But cricket, which is as start-stop a game as any ever devised, is wildly popular in England, India, Pakistan, Australia, and a lot of soccer-first places. Tennis, a start-stop game, is the rage in France - indeed, “tennis” is derived from a French term.
And of course, continual play games are quite popular in America - basketball and hockey being the obvious examples.
I just don’t see a lot of objective evidence that there is anything in the nature of soccer, as a sport, that would make it unpopular in the United States. It’s hockey without skates, basketball with the nets on the ground. There is no defining aspect of the game you cannot apply to a sport that’s popular as a spectator sport in America. Had Dr. Naismith or Alexander Cartwright invented soccer, instead of basketball or baseball, soccer would today be a huge sport in the United States, and men like Michael Jordan and Joe DiMaggio would have become great soccer players.
Actually a big part of it, that no one has brought, is that soccer is closely associated with the upper middle class in America, at least in terms of the popular culture (the exception being among immigrants, of course). It gives an ignorant sports commentator who doesn’t want to learn soccer something to grab onto when he’s making fun of the sport. I actually heard one guy say he wouldn’t let his kid play soccer, even if he wanted to, and read a columnist agreed with him.
I have no answer for you on this, not being from any of those places.
I don’t really consider basketball to be a continuous action game, but it’s not really accurate to call it a start-stop game either. The transition game pretty much puts it in the middle of the road; a hybrid of both styles. But there is quite a bit more scoring in basketball than in every other continuous action game in existance, no?
Also, you greatly overestimate the popularity of hockey in the US. Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals reportedly drew 600,000 households. That’s half the ratings of MLS. It is notably lower than WUSA ratings when they closed their doors due to lack of corporate backing. And it’s less than half the ratings of the XFL when they folded due to lack of ratings.
So I’d refute the notion that hockey is a popular spectator sport in America. Given that, would you still assert that there is no defining aspect of soccer that cannot be applied to a sport that’s popular in America?
Having a goalie seems to be something that doesn’t exist in popular American sports. Interestingly, goaltending tends to be an actual penalty in the popular sports. Basketball and football both have the exact same goaltending penalty on the books. (In football, it’s jumping up at the goalpost and knocking away a low FG attempt. Goaltending; kick counts.) In baseball, isn’t it against the rules for the catcher to block home plate if he doesn’t have the ball? That’s similar in nature to goaltending, isn’t it? (You’d know better than me.)
Countless aspects of soccer map directly to hockey, so I don’t find it surprising that hockey is barely more popular than soccer in the states. Hockey at least has high-speed action and violence going for it. But I’d point to hockey’s lack of popularity – combined with its stylistic similarity to soccer – as evidence that actually yes, the structure of the game itself is inherently unpopular in America.
But you see, this post demonstrates precisely what is wrong with your whole approach. You assume that a long-winded explanation of soccer tactics and other intricacies are the key to changing a person’s mind. They’re not.
I’ll bet that, despite your “countless pages” about football, you’ve never converted anyone who hasn’t spent time getting involved in the game and the culture. If i had seen your football posts before moving to the US, i would have been impressed with your engagement and your knowledge, but i still would have yawned and moved on. The reason that i can take something away from your football discussions, or RickJay’s baseball discussions, is that i have had the opportunity to become immersed in the whole experience, and come to apreciate over time what it is that makes people football or baseball fans.
I called you parochial not as an insult, but because it precisely describes your attitude to this whole debate. You constantly assume that each sport has something that makes it objectively and universally better or more interesting than other sports. You seem unable to appreciate the cultural variations and predispositions that can help to explain why different sports are popular in different places, and you apparently have no interest in considering the possibility that even you might be making the exact opposite arguments about soccer if you had been born and raised in England or Brazil.
I don’t especially care whether you like soccer or not, the same way that i don’tcare if my Aussie and British friends like baseball or American football. In the end, my enjoyment of sports is about what i find interesting, and i’m not much concerned about anyone else. I’m just perplexed at the way that you seem intent on universalizing your own preferences as if they should apply to everyone else.
