Most of them, particularly team sports. I fully admit that I’m a total weirdo when it comes to watching sports, but the only way I can get through more than about 5 minutes of a soccer, football, or basketball game is to view it as a small-unit field battle. Football in particular looks like repeated charges of medieval forces (sans archers) seeking to break through an enemy formation.
The Olympics are about the only time I watch sports because that’s when I can see individual competitions between people who are the best in the entire world at what they do. That, and they have events that are more interesting to me, like gymnastics, most track and field events, swimming. I’d like to see more fighting or war-based sports televised though. Fencing, and shooting or archery don’t get much time, if any. Steeplechase, dressage, and modern pentathlon are almost never broadcast.
I occasionally watch K1 or mixed martial arts competitions because I’ve been doing martial arts myself for literally half my life. There’s a kind of professional interest there. Even so, I find myself thinking along the kinds of the more brutal and nasty stuff I’ve practiced. The way I approach fighting is completely different from any rule-based sport, even ones with minimal protections like most MMA matches.
So, while it’s interesting as sport, I often critique the fights thinking things like, “That would be an arm break there if it were a real fight. That should have been a rib shot, probably break a couple if it landed solid. Ooh, good thing they’re wearing gloves, because covering up like that with bare hands would net you a nice face shot or broken hand bones.” I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut if other people are around so that I’m not keeping up a constant commentary on the match.
Baseball can be dull, but it was never really meant as a television sport. It’s good at the stadium where you get the atmosphere … you know hot dogs, beer, and the excitement of knowing that at any moment you may be clobbered by a foul ball. It’s also fine for the radio. Baseball is as much about strategy as it is about individual performances, so it’s slow-moving and dull if you don’t appreciate that.
Soccer on the other hand is manufactured to be anti-spectator. There is almost no strategy involved in normal play. (This is according to a Sports Illustrated article that interviewed many players, fans, and coaches who admitted as much.) That makes it fun to play, but not to watch. The resulting random motion makes it impossible to do closeup shots for TV, so even if there are great individual efforts, we really don’t get to see them well. Also dampening the excitement is the prohibition of a transition game with the off-sides rule. Moreover, instead of having an official time keeper, they just let the referees decide how much time the ball was out of play and add that to the end of each half. One more big “screw you” to the fans, who are just told when the game is over.
Don’t like pro basketball much. Not enough variety in game play, and as others have mentioned, the foulfests that seem to end most close games drive me potty. On the other hand, I can enjoy college hoops. Go figure.
Don’t like football (soccer). Not enough strategy, mostly seems to be just random running around, and I hate the oscar-worthy faking of injuries when one player fouls another.
Don’t like American football very much, at any level. It’s a sport that seems to reward blind aggression and oafishness.
Don’t mind watching golf on TV every once in a while, for about 15 minutes or so.
Baffled by cricket, and a typical match takes far more time than I care to spend following a sporting event.
Like hockey, on the rare occasion I actually go to a game, but have no interest whatever in watching on TV.
Like baseball and NASCAR races, as there is a lot of strategy involved, and both sports have a lot of quirky unwritten rules that crack me up.
Don’t care much for open-wheel auto racing; I prefer the cars to look more like cars.
Rugby can be awesome, especially when one watches it live at field level, and I much prefer it to American football.
I’ve posted this here before, only to get flamed to a crisp by soccer’s Defenders of the Faith, but IMNSHO soccer has too many players on the field. Imagine how boring baseball would be if there were 11 fielders, or football with 13 defenders (impenetrable 5 deep zones), and you understand soccer’s problem. The offsides rule is a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless with 11 players per side.
I’m to tight fisted to enjoy something like that. By the time I’ve paid $80 to play the course, and $30 to rent a cart, any money left in my pocket is going to the beverage cart, not to side bets.
I have argued this for years on the boards, and while I often get yelled down I have never backed down from this position. I’d love to dig up that SI cite if possible. Assuming you don’t have a link, do you have any idea roughly when you saw it?
It is my contention that one of the main reasons soccer is unpopular in America is because we like/value strategy more than other cultures do. This hypothesis would also help explain why you can easily find some sort of televised poker seemingly 24 hours a day.
I can understand why certain people do not like Soccer as some games can be very boring.
But to say soccer has no startegy is not true. Sure, football may have more startegy than soccer, but soccer has plenty of different formations, playing startegies and all that.
Italian soccer, for example focuses on defense and letting the other team have posession and then, in a counter attack score a goal and then add another defender to the team and save the score.
It has earned them 4 world cups.
Simialar to football, in a way, players are often told to send the ball to X player, who will run faster than Y defender and then center it to the forward.
You can choose to play agressive and actually go for rough tackles, which will intimidate other players into running and breaking through defense.
There are plenty ofther examples.
Still, I do see your point. Some games and some teams have zero startegy and just focus on pasisng the ball around mid-field and then hope for an opportunity.
I do think that if the US had a REAL soccer superstar, or a few, it would slowly grow on people.
Yeah, but that’s approaching the maximum amount of detail you can give about the strategy. There’s just not much there.
A similar overview for a football gameplan is easily possible, but then the elaboration of what exactly it entails could go on for hours and hours. And by the time you finished, the baseball guys would be just getting warmed up.
