After all, either one or the other is fairly big in most of the countries that maintained close colonial ties to the UK past the development of the respective game. Besides that, football managed to become the world’s game by being simply the finest team sporting contest yet devised (also by being simple and inexpensive to play, and a host of other factors). Cricket… well, I admit I don’t understand anything about cricket (and yet am fascinated by it because of this very fact), but for reasons I don’t quite understand, it became popular with rather a few of the old British colonies.
Canada technically became a separate country with mostly devolved powers of government in 1867, but (as I understand it) remained fairly cozy with the mother country well into the 20th century. Even using the 1867 date, cricket was alive, well, and no doubt already perplexing by that date; association football was in its infancy, but it did exist. Yet Canada took its own sporting path, with Canadian football that favors the rather horrible stuff we call football here in the States rather than association football, hockey, baseball borrowed from us Yanks, curling and so on.
So, while I doubt there’s any single answer, would anyone care to enlighten me on why Canada, like its southern cousin, bucked both the global and colonial trends in popular team sports?
Canada’s political ties with England are absolutely, hopelessly crushed by its PRACTICAL ties with the United States. It’s nice and all that the Queen’s on the money, but it has nothing to do with everyday life. Canada and the US are intertwined culturally and economically to an extent impossible with some little island country across the sea. Canadians sound far more like Americans than they do Britons. They watch more American TV shows, eat more American food, and of course visit the USA a lot more.
Soccer has been around a long time but did not really begin to be the big international sensation it is until the latter half of the 19th century, by which time hockey was already the biggest sport in Canada and baseball was already a professional sport. As to cricket, it’s probably inevitable, given two bat-and-ball games, that baseball, America’s national pastime and a virtual obsession there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, would supplant cricket.
From that point on it was geographically and culturally inevitable Canada would be more similar to the USA in terms of its chosen sports.
Of course, it’s not the same; Canada is in fact quite unlike anywhere else in terms of sports popularity, starting of course with the fact that hockey is far more the most popular sport here, something true of no other country in the world with the arguable exception of Finland.
I suppose one shouldn’t discount the obvious, eh? Fair enough. FWIW, I got to thinking about this earlier when I was pondering perhaps the more traditional question of “why didn’t football catch on like cricket in India/Australia/the West Indies/etc.” and it occurred to me that we had another English colony just to the north that somehow managed to avoid the two major English sport exports (there’s ruggers too, but it’s marginal in comparison to either cricket or football).
And American/Canadian football (mostly the same, much more so than any other codes) are both dated to I believe the 1860s. It’s not like Canada made a conscious decision to copy a code.
I am not a big football defender and have evolved to neutrality about it but I could easily make the case that soccer is equally horrible. Unfortunately these discussions often devolve to “soccer is wimpy” vs. “oh yeah, then why do you wear pads and helmets?” to no progress.
You might make a class argument about cricket, I’m not sure (is it true that it is/was upper class or is that a stereotype?). But then Australia doesn’t have a history of fancypantsness, nor India or Pakistan.
Sports in 19th century Britain had a huge class connotations. Soccer was the working man’s game. Rugby was the sport that was played by Gentlemen. Cricket was one where all could and did play. This certainly had a huge impact on the spread of British sports across its Empire. In the sub continent, Cricket was the one game that was the natives could play as equals with their masters. A butcher;s boy could in cricket (In England) make every attempt to kill the Earl’s son with a fast ball (remember hitting the batter is perfectly legal and a common tactic in cricket) and get nothing but praise for it.
Cricket did well in the sub continent because of access, good players could and did go on to play for top sides in England, not the case in football or Rugby. I think maybe cricket spread because of similar reasons in the Antipodean climate?
In South Africa, there was a racial element, Rugby was the whites game, football the Blacks, all people played (segregated) cricket.
This is not to say that there was not a lot of upper class affectations in the game, there were and are legendary (and probably the reason for the stereotype), but it was (almost uniquely) a game that all could play and were put forward.
I do find the fact that countries where Association Football is not the most popular sport are often former British colonies quite surprising.
Thanks. It enjoys a stereotypical upper class connotation in the US it seems, but somehow I thought that wasn’t right. And a googling confused things more by saying both!
I think you wouldn’t find peasants playing polo, right? I’m 1/2?
When someone mentions playing soccer and football, you get comments like “I think you mean football and AMERICAN football!” when in most of the English world it isn’t clear cut. This isn’t really ever true in the US and Canada, and even in Ireland, Australia, and NZ “football” can be an ambiguous term and the default definition depends on what part of the country you’re from. Even association crazy Italy doesn’t call it football (normally despite use of “FC”).
For what it’s worth, Canadians were actually the first to play proto-American football. Canadian colleges adopted the rugby style code first when American colleges were playing a more soccer like code with a round ball. American colleges a couple years later adopted the running code, probably influenced by the Canadian game. Harvard eventually adopted McGills rules after playing them in the 1870s and convinced the rest of the Ivy League to give up the association football code. From there, the evolution of the game was pretty much in the U.S.