See, here you come close to appreciating that historical differences contribute to the popularity of various sports, but you still make some rather bizarre assertions.
Your point about Capoeira is interesting, because the rest of the world could say exactly the same thing about American football–just because it’s big in America (a country with less than 5% of the world’s population) “doesn’t mean that there isn’t something in its nature that makes it unpopular in other parts of the world.” Your comment is especially interesting given that, earlier in the thread, in response to someone who pointed out how popular soccer is throughout the world, you said:
Well, which is it?
Is lack of popularity evidence of a games inherent weaknesses, or is massive popularity indicative of the poor taste of the masses?
This is pretty much how i feel about the situation.
Huh?
As far as i can tell, plenty of people in this thread are arguing precisely that the history of these sports in America is the reason for their ongoing popularity. That’s what RickJay has been arguing all along, and it’s certainly what i have been trying to say, along with others. As a historian, i believe that historicizing these issues rather than making simplistic appeals to some genetic or immutable national characteristics is the way to understand them.
As for the whole “nag Americans into liking soccer” thing, i can’t speak for anyone else, but i’m actually quite happy with the fact that it’s one sport that hasn’t caught on at the professional, spectator level over here. The fact that the American team is good without being great, and that soccer isn’t a US-dominated sport, means that i can take an interest in the American team and feel good for them when they do well. Same with the American rugby team at the rugby World Cup. It’s nice to see the US as underdog occasionally, instead of seeing them as overlords and hoping they lose each game, which is what i do when watching international baseball or basketball.
I think the reason why basketball is considered a continuous action is the introduction of the shot clock in 1954 which considerably increased the amount of scoring. If there was no shot clock, the pace of a typical basketball game would still be between start-stop and continuous.
Ice hockey’s popularity in the U.S. is mainly regional. Basically, hockey became popular anyplace where ponds and lakes froze over during the winter (i.e., Canada and the northern tier of America). Outside of those places, however, hockey was almost a foreign sport. The NHL has attempted to broaden the sport’s reach by moving into such strange climes like Florida, Texas, and the Deep South but hockey’s popularity is still mainly limited to New England, the Northeast, the Great Lakes states, and Canada.
No, I don’t, but I must apologize because I was being confusing. In including hockey I’m trying to include Canada. Canada, as I am sure you are aware, is also a country where soccer is not a major spectator sport - in fact, even less so than the United States. It could be reasonably argued that Canada is the LEAST soccer-interested nation on the planet. It’s also a conflated market with the USA so it’s an interesting point of comparison; here you have a market about the size of the state of California (in population, not area, obviously) and that is culturally extremely similar to the United States, where the dominant sport is hockey - super, ultra dominant, like if the U.S. had one sport that rolled the popularity of football, baseball, basketball and NASCAR together. I mean, our $5 bill has kids playing hockey on it and a quote from a short story about hockey.
And of course, hovckey is actually VERY popular in the United States if you’re in the right place; it’s very, very popular in Minnesota, New England, New York, Michigan, et al - places that are really cold, unsurprisingly.
Yet, Canada has no pro soccer teams at all, and states where hockey is popular aren’t really all that fond of soccer, even though, if you like putting objects past goalies into nets, it’s the obvious low cost alternative to hockey. The immigrants get all worked up over the World Cup, but that’s no different from any big U.S. city.
Similarly, if we look at other nations we quickly see that soccer preference is not a clear dichotomy. The most popular sport in Japan is baseball (I know sumo’s the national sport; baseball is more popular) but the second place finisher is… soccer, which has seen its popularity surge in recent years.
There is nothing in baseball that conceptually matches the opportunity for “Goaltending.” Maybe going over the fence to take away a home run, but that is legal. The football equivalent to baseball’s obstruction rule is probably the rule against pass interference, but again, it’s conceptually very different.
