Perhaps I should start my own thread: “Help me see the appealing (sic) in sports like American Football and Baseball”.
Huh?
I’m not saying John Terry isn’t a great player, just that if you wanted to point out a highly skilled player he’s a bad example.
Perhaps you missed this:
No snark intended by this topic, and I’m not looking to make an argument for what’s the best sport to watch.
RickJay, you can go ahead and close this. I actually got some good answers before the threadshitting arguments started.
It’s my point that there is simply no way that someone who had never played soccer until their 20s could acquire the skills to become a professional player. An EPL club wouldn’t bother with such a player, no matter how great an athlete they are as they will struggle to get themselves up to Sunday League level (lowest organised amateur level).
I am not saying that no skill at all is required to play in the NFL, I’m just stating that in terms of skill requirements soccer and American football are at the ends of the spectrum.
Hockey’s entertaining to me, although it suffers from the same problem baseball does, in that there are too many games, so any one game doesn’t typically matter.
Good soccer is entertaining- and by good soccer, I mean aggressive soccer where both teams are trying to make plays on goal. Too much soccer is mid-field strategic play where they pass it around and try and maintain control while setting up their strickers; this is boring as hell for the most part, even when you know what’s going on. Combine that with the predilection of many players to flop and feign injury, and you have a recipe for something that is about as fun as watching paint dry.
One of the appeals of both hockey and futbol is the general absence of specialization. In particular, American football has become a game of extreme specialization and, while I’m still a very interested observer, has diminished its attractiveness to me by doing so. The presence of fairly normal sized athletes both attacking and defending satisfies something in me that watching outlandishly large and/or outlandishly fast specialists doesn’t.
Fair enough, but it wasn’t obvious to me that your original comment was hyperbole.
It’s funny - extreme specialization is exactly what attracts me to American football (and baseball), and lack of same is why I find soccer less interesting. 
Well, it’s not like soccer is without specialization. You don’t stick a centre back up front or a striker in defense, or for that matter a full back in central midfield or a goalkeeper anywhere but in goal, etc. Well, that is, unless you’re trying to bring back Total Football.
One of my best friends takes this exact approach in our many arguments about sports. He doesn’t want to see regular-sized people performing on the field, he wants to see Supermen.
But I think you could play every single member of a football team out of position and still get a decent, professional standard performance from them. The same could not be said of American football.
This week’s Sports Illustrated contained a piece about the proliferation in the numbers of coaches and support staffers at big time college football programs. Another one of the appeals of soccer and to a certain extent, hockey, is that play is fairly continuous and the players are largely free of clear direction from the sideline.
Basketball games can feature something like six timeouts in the last four minutes of play, which really interrupts the flow. NFL quarterbacks have a radio receiver in their helmets to get the latest instruction. College football offenses get set, then stand up en masse and look to the sideline for the audible. All of which drive me insane. Especially when Navy does it because they only have three fucking plays.
I watch a lot of sports and understand that American Football requires a huge amount of pre-game planning, resulting in e.g. a offensive playbook where every player on that team needs to know what he must do when the QB calls a particular play.
And the game itself is a series of bursts of strenuous effort punctuated by breaks (which earn the sport loads of money from TV adverts.)
In soccer, the game requires more stamina - as there is far more time with the ball in play during the 90 minute game; only a handful of substitutes etc.
Neither game is ‘superior’. They require different physiques and different training techniques.
Having said that, I’d like to recommend another sport - which is easy to follow, incredibly intense and demands high levels of skill and versatility from every player:
Well, If you’re Stuart Pearce you might try a goalkeeper upfront if you need a goal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZj7xcehvOU
On re-reading, it wasn’t obvious to me either, so I’ll withdraw it.
You might just as easily say that proves it’s a less skilled game, not more. I think you’re wrong about that, though. Remember when Ruud Gullit went to Chelsea for his retirement tour? He moved to sweeper and everyone was really surprised to find out he was good at it because he’d always been an attacking player.