No one in the US gives a rat’s ass about that team. This is the first I’ve ever heard of it. The NFL is the only league that matters.
They aren’t fond of the World Cup, they’re fond of America. Same reason we’re excited about how the US does in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Olympics every 4 years, assuming there’s a medal contender. Otherwise, we don’t care.
Again, that presumes American’s are interested in soccer, which they are not. They’re interested in how the US does in pretty much any competition, and once we’re eliminated they lose interest quickly.
Many, if not all, Italian basketball fans pick a NBA franchise as their favorite. Even soft drinks often carry NBA star players in their marketing campaigns. Neither football nor baseball or hockey have any attractive, but basketball has a good following so you’ll see lots of people with Lakers, Celtics or Knicks T-shirts. Sky Italia (think of ESPN) offers extensive coverage of NBA, too.
I thought I read somewhere that some Americans choose British Premier League teams to support.
The Olympic fever is quite common all over the world - I don’t even know what fencing or horseriding is about, yet I’ll nonetheless cheer the Italian representative there. But the World Cup usually is a vastly different thing… I mean, don’t Americans watch other games aside from the ones they’re in?
Things may have changed, but when I was in college, graduation didn’t mean much. I had an English Composition class with a big name basketball star. He had people to write his papers for him. Talking with him it was apparent he was barely literate. He graduated, played, then coached in the pros.
I also met Craig “IronHead” Heyward in college. Somehow he stayed out of jail and graduated.
Not really, no. There are big Portuguese, Brazilian, and Costa Rican communities near me and they were going nuts during the World Cup, but move away from those neighborhoods and there is very little interest. Some soccer fans will pick a country to root for based on their ethnicity or if they’ve traveled there, but Americans as a whole don’t care about soccer when it doesn’t involve Americans. And even then it’s a relatively small minority who care at all.
This is true in general, but there are exceptions. A friend in HS was drafted into the NHL but completed 4 years at Yale (no athletic scholarships at Ivy League schools) and went on to have 10 year career with two NHL teams. He got his MBA during the summers and now works in finance.
Nitpick: It’s a bye week.
I think the 16-game regular season is just about perfect, but it may just be what I’m used to.
Note that American football is a much more injury-prone sport. You wouldn’t have a team left with that kind of schedule in the NFL. Most of the players would be injured.
The whole point is to more or less enforce parity within the league, and thereby keep it more competitive overall than it would otherwise be. The draft mechanism, the scheduling and the salary caps are all intended to do this. In other US leagues with more European style rules, you see the same things that happen in Europe happening- one team with a lot of money outspends everyone else to become dominant. In that sense, there’s not a lot of difference between say… Real Madrid, Manchester United, Inter Milan and the NY Yankees. They’re good because they can buy the best players, and because they’re good, they have merchandising muscle, and can afford those players.
The NFL avoids this situation by enforcing parity and sharing revenue, so that in the end, what distinguishes teams is the skill of the coaching staffs and the front offices at making the best of what they have and/or identifying inexpensive talent, as well as things like team culture and leadership. That’s why the Pats are so consistently dominant, and why the Browns are so dysfunctional- in one case, we have team culture that consistently wins, and in the other, you have something f**ked up that makes the team lose despite everything that should enforce parity.
Understand, then, that the US is a huge country with major metro areas hundreds of miles apart and very much independent from one another. This drives many of the differences in how US sports leagues are organized.
To prosper, an American sports league must have viable, competitive teams in as large a number of major metro areas as practical. This is the only way to generate both gate revenue and national TV revenue.
This means that relegation and promotion are right out. It would hardly do, for example, for the NFL to relegate the Chicago Bears (as bad as they are), which would leave the league without a presence in the third largest metro area in the country. This would create a huge, immediate drop in TV ratings and in general interest in the NFL in Chicago. The next nearest team plays in Indianapolis, 200 miles away, a city with its own TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers. Nobody in Chicago pays any attention to anything that is happening in Indianapolis. Nobody in Chicago would adopt Indianapolis as a favorite team, even as a temporary expedient until the Bears made it back to the top division. Chicagoans would just lose interest in pro football.
