I recall reading somewhere that the earliest known versions of a game like soccer (football, whatever) was played about 600 years ago in Mongolia and northern China, where nomadic tribesmen would put the severed head of a slain enemy in a leather bag and kick it around.
Judging from some of the soccer fans in England that we hear about here in the U.S., it seems not much has changed about the game. 
Tom, they didn’t answer me when I asked the same question earlier 
…
Wow, how about a plain and simple answer to this question.
To be “popular” as a sport in the United States you need to have at least one of 2 things
1.) Scoring
2.) Violence
If you happen to be a sport that has both…you rule(See the NFL and I’m sure the XFL next year.)
Realizing of course that baseball is an anomaly to this rule but baseball has a special spot in the American psyche. Which of course it could destroy if they don’t realize that most of the country could give a rip about the Yankees and the Braves(insert hard salary cap here).
Referring to the fact about having an outright winner. Gearge C. Scott’s speech at the beginning of the movie Patton sums the American view point up on this subject.
…Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight - wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and never will lose a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.
all sports are boooring, IMHO if im not playing it i dont really want to watch it
First, bear in mind that ALL spectator sports are (objectively speaking) pretty silly. None of them are terribly important, in the grand scheme of things. Neither Mark McGwire, Peyton Manning, Vince Carter, Mark Messier, Renaldo or Michelle Kwan is curing cancer or making the world a better place. They are just entertainers- nothing more, nothing less. So, the fact that 90% of the world doesn’t care about baseball means nothing to me, just as the fact that 99% of the world doesn’t care about Blue Oyster Cult doesn’t make their first album any less brilliant (IMHO).
Now, I find soccer a drag, but it doesn’t bother me if Bolivians and Belgians think it’s the most exciting game on earth. Like most Americans, I’m quite willing to say, “Whatever floats your boat. You enjoy YOUR silly games, and we’ll enjoy ours.” The problem is, soccer freaks are NEVER content to leave it at that. They have the zeal of evangelical Christians, and the same determination to push their beliefs down our throats.
Instead of trying to convince us that soccer is fun to watch, they BROWBEAT us, and nag us, telling us grimly that “Soccer is the WORLD’s sport,” as if this proves we backward rubes in AMerica have to get with the program!
Sorry, I’m just not interested.
Completely off-topic BUT…
[bold]TomH
[/quote]
, if you’re reading this…what about the rugby yesterday?
I’ve got a question of my own. Why do non-Americans even care what sports Americans like? I mean, this isn’t just a comeback, I’m really curious. You don’t see Americans asking why the rest of the world doesn’t like any of it’s favorite sports.
Ummm, your forgetting the main difference between American football and football (soccer) is that American football is a full-contact sport. Hardly any comparison really. Now if you want to start comparing it to rugby, have at it.
I dunno how you figure that, but it’s not even remotely close. They do not get paid that much for coming in last. Particularly when you figure in the cost of maintaining a race team, with all the cars and pit crew and all that. Racing is a rich man’s sport, and by that I don’t mean that it will make you rich.
Tom:
As I understand it they’ll just continue to run up the scoreboard clock and the official time will be kept by the referee on field. IIRC, that’s the way Premier does it, yes?
Most high school games stop the scoreboard clock with two minutes to go so the fans don’t count down loudly or any other stupid American tricks.
-andros-
andros,
Yes, that is the way we do it. What I meant was, how did they deal with time added on before the change? Did the clock go into negative figures or something?
They recently introduced a new practice here of announcing how much time was to be added on after 45 and 90 minutes, whereas before you just had to guess (and commentators would often spend the last few minutes of a dull match commenting on the referee’s judgement of injury time). Goals scored in injury time are deemed to have been scored in the last minute, so you occasionally (but rarely) see score lines like
Carbone 45, 45
Booth 45
when in fact the three goals were scored during several minutes added on during the first half.
[Bonus points for anyone who can say why the score line I have quoted is actually highly unlikely]
voltaire,
Good question. The answer, for me at least, is simple curiosity. Association football is arguably the most popular team sport in the world and the US seems to be the only country where it doesn’t have a major following. There seems to be no prima facie reason why that should be the case (e.g. climate) so it’s an interesting question.