I have to agree with some other posters and point out that you should back up a bit and try to look at a somewhat broader, objective picture; you’re examining soccer from a standpoint of ignorance, as are most other posters who’re saying it’s “Boring” or what have you. Well, hell, so am I; I don’t know much about soccer at all. But, honestly, I’ve never seen a discussion about “Which sport is better?” - which is exactly what this discussion has been for the most part - that involved anything other than subjective opinions. The position of soccer in the U.S. market can be wholly explained by history, market conditions, and, to a degree, market saturation.
So back to the original question in the OP – wouldn’t you say that to a large degree the fact that the average American (or American family) is so inundated with choices already that to “accept” soccer would, in a way, come at the cost of another sport?
Sure, if everyone in the US worked at a sports bar or in the sports department of their local newspaper, etc, I think soccer would emerge as much as our pop culture society would allow it to. The problem is, with year round basketball camps/seasons, high school baseball (winter/spring), legion baseball (summer), college football/NFL (late summer/fall/winter) to name a few, embracing soccer is coming at the cost (social, enjoyment, etc) of one of the others, which, in America is a choice problem that doesn’t exist (to the same degree) in many other countries… Yes? No?
Yes. It’s that way in high school at least. The sport’s seasons overlap so much as it is that soccer gets beat out by more established sports with stronger programs. At least around here, if you have any sort of talent they steer you towards football, because football pays the bills for all the other sports.
I think it’s largely about the lack of precision in certain aspects of the game play. Others have mentioned the way most of soccer action defies statistics-keeping, and I think that’s probably the most alien aspect of the game to Americans; but then there’s the fuzzy-math stoppage time issue (well, it’s an issue for me) and the lack of instant replay/coach’s challenge for bad calls.
I’m not pleased with the TV camera angles, either. For a sport that frustrates the statistician but is supposed to reward us with fluid displays of agility and speed, we should be able to better appreciate the fancy footwork. But most of the time, the coverage is so wide-angle (and strategic in its purview), we can’t really see the footwork; the wide-angle overhead view also visually dampens the players’ speed, so that the action often looks misleadingly slow. (This is one pitfall which ice hockey also shares but which American football has largely escaped; the football field’s size and sidelines facilitate complete camera coverage from all angles, and football broadcasts tend to only use wide-angle, overhead angles as establishing shots, like when returning from a commercial, and as alternative viewpoints on long-yardage plays.)
But getting back to my earlier points – first, stoppage time: I’ve always felt this was an arbitrary, mysterious decison on the part of the ref, and that it can’t help but confer an unfair benefit one side or the other. He can’t be keeping any sort of precise time throughout the game’s many interruptions, or the stoppage time at the end wouldn’t be an even two or three minutes. I think the typically anal American time-&-statistics-obsessed sports fan would have a lot more respect for this aspect of the game if the ref had to keep a scrupulously accurate time throughout the game and declared stoppage times of precisely 2:29 or 4:08 or whatever. Is there any sort of referee oversight procedure where the refs must account for their stoppage-time calculations?
Then there’s lack of redress for bad calls by the ref – namely, the lack of instant replay or coach’s challenge to reverse a bad call. In a low-scoring game like soccer, every bad call is a catastrophe to the sport, especially so in a cutthroat tournament with few games and where tied records are determined by point differentials. In the Japan-Australia game, Japan’s sole goal was shown to be offsides (IIRC), and for much of the game the score was 1-0, although Australia scored three times in the final ten or so minutes, winning it 3-1. In this case, the ref’s bad call didn’t determine the won-loss record, but it still might penalize Australia further down the road in the point-differential sense. What redress would the Aussies have then, if they fail to advance to the next round?
That’s part of it. The USA has a very well established, and very old, tradition of professional spectator sport. The National League (of baseball) is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest continuously operating professional sports league in the world, and the NFL goes back a good peice, too.
There might be room for more, but I think you’ll find sports attempting to get market space will become niche sports, as the NHL has become (in the USA.) Even the surging popularity of NASCAR is to a large extent happening at the expense of open wheel racing popularity, so in effect the sum of “auto racing” as a sport is not growing all that fast.
