Do US sports fans ever regret the absence of international competition?

The Game Room
61

Granted that the markets for various teams don’t necessarily follow political borders here, but really, I think that it makes sense that they don’t. With national teams, you have one team for all of Brazil, and then one team for Luxembourg. One’s drawing talent from a much larger pool than the other. Here, on the other hand, teams are wherever there’s enough population to support them: There’s no Wyoming team, because there just aren’t enough people in Wyoming, but there are multiple teams in each sport in California, Texas, or New York, because those places do have enough population to support multiple teams. The end result is that our teams might not represent specific states, but they do all represent roughly the same number of people (except for the Packers, but that’s just because the people of Green Bay are insane about football).

Now, one thing that might be different between US teams and international teams (I don’t know whether this is the case in international sports) is that players are relatively liquid: Teams trade players all the time, so a fellow who used to play for New York might end up playing for San Francisco a year later. Does this happen at all with, say, the World Cup?

62

Players can establish residency (or, in some cases, citizenship) in other countries just to play for their national teams, if they like.

It’s not like the English FA is going to send Michael Owen to the French in exchange for cash or other players or fishing rights in French territorial waters, though.

63

Assuming you’re talking about football, the answer would be: no. Obviously, players can transfer from one team to another, which can be very controversial where it concerns two rival teams. However, a player can generally only play for one national side during his life time (barring the dissolution of that country) - which is the country that he has citizenship in. In the case of dual citizenship, it’s first-come, first-serve: whichever country recruits the player first and has him play for the national team gets to keep him. I believe there may be a way out where people can play for one country’s under-21 team and then play for another country’s regular football team, but that’s about it.

64

I don’t think that’s right. Muzzy Izzet made the England squad (but never appeared in a match) and was later capped for the Turkish national team.

65

While I should have excluded hockey, I think you greatly underestimate basketball and baseball’s reach around the world.

66

I would have let it go because I don’t think it much matters, but since the point keeps being debated and this hasn’t been disputed:

You made those numbers up, and they’re inaccurate. You skipped the French and Italians entirely, and it looks like you’re claiming a maximum of 30 or so foreign players. Even if we’re only using active players like right now, today, the number is double that, easily. In April of 2008, the official NBA number of international players was 76. I seriously doubt it’s gone down since then, so we can conservatively put the number somewhere around 20% of the NBA’s players and be pretty comfortable, I think.

This and your calculation also leaves out a slew of players currently playing elsewhere internationally but who have either played for NBA teams in the past or have been drafted and are expected to play in the future, like Ricky Rubio.

The OP asked “So how do US fans feel about the fact that all of their major sports are of minor interest to the rest of the world,” basketball being one of our major sports. The response was that basketball is played internationally and is not of minor interest in the rest of the world. Are you really disputing that basketball is played internationally?

67

When did I say I was disputing that basketball was played internationally? I don’t know where you got the number 30 from, anyway. I noted that there are probably 20 NBA players from Eastern Europe alone.

In any case, the fact that there are 76 foreign born players in the NBA doesn’t mean basketball is not of minor interest in the rest of the world. It’s the second sport in much of Eastern Europe, and possibly the first team sport in China. Everywhere else it’s a niche sport.

68

The fact is the rest of the world and what they do is generally of minor interest to Americans. We don’t care about international competition, we think soccer is for little kids and girls, the only real football is played by real men in helmets and pads and we don’t understand why the rest of the world so pathetically craves American validation of thier lifestyles.

69

Every 4 years are the FIBA World Basketball Championships. Aside from berating American players if they don’t win, there is very, very little interest in the game. And this has some of the best players in the world, in one of the big 3 sports in the US. Rugby is not going to take off here.

And this is coming from someone that has attended Aussie-rules football matches in person, and would gladly watch rugby on ESPN

70

Aww, what’s wrong – hurt feelings at getting trounced again? :stuck_out_tongue:

In my experience, Hockey is much more popular in the USA than Soccer is.

71

What about the UFC? The current champs include two Americans, a Canadian, and two Brazillians. Seems pretty international to me.

72

Nosed out by 5 turnovers.
U of Ms program is a mess right now. I hope Rich Rod makes it. Frequent coaching changes hurt a program.
I worry about the bowl games. Ohio State is not as good as advertised. Penn State is not that good either. MSU is sliding at the wrong time. Could be ugly.

73

You put it bluntly but I believe it really cuts to the heart of this issue as well.

74

He was joking.

75

I find it of interest that the OP mentions rugby and cricket, two sports that neither the US, nor a number of other nations, have little to no interest in.

Aside from the fact that the US, and other nations, find other sports more of interest to them; I think someone should mention that the US does compete internationally if the sport interests Americans and if they traditionally have some skill at the game. Just for fun, I checked the International Ice Hockey Federation’s web page and I saw the groupings for the 2010 Championships:

There’s the USA, in Group D. And other countries against which the US will play.

The OP has based his proposition on two sports. In the same spirit, I may only offer one sport (ice hockey), but I ask the question: if international competition is so important, then why don’t we see many of the countries he mentioned in his OP in these groupings? The US, and many countries the OP doesn’t mention are here too, but all that the OP mentions (France being the exception) are not in this list.