Furthermore, it isn’t enough just to have a team in every market, you have to have a reasonably competitive team. Half the teams have to lose, but if a team loses too badly for too long, it will kill interest in a major media market. This can’t be tolerated.
The stereotype is that Americans are cut-throat individualists and Europeans are socialists. In sports we see the opposite. American leagues spend a great deal of time fretting about competitive balance, hobbling the strong, and encouraging the weak with salary caps, revenue sharing, and drafts of school-age players. Europeans generally don’t care.
About minor leagues and competition: the National Football League is comprised of two “sub-leagues” - the National Football Conference (NFC) and American Football Conference (AFC). The NFC used to be the NFL. The AFC used to be the American Football League (AFL), a competing professional league formed in 1960. The AFL was merged into the NFL in 1970.
The AFL was the most successful competitor to the NFL. Other attempts at competing professional leagues failed - the USFL in the 1980s (many USFL players played on NFL teams after the league folded; many were previously drafted by NFL teams, but joined the USFL instead), and the gimmicky XFL in 2001. The Canadian Football League (CFL) had teams in the United States during the 1990s.
There’s also professional arena football – American football played on a small field that’s about the size of a hockey rink – but it doesn’t have much of a following.
Partially yes, partially no. I haven’t seen nearly as much interest or passion in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Olympics than I’ve seen regarding the 2014 World Cup. I think people realize that soccer is a big deal internationally, and the World Cup is very big time event, so the US doing well there a bit bigger than most of the Olympics sports. Oh, and watching soccer at the World Cup is much more conducing to hanging out at a bar with drinks and friends (I don’t see many folks driving down to the bars for Women’s Gymnastics during the Olympics, even though it is insanely popular).
In addition, it appears there is a growing interest the game - English Premier League matches on Saturday afternoons get much better ratings than NBC thought they’d get (I mean they are still like 1.2, but it wasn’t really expected to get above a 1.0). MLS has just signed a lucrative long term deal with ESPN. There is momentum for just being a “root for US like the Olympics” thing.
That is an extremely interesting analysis. It seems like at some point of its history the NFL sat at a table and asked “what’s the most efficient way to make money?” and devised this system.
Soccer instead came together mostly on its own without any guidance - “franchises” (meaning the owners of the teams) often despise any attempt to regulate their turf preferring anarchy. Like any anarchical, it quickly stratified into a caste society with an extremely small aristocracy (not more than 4-5 teams), a middle class (20-30 teams) and a low class (hundreds of no-hoper minnows). Who knows if we might get some sociological insight from it?
I think it’s wrong to try and make comparisons. They are simply two completely different ideas of sports, both good for the people they’re followed by. I think that Juventus, Bayern Munich or Real Madrid would hate to be stripped of their status, just like Chicago Bears must have a chance at glory.
As for the gameplay itself, there are many quirks completely unusual for a European. I list them only for fun:
- Why don’t they put some advertising boards around the pitch? It’s revenue plus players don’t risk crushing sideline folks in their charged runs.
- Does the referee always have a microphone and explain decisions to the stadium like in the Super Bowl? I think that might be a recipe for disaster and protest if he makes some contested call.
- Don’t you find the screen a little bit too crowded by digital notes, statistics’ baloons, artificial lines and player summaries? We barely have a superimposed offside line in replay.
- It’s weird to see all the military stuff at the beginning. The maximum you get in Europe is a State official presenting the League Cup and, for Italy, the president of the Republic going to World Cup finals
- (Added in edit) Soccer sound technicians usually prefer tuning out the stadium in favor of the commentators’ voices. It seemed the opposide for Super Bowl, sometimes even picking voices from the pitch itself.
[QUOTE=Captain Nemo]
t’s weird to see all the military stuff at the beginning. The maximum you get in Europe is a State official presenting the League Cup and, for Italy, the president of the Republic going to World Cup finals.
