It’s a serious question folks. Not a flame. It has always baffled me as to why a sport that just about the entire world is obsessed with is still, relatively speaking, a minority sport in the US. Are there historical or cultural reasons for it or is there just not enough room for commercial breaks? 
Any ideas?
As an american…
well, it bores me.
a bunch of guys kick a ball around, nobody scores. Sorry, I’m a baseball fan, with a passing interest in american football.
soccer, though. they just run around for 3 hours and maybe 2-3 times during the game someone will kick a ball into a net.
I just don’t get it.
Perhaps slightly off topic, but how can a nation which is bored by football (Soccer) be so wildly excited by NASCAR - motorway traffic jam moving at high speed?
Russell
Hehe 3 hours is slightly excessive (90 minutes with a 15 minute break at half-time, extra-time played in certain competition sif the tie is drawn). Fair points though. BUT…
Why do you support a particular baseball team? Because it’s your home town, you once lived there, or whatever. Soccer evokes such passion in those who follow firstly because of the trritorial aspect (my town against yours), and secondly through the spectacle of the game. Guess it’s horses for courses. I find baseball pretty dull. Guy pitches, guy swings, guy misses, repeat until someone hits it, run. It’s all a bit stop-start for me as well. If I ever watch baseball it’s in highlight form where I don’t have to endure the long pauses between the action.
There was a thread in the Pit a few months ago called “I hate soccer”. As far as I can ascertain:
-
It’s not high-scoring enough. American sports generally involve one of the teams scoring every few minutes, at least.
-
It can end in a draw. American sports don’t, so MLS has something like a penalty shoot-out even in league matches.
-
They already have established sports which are very popular, so football has difficulty competing (rather like basketball or ice hockey in the UK).
3A. As a consequence of point 3, it its not very well-understood so a great deal of the subtlety is missed.
-
It is presented badly on US television – commentators who don’t understand the game and advert breaks during the run of play.
-
For some reason I cannot fathom, it is seen predominantly as a women’s sport and therefore has a low status (a bit like hockey or netball here).
Allez France
Surely that is part of the attraction of soccer. 89 minutes of guff followed by 1 minute of rapturous pandemonium after Claudio Reyna (anyone know who he is?) scores the winner. Against Celtic. Ahem.
Now that just seems plain ridiculous. Why not have a draw if 2 teams are so easily matched as to be incapable of outdoing the other?
Granted. But footie is great
There isn’t THAT much you need to understand to glean enjoyment from it is there?
This I have experience of. ESPN is the work of Satan.
And France were luck BTW. Did I say France were lucky? Beg pardon, what I meant was Scotland were an abomination.
All the reasons that folks in the U.S. give for hating or ignoring AssocFootball/soccer basically boil down to “We didn’t grow up with it.”
AssocFootball/soccer was organized in Europe in almost exactly the same years of the nineteenth century that baseball was organized in the U.S., culminating at the beginning of the 20th century. It was easy in the U.S. for baseball to spread into inter-city and inter-state rivalries using the railroads. I suspect that the same is true of Association Football in Europe. On the other hand, until the development of the Boeing 707 and the Vickers Viscount, the idea of playing a team on the other side of the Atlantic regularly was just silly, so there was no cross-Atlantic interaction for either sport. Europe then carried Association Football out to its colonies. (That does not explain its growth in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America, of course, however most of South America has seen a lot of European immigration with no baseball/football establishment to greet those people at the coast.)
Both sets of sports then made their way through the first half of the century, gathering fans on their respective land masses. U.S. football was a college game (shooting off from rugby, prompted by threats from Teddy Roosevelt after several college kids were killed and maimed). That game became very exciting with the introduction of the forward pass (that gave the offense a much wider variety of options to move the ball). It might have remained a college game (despite several efforts to go professional in the 1920’s and 1930’s) except that television brought it into the living room at the end of the 1940’s.
When Association Football shows up looking for support, it has to go up against U.S. football, on the one hand, but it also has to compete for share against basketball and hockey. For most casual sport fans, that is simply one sport too many.
There are always predictions that when the kids raised with soccer in school in the 1980’s are raising their kids (or grandkids) and the numbers of soccer-aware people is higher, then soccer will take off in the U.S. It could. :::shrug:::
Tom~
But that’s the whole point of American sports: proving who’s the winner and who’s the loser. A game doesn’t count if nobody loses. It’s like some kindergarten playground thing. (“Now, Timmy, we’re not keeping score, and everybody is a winner – now pass the ball to Palsy Girl.”) America wants winners and losers, not a dozen sweaty men in shorts running around for two hours to prove that they’re all about equal.
I hope that this has proved informative.
I’m your only friend
I’m not your only friend
But I’m a little glowing friend
But really I’m not actually your friend
But I am
Er…no offence intended but isn’t that a bit of a childish, juvenile attitude? If I score as many points as you at any sport/game does it not infer that we are of equal skill? If this is the case why should there be a winner if neither one of us has earned it?
It’s weird, they even don’t like cricket, can you believe that?
IMO, it’s a combination of the ‘not growing up with it’ theme and the squeeze put on football by american football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey. there’s just no place for soccer.
In addition, the climax of soccer for the rest of us are competitions like the world cup and the european championships (remember wembley Coldfire, 4-1 was it? You can stick your total football up…etc) which generate interest worldwide. The US doesn’t generally involve itself in international team sports (olympics aside) with regard to their major sports because relatively few other countries play these games to a sufficiently good level.
I’m siding with our American friends on this one, cricket is mind numbing
android209
What about the World Series?
RUssell
snigger
It’s not just that the game is low scoring (a good baseball game could be) or that it could end in ties (the NHL does fine, even with the overtime).