Being a fan costs you; it’s an investment of time, money, and a degree of emotional dedication, especially in the case of team sports.
Scrivener, your point about there being no redress for bad calls just strikes me as being weird. Basketball has the worst officiating of any organized sport I have ever seen, with no replay rules or redress for bad calls - ask Mark Cuban - and Americans love it. Baseball has no replay and draws 70 million fans a year or whatever it’s up to now. In fact, sports with replay/redress rules are quite outnumbered by those without, and even those with it, like football, have it only at the highest levels of play, and it’s limited at the NFL level (and the officiating there has been famously inept in recent years.) Why would you think that was an issue for Americans?
Again, we have to get away from pretending this is an issue with the way the sport works. Americans are not more precise or rule-obsessed than Spaniards, Chinese, or Pakistanis. I mean, I personally don’t understand why anyone would like soccer more than baseball, but I’m objective enough to stand away from my own preferences and acknowledge that it’s probably not because there’s something wrong with them or because I’m all that different from Juan.
RickJay, you’re probably right in what you say about officiating (certainly about the infamously bad refereeing in the NFL of late), but these other sports aren’t as low-scoring as soccer. Not that a bad call in basketball isn’t as odious or unfortunate, but it probably isn’t as likely to determine the outcome of the game, either. Ditto for baseball, where the quality of the officiating is generally much better.
What I don’t get is why more soccer fans aren’t more upset by the bad-call issue and clamor for some sort of redress procedure to be added to their sport. (They already have an informal, non-binding instant replay on the big screens for the crowds in the stadiums, and you can hear them booing after a bad call on replay as it is. They just need to let (or compel) the refs to watch, too.) The Wikipedia entry on Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals is a case in point. According to the entry, few people, including the players involved, blamed the ref then or since, although most of the camera angles showed it to be clearly a hand goal, while a few angles were ambiguous. So okay, you could argue for giving the ref a personal pass on what might’ve been impossible for him to see… but this doesn’t excuse the way the game is structured for allowing this to happen and go unchallenged by replay or challenge. FWIW, several of the English players did argue their case with the ref, but to no avail.
I have friends over at ESPN who deal with ratings. According to them, if you go by self-reporting, people love football, then baseball, then basketball. But when they look at the Neilsens year to year, they get a different picture.
Overall, baseball’s audience peaked in the late '70s/early '80s, as did football’s. The NBA and Nascar are the only sports with growing audiences (although NBA has dropped a bit in the past two years).
But it’s hard to measure. The target audience for all sports is young men, who aren’t likely to be hooked up to audience meters.
No, I do not. I assume that certain sports are innately more appealing to certain cultures. You are projecting the “objectively and universally” onto my arguments, and then refuting the strawman. Please stop doing that.
I have no doubt that I would, if asked why gridiron wasn’t popular in my native Brazil. But this thread is asking about why soccer is not popular in my native US, so that’s why I’m addressing that question. I even specifically cited innate aspects of gridiron that might make it less palatable to markets outside the US. For some reason, you seem to think I’m arguing that soccer is not popular in the US because soccer sucks rocks. You’re doing a fine job refuting that assertion; I’ll keep your posts in mind if anybody comes along and actually asserts it.
Again, please cite where I universalized anything about sports. I specifically offered reasons why I think Americans are not big fans of soccer. It is actually possible for a culture to not like something because of its nature without that nature being universally or objectively bad.
Your odd binary view is missing the mark. Popularity is not evidence of anything. Britney Spears is not the best singer, McDonald’s is not the best food, etc… This does not mean that if something is popular, it can’t be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It just means that popularity doesn’t prove that a thing is great.
As a refresher, since my words seem to have been misleading, what I’ve said is that Americans may not find soccer appealing because:
Americans are fixated on strategy. Not sure why, but the world wars may have contributed to this. (Note: I’m not saying that there is no strategy in soccer. I’m saying there isn’t the strategic depth in soccer that you find in the big dog sports in the US.)