Conversely, US sports are hardly played at all outside North America, though I know they’re big in Japan and basketball, in particular, seems to be catching on in this country. Among other things this means that the USA does not participate in a lot of high-level international team sports.
Rather than relating it to soccer, I suppose a better question would be “Why has America developed its own team sports, rather than playing the ones that everybody else does?” This is not about whether Americans should like the sports the rest of us do (that would be a silly suggestion) but about why they don’t.
FWIW, I think that DS Young’s answer above is fairly persuasive.
MadHun,
I didn’t see the Rugby, but it’s hardly surprising that England managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again, in such a spectacular way.
Why is the “writhing in agony” act such a big part of soccar games? Somebody is tripped, and falls down-the camera focuses on his face-as he bites his lip-this goes on for an excruciatingly long time-do European fans like this crap?
Euros-please explain this strange (to me) phenomenon!
Everybody I know hates this play-acting thing. But it can win a game, so it goes on. The British definitely see this as predominantly a continental european thing, although i’m not sure how fair that is.
Booth, soon to be in the first division
Carbone’s at villa I think (on loan?).
I have a theory as to why soccer hasn’t become popular in the U.S. in the way you’re asking about, but first let’s note that in a certain sense soccer is popular in the U.S. Every middle- to upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood has lots of soccer teams. It’s played there on a highly competitive basis in teams that run from 5-year-olds to high school level. It’s played by both boys and girls. It’s played in most colleges. It’s played to a smaller extent by adults in amateur leagues.
So why hasn’t this popularity extended to professional soccer, let alone to world soccer? Here’s my theory: People’s attitude towards sports can be classified as either treating them as neighborhood games or as gladitorial contests. (Perhaps it can be argued that this distinction varies on a spectrum rather than being a rigid yes/no thing.) Increasingly, professional sports in the U.S. are seen as gladitorial contests, not as neighborhood games. There just hasn’t been any way to sell professional soccer as a gladitorial game.
This wasn’t always true. Baseball in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century to the middle twentieth century was the epitome of what I am calling a neighborhood game. In a neighborhood game, everybody (or at least all males) dreams at one point of being a great player of the game. There are teams of every age group in the sport. The quality of play rises gradually in ability from neighborhood pickup teams to organized local teams to semi-professional leagues to professional leagues. Every father dreams that his son could someday be a great player. Nearly everybody has somebody in a professional league who came from (sort of) their neighborhood. Ideally, a neighborhood game is played by people of varying income levels and ethnic groups. There’s at least a myth that the sport equalizes such differences. The great players of the game are considered role models, both intelligent and moral, and there will be a collusion between the players, the team-owners, and the sports writers to suppress any news story that indicates differently.
Until the '50’s, baseball was the American sport, and it was treated very much on the neighborhood game model. As ethnic groups entered the American mainstream, they each produced great baseball players. Blacks never entered the American mainstream till about 1950, and one indication of this was that they couldn’t play professional baseball in the major leagues until the late '40’s. There were separate, poor-paying Negro leagues until then. Even baseball though lost some of its neighborhood game aura and turned more towards a gladitorial game status in the late twentieth century.
A gladitorial game is one in which the professional players, even though they may have immense numbers of fans, are never seen as “one of us” by most of these fans. The players often come from completely different social and ethnic backgrounds from their fans. There seems to be little connection between the professional players and the good neighborhood players. Nobody has any illusions that these players are intellectual or moral giants, and news stories about them often go out of their way to make the players seem like louts. Most fathers don’t dream of their sons growing up to be a great player. While people will try to find any sort of vaguely scientific support for the intellectual superiority of players of neighborhood games, they will go to absurd lengths to show that being good at playing a gladitorial game has no connection to intelligence and indeed is an indication of the subhuman abilities of the players. Basketball, which has been the most popular sport in the U.S. since the late '80’s, is the epitome of the gladitorial game. Despite its popularity and the immense salaries of its players, many of its biggest fans look on the players as if they were performing animals. Football, which was the most popular sport in the U.S. from the mid-'50’s to the late '80’s, was halfway between a neighborhood game and a gladitorial game.