I’ve heard it said that because soccer is free-flowing, of course it doesn’t reduce to a 600-page playbook. All the strategy happens organically, on the fly. First, that’s tactics, not strategy. And what is missed is that football has just as much organic, on-the-fly tactics to it as soccer does. The deep strategic element represented by the huge playbook just doesn’t exist in soccer.
This is one reason Americans view soccer as a kids’ game, IMO. There’s just not that much to it compared to the sports we like. The same could be said for hockey, which is basically just soccer on ice. The violent hitting and unlimited substitutions make hockey about a billion times better than soccer, but there is still the lack of strategic depth. Unsurprisingly to me, hockey and soccer are about equally (un)popular in the states.
What I meant by that is that so much of baseball involves no decision making. When the ball is hit to the short-stop, everybody knows exactly what he’s going to do with it based on the current situation - the only question is whether he is talented enough to execute. You never end up saying, “Oh wow, I thought he’d throw to 2nd but he surprised me with that throw to home.” It’s not even like there’s a Yankees’ defensive strategy and a Tigers’ defensive strategy: every shortstop, every time, same script. Attempts to do anything creative or surprising are even actively discouraged (infield fly rule).
Yeah, the pitcher does get to make some interesting decisions, and there are times when you see bunts or base-stealing attempts when those plays aren’t necessarily “textbook” for the current situation. But for far too much of the game, the spectator already knows exactly how the play will end as soon as the ball comes off the bat, and that makes it pretty dull.
I’ve always felt this way about both soccer and hockey. Both appeared to have no strategy. I thought maybe they were actually attempting a basketball like strategy going man-to-man then zones, setting up pics, opening shooting lanes, a stategic pre-planned pass maybe? and I was just too unfamiliar with the game to see these things happening. but no, there is none of that going on.
You can’t be serious. I’m not exactly the biggest football (soccer) fan, yet the last post was just idiotic. You honestly don’t think that there’s any strategy to playing football?
I’m sure he didn’t mean any offense by it, that’s just how it appears if you don’t have any experience with it. While I was living in Europe folks always asked me what was up with American football, all the stop and start action was jarring, less time spent playing than in the huddle and lining up. It was harder to explain football as a “game of inches” than I expected. Soccer (or “rest-of-the-world-football”) has the reverse problem; to the uninitiated it looks like it’s just back and forth, back and forth with no overall game plan or strategy.
Compared to, say, football or baseball? No, there isn’t. Keep in mind that strategy is “an elaborate and systematic plan of action.” Soccer and hockey are both mostly on-the-fly tactics; very little strategic depth is there. Somebody upthread made the compelling case that baseball is “on rails”, meaning that while it has strategic depth, this is offset by the lack of on-the-fly-tactics.
Football has the strategic depth of baseball and the on-the-fly tactical depth of soccer.
Soccer does not have an elaborate set of pre-planned situational responses like baseball and football does. This is what strategy is.
I’m not saying it doesn’t have any strategy at all. I’m saying that it has nowhere near the strategic depth of the team sports that are popular in America.
Not that anybodys been able to explain to me. I admit I don’t know much about the game but in my limited viewing experience I just don’t see either team when in possesion of the ball maintaining any type of “control” for more than 5 seconds.
Watch basketball sometime and you’ll see each teams possesion ending the majority of the time with a strategic shot on goal. In soccer the team with the ball rarely makes it down the field before turning it over to the other team.
I think soccer does not work at all on television. Seems like you would need to see it live to really appreciate it. Then again, I watched a little of the Euro 2008 tourney and I found the Dutch team’s style to be pretty entertaining because they were active attackers. I think soccer would work a little better if they made the field smaller, allowed a couple less players on the field, and if the refs could kick any player out of the game who got slightly bumped into and acted like a sniper had shot them.
Golf infuriates me. Tennis hasn’t been interesting in years unless your only interest is ogling the women. X Games-type competition holds no allure for me whatsoever.
The thing about soccer/football, is that if you aren’t really familiar with the game, then it does indeed look like not much ever happens. But really, you can say the exact same thing about baseball and American football. There is a strategic depth to all of those games, (although I grant American football is by far the most strategic/tactical game that I’m aware of) but if you don’t know what it is, its not very apparent. Thus, you get Europeans who think baseball is all standing around and American Football has no action. Just like Americans think soccer is just running around chasing a ball.
As per the OP: I actively loathe golf. I just don’t have the patience for it. I want to just hit the ball. Not spend 20 minutes meditating on my shot.
I guess I can understand why an unappreciative, or uneducated or un-whatever viewer would fine soccer boring. I mean, for someone to never have had any experience playing it, or being coached in it, I suppose there is a certain illusion of random kicking and no strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth, by the way. Every touch of the ball incorporates several strategic decisions.
What I don’t get, is why someone would honestly say that soccer is boring but baseball is exciting. Sure there are exciting moments, but there are great swaths of time where absolutely nothing happens. I don’t mean slow or unexciting play, but there are minutes upon minutes in any given game where everyone on each team is just standing there … doing absolutely nothing.
And I love baseball … go Red Sox!
That being said … I don’t really appreciate basketball, probably for the same reasons I’ve attributed to soccer-haters above. Never really played, never really got any coaching in it.
I even tried to follow the Celtics this year because of their resurgence, but I couldn’t get through an entire game.
