That’s what I was going to say; we aren’t set up like FIFA, where each state would have its own league and “state team”.
Instead, the interstate rivalry takes place in collegiate sports like @kenobi_65 points out. There are both standing rivalries - UT/OU, Texas A&M/LSU, OSU/Michigan, etc, conference interstate games (which may overlap with the first), and non-league interstate games.
To use my alma mater, we play in the SEC West, and are from Texas. We play teams from Alabama(Alabama & Auburn), Mississippi(Ole Miss, MS State), Louisiana(LSU) and Arkansas every year as part of our conference play. Last year we also played Missouri, South Carolina, New Mexico and Colorado. Those second four teams vary every year- next season we play teams from Florida (Miami, UF), Massachusetts, and North Carolina (Appalachian State).
So there’s a lot of interstate football play, and even more interstate basketball and baseball play, as there are just a lot more games to spread out among opponents.
Come to think of it, the contest gives a bit of a geography lesson in itself, since the host country gets chances to show some glimpses of itself (each act is introduced by a short clip of them doing something “typically” of the country or visiting some important sight), and the votes of each country are announced by live link from their own broadcaster (complete with whatever visual backdrop they want to show).
Yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic that the inter-state “US-vision” contest will be fun and entertaining. I’ve watched some of the Eurovision stuff on TV when it’s on (it’s not on often over here), and I’ve seen some of the acts who have gone on to larger fame post-Eurovision. And I’ve seen “Fire Saga” as well.
What I am desperately curious to see is if it’s all a sort of Euro-dance style music competition, or if it’s like country acts from Montana, rap from Georgia, dance from New York, and so on. And whether it gets more homogenous over time or not.
But yeah, the primary interstate sporting events are collegiate level sports, with US football being the biggest, followed by basketball, and then baseball.
The ESC has several different trends at any one time. It’s hard to tell how it will pan out each year. There are such different attitudes and expectations across the different countries.
Participant countries (or to be accurate, their principal public service broadcaster) have different strategies - try to follow what looked like a winning style last year, promote your own view of your own country’s style, put on a performer with a big International reputation (doesn’t usually work), whizz-bang presentational gimmick or keep it simple? Big belting ballad or dance-y bubblegum pop or heavy metal or wispy soulful indie lament?
And then again, who can tell what’s really going on with the voters?
The ESC is a contest between people who are not afraid of ridicule with a hint of nationalism where clusters of countries vote for each other and in the end, Germany loses. Which is good. Puts us in our place. I hope we never counter-attack with Wagner!
It gets hyped a lot each year in certain media, but it is only a small sub-set of the population that seems to enjoy it, with differences acoss countries. The sub-set has been including gay men for a couple of decades now, at least in Western Europe, that was unexpected for me at the beginning, now it is part of the party cycle, quite funny when observed from the sidelines (I live in the Eisenacher Kiez in Berlin again, if that means something to you. A very distinctive sub-culture in a bourgeios environment).
Going back to the OP (which I think only Pardel-Lux really answered): it varies, at least in The Netherlands. If we focus on the higher educated part of the population (having received at least pre-university education), you are expected to know and place the major countries and their capitals, but for smaller countries people may make mistakes or find it harder to locate them exactly. The knowledge is, I believe, mainly based on high school education and later travel or work experience. My children have to learn all the states of Europe, their main cities, mountain ranges and rivers. Of course they may later on forget a lot of details, but the main outlines are well known. My general impression that most European countries provide a similar level of education.
In addition, when learning foreign languages (French and German in particular) you also learn a lot of geography, which helps.
Additionally, many Europeans of course travel on the continent and thereby obtain first hand experience with geography within Europe. Air travel counteracts that, though.
For people of my generation the states of former Yugoslavia remain hard to remember because they became independent after we left high school, similarly with states in Eastern Europe that were part of the Eastern block or Soviet Union. We may know the names of the states, but hesitate to pinpoint their exact location and are unsure about the capitals.
Not always (1982 and 2010) - these days, it seems to be a permanent wooden spoon for the UK, but then the BBC doesn’t always seem to take it that seriously anyway. These things go in waves. The first few I saw, it seemed always to be Austria and Udo Jürgens, fighting it out with the Francophones (the French record companies could use Monaco and Luxembourg, as well as Belgium every other year and Switzerland every third or fourth) . At another time, Ireland had a run of success (to the point that they joked that RTE was desperate to find a really lousy song so they wouldn’t be bankrupted by having to host it again - Google “Father Ted+Eurovision”).
If the BBC weren’t founder members, the UK wouldn’t have been in it since the Millennium. You are not allowed to vote for your own country, so there are definite blocks. Balkan countries vote for each other, Greece and Cyprus almost always exchange douze points. The Brits are not popular and even less so post Brexit.
I wonder where the alliances would form between US States? The SE seem to form a likely group, as do the Mid West. No idea about others though.
That’s ridiculously untrue. Current teenagers probably know more countries in Europe than your generation does, partly because more of their classmates will have parents from European countries that were just “Soviet Union” or “Yugoslavia” when you were young.
Knowing capitals is harder - everyone (well, nearly everyone) knows the big ones, but the small ones are not the sort of thing that are taught at school - no need. It’s not the sort of thing that people memorise unless they like quizzes. Also, country boundaries changing and capitals changing doesn’t really help with keeping track.
And knowing the leaders of the countries apart from Merkel (and, currently, Zelenskiiy) is probably pretty rare. They honestly don’t come up that often by name alone.
I used to occasionally do a scattegories quiz when supply teaching with no materials at all (as a short game, not the whole lesson), a capital city was one of the categories.
The teenagers were really quite good, and this was in a low-income area where very few of them would have been on many foreign holidays, and quite possibly had never left the country at all - or gone on holiday inside the UK either, so it’s not an aversion to foreign travel, it’s a feature of living below very low means.
Football - soccer - helps a hell of a lot. For example, Kiev would have been familiar to football fans for years because Dynamo Kiev is a fairly big and well-known team.
I like to watch quiz programmes. We know that contestants have to audition to take part, so the idiots and those with no personality get weeded out, so those that make the cut are probably above the average for knowledge.
It’s true that football fans do better on geography than the others, but they tend to fail on fashion and popular culture. Geography questions are not usually difficult. One from last week was to choose the most Northern country from a list of three: Spain, Switzerland and Estonia. The contestant guessed Switzerland “because they have a lot of snow”.
The countries they are familiar with are likely to be the ones they go on holidays to, but flying to Spain gives you no idea about its relationship to other European countries.
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that since none of this has any direct impact on their lives, they have no interest in it. Fashion, pop music, influencers on YT, sport are much more relevant to them, so that’s what they know. I draw an analogy with maths. How many of s have needed to solve a quadratic equation or look up a cosine since we left school? If you are not an engineer or involved in science, it’s unlikely.
Quiz show auditions don’t necessarily filter out idiots (except Only Connect). Shows like pointless want a range of people on, so some of them will be the type who don’t actually have good general knowledge at all.
One of the talent shows used to include hopeless contestants and watching them was akin to watching a Roman Circus. Quite rightly, they stopped doing it.
It’s true that some quiz show contestants may well not have “good general knowledge” but in my experience, they are not completely hopeless.
It depends on the show. Pointless doesn’t want total idiots, but it does want a range of people. Not knowing how far north Estonia is doesn’t mean the average teenager can only name four European countries.