Professional soccer hasn’t become popular because most American sports fans don’t want it to become popular. They could never get their heads around the idea that a sport which draws its players from middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs could be a glaitorial game.
Contrary to a number of assertions in this thread, soccer is a contact sport. However, a player is not entitled intentionally to kick, trip, jump at, charge, strike, hold, push or spit at an opponent. Nor is he allowed, when tackling an opponent, to make contact with the player before the ball.
The “writhing in agony” is all an attempt to persuade the referee that his opponent has done one of the aforementioned things, thereby getting a free kick for his own team and possibly a yellow card for the opponent. If it is done cynically and deliberately, it constitutes unsporting behaviour, for which a player can be cautioned. If a player refuses to get up and stop making a fuss when the referee asks him to, he is guilty of dissent and can be sent off. There was an example of a sending-off like this in a fairly recent match, but I can’t remember the details.
android,
You’re pretty close. Booth and Carbone played together at Sheffield Wednesday till the tiny Italian contract-whinger went to Villa (to repeat his contract whingeing). It is virtually inconceivable that Wednesday could have scored three goals in the first half of any match, given their form in the last couple of years.
Well, my assertion was that soccer wasn’t a full contact sport. Which it isn’t. This was particularly pertinent when the length of time soccer players stay on the field was being compared to the length of time that American football players stay on the field.
What I find odd is this,
Americans love to win,wether it’s golf ,tennis,athletic events even that yauchting thingy that the Aussies took a few years back.
All these can be considered ‘world’ sports.
In the UK we note that Americans appear to be very nationalistic-no criticism implied here-and that US victories seem to be treated as assertion of American identity/superiority.
Strange then that the US does not seem to have that hunger for the worlds most popular sport but instead declares itself the “World Champions” at games the rest of the world is largely not interested in.
I truly think that the US ,with all it’s enthusiasm and energy, could make an enormous positive contribution and not just in cash either .As it is there seems to be something missing by not having a world class US team in the world cup tournament.
I’m NOT getting involved in this debate again, but I just wanted to answer TomH’s question about the MLS: when the clock was counted down instead of up, it was just stopped for injuries.
And to tell the MadHun we’ll get yous next season
ruadh, semi-resident SDMB Tim
Shoot, why doesn’t this thing have a spell-check that operates as you post? For those of you who had no idea what I was saying, I meant to write “gladiatorial”, not “gladitorial”.
WAG here. My guess is that fandom for a sport is born when a kid is very young, and that people (mostly men; some women are fans of pro sports but my experience is that the majority, both in America and Europe, aren’t) are strongly influenced in their choice of sports and teams that they follow by their fathers, older brothers, and uncles.
Personal example. We have always been a baseball family. My granddad played minor-league ball, and he brought up my dad and then my dad brought me up in having an interest in baseball. My granddad played in the Cardinals system down in Texas, and even when we moved up to KC my dad continued being a Cardinal fan. I was when I was a very little kid but then changed to the Royals, since we lived in KC and all the other kids were Royals fans. I still have a soft spot for the Cardinals, though. And ever since I was a little kid I’ve been a Chiefs fan, since that was the big sport except for baseball in town. And one of the reasons I went to the University of Kansas was that I’d always been a KU basketball fan. (There were a lot of others).
I think that one big reason you support a particular sport is that you were brought up with it in your family, and you won’t start liking a team if it isn’t your family’s team or the team of your town. And I think that a lot of the appeal of sports is hometown partisanship.
Very few Americans were brought up in soccer families, and none were brought up as fans of a particular team, unlike England, where the opposite is true. Add to that the difficulty of televising soccer (so important in bringing a sport to a mass audience; sports weren’t too important in America before TV. Until 1954 they played major league baseball in only ten cities, all in the Northeast and Midwest) in the USA and its unfortunately still-existent image as a girls’ sport, and that’s why soccer isn’t too important on the west side of the big salt pond.