I would suggest that the answer lies more with whether Australia, Scotland, Ireland, England, New Zealand, Oman, the West Indies, and Pakistan can play ice hockey; than it does with whether these countries like international competition. Similarly, the reason you don’t see the US competing internationally in rugby and cricket competitions is because it doesn’t play these games. It’s as simple as that.

76

The fact that a country fields a team in a given sport does not mean that country participates in it in any meaningful way. The US has a national rugby team, which isn’t very good. Similarly, Italy and France have ice hockey teams, which… aren’t very good.

77

Do we miss it?

No, not really. It’s all well and good for you to get jazzed up about football or rugby. or whatever. And we’ll field a team for World Cup and such things. There are American teams for just about every major international competition. But they don’t really matter that much to us because we’re far more interested in our home town sports and our college alma maters. When the Packers win a game, an entire region of our country celebrates. And when the Yankees lose, a portion of the country laments. We feed our competitive needs very well.

For the limited sports we care about there is extreme coverage in all forms of media. We eat, breathe and bleed college basketball during March Madness. We know every detail about the NFL teams we cheer for. We can tell you the minutiae and stats surrounding the decision to walk Jeter with a man on first and two outs. We dig deep and involve ourselves deeply. We scarcely have time to keep up with the stuff inside NY or LA, let alone the ret of the country. Try expanding that outward and we lose interest. Combine it with a sport that doesn’t interest us very much to begin with… well, we barely give rugby and cricket the time of day. Quite frankly, we can’t be bothered.

Besides, do you really want us showing up and doing the nationalistic ‘U.S.A.’ chants? Really? Take it for what it’s worth. We have tons of national pride. In many respects, it’s scary. Look at us during the Olympics and you’ll see that fervor broadcast out to the world. Our fans flex their cheering muscles and makes rather obnoxious asses of themselves. Most of the time though, we tend to keep it in check and just stick to local sports teams.

If I were you, I’d be glad.

78

I suppose one way of putting it would be, you can’t miss what you never knew.

79

…I - O!

I’ll echo some of the other sentiments already stated here…

  1. We have a ton of sports already. I can watch “my” teams play thursday-sunday in October (pro basketball, high school football, college football, pro football) and spend 12+ hours of my life doing so. During the baseball season, there’s almost a game every night. And it overlaps heavily with basketball season. If I followed a hockey team I’d have less of a social life than I do now.

  2. America is Big. If you are a fan of an east-coast team and they play a game on the west coast, it’s already a pain in the ass. We like our sports to be at predictable times. I know that World Cup fans and cricket fans have to be up at all hours of the nights looking for their games. “Crikey!” No way we’re going to tolerate anything more than a 3-hour delay.

  3. We do already have a TON of internationally-born players in all sports and we love them as our own.

  4. America spends a redonkulous amount of money training its athletes, because there is a redonkulous amount of money paid out by fans. Of our 3 most popular sports (baseball, basketball, football) I can’t imagine other countries being able to support teams of American caliber*. It would be very hard to work up the amount of capital needed to build teams in other countries to compete with us in “our” sports. Even if the capital and the coaching and facilities were provided, would the fans show up to keep it afloat? I doubt it - too much soccer and cricket to support!

*I do not know about the caliber and fan base of Japanese baseball teams. They might be the only ones able to compete on a level playing field with us. While a lot of South American countries produce top-notch ball players, that’s still just raw talent until they come up to get our money-infused training. And while South Americans love their baseball, they just don’t have the cash to throw at it like Americans do.

80

I suspect there’s a number of reasons, which others have already touched on.

The three team sports which have the biggest following among U.S. sports fans (football, basketball, baseball) either (a) do not have meaningful international play, or (b) that international play (basketball) did not, until relatively recently, feature professional players from the U.S.

Even auto racing seems to suffer from this now in the U.S. When I was growing up, big-time auto racing in the US was Indy-car racing. As it was open-wheel racing, there seemed to be a certain amount of cross-pollination beween Indy racing and Formula 1 (I remember when Mario Andretti raced in both series).

But, the combination of NASCAR’s strong marketing, and political infighting among the Indy-car community, has led to NASCAR totally supplanting open-wheel racing in the US (from a visibility / popularity standpoint). Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a Formula 1 race in the U.S. in years…and, not surprisingly, there aren’t many F1 fans in the U.S. anymore.

Americans do get excited about the Olympics…but those events seem to make many Americans into temporary fans of sports that they don’t give a damn about for the other 47 months of the Olympic cycle.

And, as others have said, in the big U.S. sports, there’s so much of it available now (the seasons are so long, there’s so much of it on TV) that sports fans are probably overladed.

I’ve read informed opinions which suggest that the Japanese teams would probably be competitive with U.S. AAA minor-league teams, but I have no idea if that’s an accurate assessment. There are certainly more Japanese players here than ever before, but only a handful have been able to make significant impacts to date (such as Ichiro, Matsui, and Nomo).