring. The difference between you and me is that I actually like both “Soccer” and “American Football”. I can see the advantages and disadvantages of both and enjoy watching both. In fact of the four main American sports the only one I don’t care for is Basketball.
I don’t have an axe to grind or anything to defend. I just find people like you to be frightfully boring.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12601009&postcount=113
“Where is this kind of strategy in soccer? That’s the point. It’s not that soccer has no strategy. It’s that it has very little strategy compared to American football, or even baseball. But that wasn’t even Sage Rat’s point. His point was that the strategy in soccer doesn’t have much of an impact on the games.”
“Very little strategy” and “doesn’t have much impact on the games”.
The way I see it, it is rare for a discussion regarding American Football on this forum to get an interruption from a Soccer fan going on about how crap American Football is. If a thread about Soccer gets over about a page you’re more-or-less guaranteed to get an American wading in about how it isn’t “real football” and the players are all a bunch of sissies. It gets really boring and really waring.
Europe wasn’t the only theatre for the British either. There was North Africa, the Pacific and also the Indian Ocean (and the land masses surrounding them).
In fact, if I was taking this more seriously I’d find your apparent lack of knowledge that anyone else but the Americans were involved in Asia to not only be quite insulting but also a curious extension of the commonly seen American belief that they alone won Europe for us.
But that would be if I was taking this argument seriously. Frankly it is hard to take you seriously at all as every time you type something you just come across as more arrogant, blinkered and painfully, painfully ignorant.
People like you do, yes.
The way I see it, I am yet to meet or discuss WW2 with an American that actually fought in WW2 that believes that the US alone won the war or implies anything like “without us you’d be speaking German”. They are brave, dignified men. I have, however, met or discussed WW2 with many, many Americans that were born after WW2 that piss all over the dignified stance of those brave American soldiers by arguing the way you have done (and frequently, unfortunately, in even more insulting terms).
I’m guessing you are one of the latter.
And that is the last I am going to say on the matter. This is a thread about fucking football/soccer/whatever.
Thanks for the tips to learn more about American football.
Wintertime, good points well made.
There is surely enough interest to be had from watching any sport played at the highest level and they all have something to offer.
Some are mainly physical, some have a large strategic element. In terms of strategic complexity I’d place American football pretty much at the top of the tree, closely followed by test match cricket. Baseball and football come a bit further down but that positioning doesn’t give any objective measurement of “better”.
FWIW, My personal favorites are football, rugby, cricket, golf, skiing, athletics.