Well I thought I had a good point about the popularity of the national team being due to high population density and the chance of everyone getting behind the same side for once, something that’s not such an issue in the US when teams can be the length of England away from their closest team neighbour.
SO SCREW YOU GUYS 
Yeah. Either football will have to displace one of the States’ incumbent sports, which isn’t going to happen, or the rest of the world will have to catch up massively at one of them. Which, again, is not likely. I’m absolutely sure, though, that if the rest of the world really did get good at American football overnight, the USA would bust a nut to beat them at it.
elmwood, you seem to be reading an entirely different thread to me. The only person making anything like the comparisons you describe is Shagnasty, an American, who with not a hint of irony was deriding European sports as “femme”. So who on earth are you arguing with? This isn’t “a bit defensive,” you’re outright seeing things that aren’t there.
The rest of the world got really good at basketball overnight and the American response was a collective, “meh”.
Can I still gloat if we only drew with ye? And a close run draw at that.
I’m fairly certain he meant to type basketball.
Well, some bits of the world got good enough at basketball to pick up the pieces when the American team implodes, which is often, but it’s still pretty much the case that if the USA turns up with a coherent team of its best players, it will beat anyone, and do so handsomely. When the main drama is actually getting players to commit to the team, and the main motivation is the memory of losing games you should’ve won, you can see why the audience would be apathetic.
Yeah. It’s possible that China will some day put together a team that the US can’t beat (or at least can’t usually beat) no matter how hard we try; that’s probably the best bet for an international competition that US fans are actually go crazy over.
Though we seem as a nation to have given up on men’s tennis now that Americans aren’t 2 of the top 5 or so.
That’s true. As I said earlier, I think Americans generally disdain international competition because they (justifiably) assume they’d win anyway.
That’s the thing with peripheral sports like tennis, I guess; as a country you’re good enough at everything that there’s always some sport in which you’re currently dominating the international scene. So fallow patches in sports that aren’t part of what you might call America’s sporting identity can be easily glossed over by switching attention to something else. Failure in basketball, though, yikes. Inquisition time.
The converse happens in the UK, exhibited in our amazing ability to get interested in the shittest sports imaginable, if by some fluke the UK happens to be briefly doing well. Curling is a great example.
Didn’t the Pirates sign a couple of Indian or Pakistani players to minor league deals? Maybe that’s the next big baseball market.
I think a lot of our American friends don’t realise the extra dimension that cheering on a national team can bring. Perhaps a better way to phrase the OP would have been to say “Do American sports fans miss the fact that their major sports don’t have an ultra-competitive international competition?”. Pointing out that you’d rather watch your state’s sporting franchise play against some other state, as opposed to watching the US NFL team clobber The Phillipines 136 - 0, is hardly saying anything contentious.
And I think the reality is, American sports fans don’t realise what they are missing. The closest they may have got to it was the presence of the Dream Team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which certainly wasn’t met with mooted yawns by the American sporting public.
Being an Australian sports fan who gets to cheer on national cricket, rugby and soccer teams - but not a national AFL team - I get to view this from both perspectives. And yes, I believe that a competitive international competition most certainly adds another fun dimension to a game.
Yup - and they got tryouts on the strength of their performance in a game show, if you can believe it. It’s like Slumdog Millionaire only without the communal violence and gangsters.
You can’t compare something to the pinnacle and then claim a level above that. By definition, you’re not comparable to the pinnacle if there is a level above.
A better comparison would be college football with club play and the NFL with international competition. People go nuts for college football, but the players aspire to the higher level of the NFL. Being great in the NFL generates far more respect than being great in college. (Though to be fair, if you win a Heisman, that’s likely going to be mentioned in the first sentence of your obituary no matter what you did in the pros, or the rest of your life, for that matter. Hell, it’s practically as bad as “Heisman winner OJ Simpson is also known for having some legal troubles.”)
We call those state level dream teams “college sports.” And they are dominated by exactly those regions others have already identified. (Texas, Florida and California for football.)
No we don’t. Top flight college teams may primarily recruit in-state players, but every top-25 program is going to have at least a dozen out-of-state players and probably a lot more.
I think this gets to the root of the OP’s problem. It’s not that USAns miss international competition – there’s plenty of it – as that they just don’t care nearly as much as folks from elsewhere. The World Baseball Congress raised some attention, but wasn’t really a crowd symbol, and certainly didn’t give the World Series a run for its money. The Ryder Cup strikes a sentimental chord among golf fans, but it’s not going to rival the Masters any time soon. The FIBA championships are essentially training for the Olympic basketball teams–no real heat there. The Olympics ARE a big deal…like they are everywhere else. Honestly, money has come to rule sports in the US, and the cash is made in league play, not in more honor-based outlets like international competition.
Why are you being deliberately obtuse in this thread?
I think this is a flaw in the OP, though. The question shouldn’t be ‘Why doesn’t the US have international competition?’ but rather ‘Why doesn’t the world have international competition like the Commonwealth?’
Soccer is an international sports phenomenon like no other. It isn’t comparable to baseball, cricket, basketball or rugby.
The only two sports left are sports only played throughout the Commonwealth. Why doesn’t Italy have a big cricket team? Where is the huge Chinese rugby following?
In what way am I being deliberately obtuse? National teams can pick from their own citizens except in very rare cases. College teams do not.
But the OP didn’t ask that at all. It simply asked whether Americans regret the lack of international competition in their favourite sports. It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
Maybe they don’t play cricket, but they certainly play rugby. The old Five Nations tournament (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France) was expanded to Six Nations about a decade ago to include Italy. They started off as whipping boys but these days the results are nothing like the ones when they first joined.