Did these sports not originate in the US or Canada? At the very least they were popularised there.
I do think the differences in sport reflect the philosophy of the country they are played in. I can’t quite put my finger on the philosophy of why Communist countries embrace sports such as a gymnastics but maybe American sports tap into the idea of freedom from too many regulations somehow. European sports can be a more more rigid. Like the difference between field hockey (popular in parts of Europe, Australia and Asia) and ice hockey (North America). Field hockey has lots of annoying little rules such as only being able to use one side of the stick. Ice hockey is a more liberal game in its rules.
The other interesting thing about American sports compared to European sports is the way they are run and structured. This Atlantic article puts it better than I could:
America’s more capitalist sports fans commonly acknowledge that their country’s most popular sports, like the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, have several rules that would please a Scandinavian social democrat. Salary caps and luxury taxes limit how much each team can spend on players, punish those that over-spend, and close the gap between rich and poor teams. In both sports, the top draft picks typically go to the worst-performing squads from the previous year. Revenue sharing redistributes wealth among the rich and poor teams. Overall, success is punished by design, misfortune is rewarded by design, and the power of wealth is circumscribed with spending caps.
It’s a different story across the Atlantic … There are few salary-cap rules, so a handful of rich teams tend to dominate annually. When a soccer team performs poorly, it’s not rewarded with a high draft pick. Instead the club is relegated to a less competitive league, a mighty blow to their revenue. Meanwhile the most successful teams from lower divisions are promoted to more competitive leagues where they can earn even more money.
I don’t think you are sufficiently familiar with the rules of ice hockey if you think it’s more liberal. It has quite a great many rules. The fact it doesn’t have that specific rule scarcely detracts from its numerous other rules for which field hockey lacks an equivalent. Hell, just the rules concerning use and nature of equipment would take me an hour to explain. An obvious counterexample would be offsides and icing rules, which add both rule and tactical complexity to ice hockey, and for which there is no equivalent at all in field hockey. (There used to be, but they got rid of the offsides rule.)
Again, I just don’t get the notion sports here are “less complex.” They simply are not; hockey is no less complex a sport than field hockey (and of course ice hockey is immensely popular outside the USA/Canada and is played the same way) football is no less complex than rugby, and in the case of truly global sports like baseball, soccer and basketball, it’s the same sport; Americans don’t simplify them.
As to the issue of league structure, there are a variety of historical reasons why North American sports don’t have relegation, but that doesn’t go to the complexity of the sport itself.
You’re right, I’m not sufficiently familiar with the rules of ice hockey (nor field hockey to be honest). I know ice hockey was originated in Canada although I’m not sure if that’s meaningful. I don’t think the fact that people play baseball and basketball elsewhere in the world has any bearing whatsoever to what I’m trying to say. It’s hard to put it into words but American sports just appear to be less challenging. I’m not sure if they really are but that’s the impression they give. Oval circuits to race around, big pockets to pot the balls into, huge gloves to catch with, and rules that allow participants to score a lot rather than scores being precious and difficult.
I will say, as a fan of cricket, that I don’t believe any sport I’m aware of is more complex, subtle and demanding. So much so it’s in this odd situation where it’s ridiculously adored where it’s played and virtually nowhere everywhere else. But I admit bias there - though I love it because of its complexity. A sport which is like a fine wine. And perversely, it is the highest scoring game of the lot.
I don’t think it was the exposure to GOOD soccer that made the difference. It was the exposure to soccer, period.
Even had it just been fair-to-middling MLS soccer, that would have been an absolutely huge change from when I was a kid (I’m 47). I mean, growing up it was literally football, baseball and basketball, with NHL hockey showing up on ESPN when I was about 13 or 14. The NASL was pretty much dead by the time I was watching sports on my own.
I mean, I knew soccer existed my whole life; I had friends who were very big into it- they played high school and club soccer and did their best to follow the foreign leagues, but it was mostly via newspaper, magazines, etc…
That’s why I think that it wasn’t so much the contrast of real professional soccer vs. lame soccer, but rather the presence of ANY soccer outside of watching other kids play that made the difference, at least in the mid-late 1990s.