It’s primarily a matter of being a fan. You can think a 1-0 game is pretty exciting if you’re rooting for one of the teams. If you don’t care about either, it’s pretty dull. Baseball has been a major sport in America for over 125 years, so you have long-time fans who know the players (and whose father and grandfathers may have been rabid fans). Their team is like a family, and they can follow them 12 months a year.
When soccer came along in the US, it was at a tremendous disadvantage. People had no stake in the home team. They didn’t know the players. And the game was low scoring.
So the baseball fans never became rabid for soccer. Those who thought baseball was too slow weren’t going to watch, either. In the early years, the only people who went to games were those who grew up outside the US. Now, with soccer more popular, you also have soccer players.
But the core group is just too small. You need to have a stake in one of the teams to enjoy a soccer game, but you can watch football, hockey, and basketball with any two random teams and enjoy the action. (Baseball, BTW, is a game of suspense instead of action.)
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
Let me say a couple things. Soccer is a very physically demanding sport. Whereas a football player plays, on average, about 7 plays a possession, a soccer player only leaves the game when they are injured. Soccer players are in much better shape than football players by all means. You always here football players saying that soccer is a “loser sport” but you never can get a football player to play against a soccer player. Afraid, I think so.
As for NASCAR racing. Those guys are amongst the best athletes in the world. They are physically and mentally stronger than most other athletes. True all they do is drive really fast. But there aren’t many people I know that can drive a car at nearly 200 mph and not hit a wall. And why not be a racer. Even if you finish dead last you still earn more money than most football players, baseball players, etc. do in one race.
Again, horses for courses. I personally can enjoy any soccer game but only ever watched American football when that rather pathetic World League thing was happening and we had the Scottish Claymores (excuse me while I barf). Ice Hockey I can’t be bothered much with unless there is a fight, for the reason you stated above: no stake in either team. Baseball can be entertaining but I won’t go out of my way to watch an entire game on TV, too little happens. I guess if I have to analyse it I like football because it flows, there is something happening ALL the time, it’s combative and gladiatorial, it is very emotionally charged and you can shout yourself blue in the face. This is NOT a: “My sport is better than your sport” thread BTW, just in case anyone was thinking of hi-jacking.
I don’t get this. Why do you need a stake in soccer to enjoy it but not other sports? Are you merely saying that you enjoy american sports but not soccer? I certainly could not watch a random american football/baseball/basketball game and enjoy it, whereas I could with soccer, because I like it.
I have never been much of an athletic supporter. 
I know this is stereotypical of me, but I just could never get into watching sports. Having said that…
…maybe I should check out soccer.
===m==(ô¿ô)==m===
Three observations:
-
In answer to the original post, one must respond: “Why is the rest of the world so apathetic about American (Gridiron) football?” When you realize the answer to this question is the same as the answer to the OP, you pretty much have it solved.
-
Contrary to some speculation raised here, the spread of soccer is almost exclusively the result of England’s financial empire during the late 19th and early 20th Century. The countries that have a strong tradition of soccer were countries that had strong economic ties with England AND the requisite climate (this excludes places like Bermuda, India, Kenya, etc where the heat is more conducive to that really mind-numbing sport, cricket). Portugal, Spain and Italy on the continent had strong economic ties; lots of Englishmen and their families lived in these countries at the time, and brought their sport with them (Italians claim to play calcio, an old form of football native to Italy, but the rules are quite different and all the old clubs (e.g. AC Milan, Juventus, etc.) were started either by English people or in imitation of the English). Add Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay to the list of countries with a strong English foreign presence, and, thus, a strong early soccer madness. And they have played international trans-atlantic soccer since 1912 (the Olympics) and the World Cup started in 1920, though it wasn’t until the '24 Cup that there were many teams willing to travel long-distance.
- Which leads why America didn’t catch on to the growing interest. I have answered this before in more detail (YOU go look at the search engine; it and I don’t get along
), but here is the gist: it WAS popular in the US in the late 19th Century, but it got aced out by the form of football that included carrying the ball in the hands around the turn of the century, mostly because Yale and Harvard and the other top colleges wanted to be more like Cambridge and Oxford (where they played Rugby football, thank you very much). Even as late as the 1930s the English and other foreigners stationed here supported a very strong soccer league, but the Depression and the growth of a professional American football league took its toll. Clearly, baseball also had an influence.
Soccer is only boring if you don’t root for one of the teams. Frankly, I find NBA basketball tremendously boring, because I don’t care for any of the teams and therefore find little to enjoy in the endless and seemingly mindless pursuit of slam-dunks. I would be bored, too, by a 1-0 game between the Galaxy and the Burn (who the HELL thought the names up, anyway; burn that sucker!). BUT, I have watched totally enthralled and on the edge of my seat as my son’s team held on to a 1-0 lead for 30 minutes.
My suggestion to sports lovers in this country: stop rejecting the game out of hand and learn something about the players, adopt a team to watch, and see what happens. You want boring to watch? Watch golf… (snore).
One of the main reasons soccer has not taken hold in the U.S. is precisely because the people trying to market in here have pressed presisely the wrong buttons. Soccer promoters never try to sell the specifics of their game, instead their main selling point is how supposely popular the game is in the rest of the world. Taking the liberty of the overgeneralization, America is a provincial place, and trying to convince it to adopt a sport just because that sport is allegedly the most popular sport in the world carries no weight whatsoever with the typical American. Typical Americans don’t care about what the rest of the world does, or what the rest of the world thinks, and so trying to convince us to follow soccer just because the rest of the world does is an entirely ineffective argument.