Americans are obsessed with macho supermen, and soccer doesn’t seem to offer any.
Americans are into definitive results; ties bother us on a fundamental level.
Americans are riveted by situational games, which soccer and hockey are not.
Americans gamble on everything to the point of absurdity, and soccer is not structured very well for gambling.
Also, while not a reason I offered but one which I tend to agree with:
Americans are stat geeks at heart, and soccer doesn’t lend itself readily to stats.
RickJay, I don’t think it’s legitimate to lump Canada in with the US and then conclude that hockey is popular in the US. It’s not. You guys keep saying how hockey is popular in cold climates like New England. I live in New England, and I would not consider this a hotbed of hockey fandom. Certainly moreso than in the south, but hockey is way down the list of what sports I see people getting excited about in this region. Obviously, other areas in NE may be more into hockey, and I would be surprised if hockey weren’t popular in the states bordering Canada, but the fact remains that both hockey and soccer are a hardsell in the US.
I think it’s no coincidence that hockey and soccer share so many stylistic similarities while both aren’t popular in the states. There are innate, fundamental aspects shared by both games that I think don’t appeal to Americans. Not all humans; just Americans. And note that I’m not saying these are objective or universal problems or weaknesses in soccer. I’m saying these are problems and weaknesses when trying to market the game in the US.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that football and cricket originate from the same country, and both rely on a conciliatory attitude to fallible referees and to difficult calls. There’s an acceptance of the “referee has the final say” attitude.
While we all know that the man in black is a wanker, we don’t want games stretched out to four hours for endless references to replays. Disputed goals, fouls, offsides, corners, throw-ins…where would you draw the line, and why? And what if the footage is inconclusive (as is often the case)?
While we hate it when judgements go against us, we take great pleasure in unfair calls in our benefit, too. Karma…
Another problem is the principle that all levels of the sport are adjudicated in the same way. Sunday league, schoolboy matches, world cup finals…all have a ref and two linesmen, and these are the people who make all decisions. While it might be possible to equip big tournaments and the Premiership with replay equipment, it’s not going to be possible for all other matches.
I don’t think there’s a valid comparison between cricket and soccer in this respect. They do use a third umpire with access to video replays to adjudicate in international cricket matches. There is one type of dismissal that often causes controversy, but not because of refusal to use video technology. In simple “was it over the line or not?” decisions, cricket uses video replays.
They don’t use video replays in soccer when it would be quite easy to. In Rugby League they use a video referee only for disputed tries. It wouldn’t be hard to draw the line in Soccer at only going to a video referee when a goal is in dispute. Perhaps the issue is the additional administrative cost that wouldn’t get used that often due to the low scoring nature of the game. I can only think of two goals in this world cup off the top of my head where the decision would have been different had it been referred to a video referee.
Having said that, I don’t think the nature of refereeing has anything to do with a games popularity in a country. The points that Ellis Dee lists don’t strike me as convincing primary causes either. It seems more like a case of history giving certain sports an early foothold in the country, and not an indication that Americans are fundamentally different to the rest of the world in what they find enjoyable in a sport.
Sorry Roger, I didn’t mean to include “you” in my “we”. My bad.
I have to agree that soccer doesn’t translate well to TV. Even with the wide angle, I still would like to see more of the field. But any wider and the players are too small.
So, here I am, 38 years old, limping because we finally got the 3v3 game started again at work and I’m out of shape (and it was 101 yesterday in Denver), had an extended argument at work this morning about the existence of the Colorado Caribou in 1978 or so (I was right, of course) and making fun of the current Colorado Rapids while discussing the retirement of Roy Keane and wondering what the heck this “makes us dislike soccer” thing is all about.
Yeah, we don’t like soccer. Watch out next World Cup, some of the kids getting ready for the big time are damn good.
We don’t have decent media coverage because no one expects the US to win… this time.