Nowadays, I think having the major pro leagues on in some capacity helps people realize why soccer is even better than they might have thought, but I think at first, it was the mere presence of soccer that tipped the scales, so to speak.
If you have only a nodding familiarity with a sport, it’s easy to miss the subtle complexities apparent to a fan. I intellectually know soccer is complex and strategic, but it looks to me like “kick a ball around at random, until you get a chance to kick it at a goal”. That’s because I’m not versed in the game. Novelty Bobble and I had a discussion upthread about the differences between cricket and baseball, and how they are equally complex, albeit in different ways. (For example, I could counter your comment about baseball fielders’ huge gloves by pointing out cricket batsmen’s huge bats.)
Why watch ‘bad soccer’? The US surely didn’t. As you pointed out NASL was a soccer league which existed and was on TV, but it was like 3 great teams and the rest were terrible.
And soccer didn’t explode in terms of viewership or in the conversation until European soccer became more accessable. MLS started in 1996 and was not good in the beginning and ended up almost dying in 2001 (it actually did basically fold for one day). It also had terrible attendance until the 2010s. A sea change happened in the 2010s. I grew up playing soccer in the late 80s/90s. Very few of my fellow rec league teammates even follow soccer, even though there was fair to middling MLS on TV (our youth teams even attended a few Metrostars games in Giants Stadium).
Thankfully MLS has grown by leaps and bounds. But it was undoubtedly helped by greater World Cup and European league accessibility.
The point there though is that the runs are just one of the elements of “scoring” in cricket. In test cricket the number of runs you score is almost irrelevant seeing as you can only win if you take all 20 wickets of the opposition. Viewed in that way, The wickets become the true scoring element of the game and you can only have a maximum of 40 wickets falling which might be over the course of five days and 30+ hours of play.
I reckon Rugby and American Football are much more similar.
American Football came about as an improvement and revision of the rules of Rugby:
The sport of American football itself was relatively new in 1892. Its roots stemmed from two sports, soccer and rugby, which had enjoyed long-time popularity in many nations of the world. On November 6, 1869, Rutgers and Princeton played what was billed as the first college football game. However, it wasn’t until the 1880s that a great rugby player from Yale, Walter Camp, pioneered rules changes that slowly transformed rugby into the new game of American Football.
Hmm, maybe. But I’d say that the element that makes gridiron football significantly different from its parent sport of rugby, is the forward pass. That adds levels of strategy and tactics to both the offense and defense that rugby doesn’t have. On the other hand, rugby has a more complex kicking game than American football.
It still seems to me that baseball/cricket are closer than gridiron/rugby, but that’s not an opinion I can defend vociferously.
As someone who grew up in the UK playing schoolboy rugby, whose brother was a semi-pro flyhalf for five years, and who has been watching American football for the last 25 years, I think I’m pretty well qualified to discuss the differences, and you’re completely wrong.
Rugby is a complicated sport. But American football is twice as complicated. First, rugby has limited substitutions and squads; American football allows unlimited substitutions, and at the professional level there are effectively three different teams for the three phases (offense, defense, special teams). Every position group is subject to its own rules, both before and after the whistle. Everything is based on set pieces which the teams must memorize, versus rugby which only has set pieces on stoppages. There are seven referees, not three. (Some) players are permitted to have headset communication with the coaches. The field has ten times as many markings, and they are part of the game, not stuff left over from dual-use football pitches.
I’m really not sure what you were getting at when you said the way the score is counted in American football is simpler. It has exactly the same scoring system as rugby: three points for a goal, seven points for a converted try/touchdown. The only difference is that the kick after is worth two points in rugby (union) and one in American football.
The only way you can think American football is “simple” is if you watch it without any real idea of what’s going on. In a vacuum, it appears to be ten guys running into each other while twelve other guys run up the field, but everyone is running to a specific place for a specific reason.