[/QUOTE]
:dubious:
1.) I won’t speak for all Americans, but when I see advertising boards all around the playing surface I think it makes the sport look “small-time”, like they can’t make enough money through tickets, merch and TV, so they resort to advertising. In the US you only see this in hockey, soccer, and NASCAR, all of which used to be really “small-time”.
2.) Americans like to know what is going on, so the ref always has a microphone. A super bad call will get lots of “Boos”, and maybe a beer bottle thrown at the ref. The NFL reviews all calls and will actually admit when a ref makes a mistake, and everyone moves on.
3.) We need something to look at to fill all of the space between when the play is actually happening, and the TV networks pander to our lack of an attention span.
4.) The NFL shield is built to be patriotic, because patriotism sells in the US. Are you talking about the military honor guard and the military flyover? That is just advertising for the all-volunteer military. There are several other threads around here about how America’s overt patriotism makes our European friends uncomfortable.
A couple of things others haven’t noted (or if they have, I haven’t seen it):
College football was huge before the pro leagues existed, and still is. There’s no comparison in Europe that I’m aware of. College games often draw 70,000+ fans and are a huge business in their own right, and has developed a symbiotic relationship with the NFL, so that College acts as the developmental league for the NFL, and the NFL adopts rules that protect the college teams (like not drafting high schoolers directly).
Other leagues in North America include the Canadian Football League CFL), and the Indoor Football League, but other leagues are incredibly minor. Occasionally players from the CFL get signed by the NFL - Warren Moon is a great example, a great NFL quarterback who started out in the CFL largely because at the time the NFL didn’t feel that black QB’s could play the position well. Thankfully that has been disproven conclusively at this point.
As far as scheduling all North American pro teams are much more beholden to the leagues than in Europe (this applies to baseball, basketball and hockey as well as football). For a capitalist country like the USA, the pro leagues are all remarkably socialist (maybe monopolistic would be a better word). 
MLB does pretty well for itself. The NFL is able to sustain its business model for the simple reason that they have almost complete control over their players. The MLB players’ union is much, much stronger than the NFL’s. Thus, you’ll never see a true salary cap in MLB, and hence, not as much revenue sharing.
The reason MLB players’ union is stronger is because it’s more organized and they can withstand a significantly long strike. NFL players’ average career is what, 2 years? Imagine losing one of those years to a strike or a lockout. They’re more likely to break ranks and cave to league owners.
USA viewership for the 2010 World Cup Final: 24.7 million
(Same number for the 2014 USA vs. Portugal match.)
USA viewership for the 2014 World Cup Final: 26.5 million
For comparison:
USA viewership for the 2014 World Series Game 7: 23.5 million
What was that about Americans losing interest in the World Cup after the USA is eliminated?
Just dismissing interest in soccer for Americans as “nonexistent” is clearly not quite right.
Apologies for the hijack.
American baseball (what you call “rounders”) is somewhat anarchic. The teams in larger markets make more money so they can afford to pay more for higher-caliber players. Seattle, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Toronto and the smaller markets have little chance to establish dynasties the way the Yankees have done, some may never even make it to the world series.
(Stop saying “pitch” it is a “field” or “grid”. Do you want us to start calling the cricket thing a “pitch”?)
They actually do, but it tends to be pretty subtle. The NFL eyes-market has a pretty high bar for entry. The biggest advertisers, however, just buy “naming rights” for the stadiums, which I find more than a little sad. The other thing about football, though, is that there are 11 players on the field and 42 players and about a dozen coaches on the sidelines for each team during the game: field-level ads are not going to be visible behind a crowd like that (I think I heard a rumor that broadcasters were considering sliding ads into the scrimmage, first-down and other graphics they paint on the field, but that may have just been coming from an ad-weary cynic).
Consider the length of a football game: it works out to around 12 minutes. This takes about three hours to play (good for advertisers), so all the replays and graphics and stuff are just filler for the people who are not reading the paper or shooting snooker between plays. Futbol has slow bits, but the clock runs all the time and there is always something happening between touch.
America is a peace loving nation. No, really.