I think that is the point though. In Australia soccer is far less popular than any other form of football. AFL (Australian Rules football) is the most popular everywhere but Queensland and NSW. In those states Rugby League and Rugby Union are more popular but AFL has teams and a following. But followers of those codes don’t feel the need to belittle soccer or the other codes, and for whatever reasons most sports fans that I know can actively appreciate soccer without really following it at all. I think everyone I know watched Australia play Iraq this week even though it was a pretty poor game.
That’s just ignorance.
What’s gotta be another factor in soccer not exactly thriving in the US (even if it’s gaining in popularity still, it seems - and I’m not even sure that I’d be willing to concede the thesis in the OP that ‘many Americans hate soccer’) is that the Americans are just not very good at it. It might be a trivial point to make but if somehow, magically, the US started competing at the level of Brazil or Spain, then that might garner a lot more interest. There’s a vicious or virtual cycle here, of course - as more potentially great athletes choose to play soccer, performance will improve and that might then generate more interest, but at the same time, if performance remains low, there’s less of an incentive to make a career out of it. Just ask yourself, how much are universities offering in soccer scholarships?
As it stands, the US is not a terrible team but barely makes the top 20 world wide (Please don’t counter by producing FIFA rankings. Those mean nothing. If you think that would be a valid point, just read the discussion in the ongoing World Cup Qualification thread). In the big four American sports, its almost always Americans or at least American teams that win (of course in NHL, it’s mostly Canadians and Europeans that are playing, but unfortunately (I’m posting from Montreal), it’s decades ago since a Canadian team actually won the Stanley Cup). In all cases, international competitions or leagues in other countries are less important than NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL (with the exception of the Olympics, if an Olympic event is organized). So in all of those cases, the best team in so-and-so sport is an American team, and the best players are going to be Americans (some exceptions apply esp. in hockey, but I think it’s still a valid point).
In football/soccer, this sort of situation does not apply and I would imagine it’s a lot harder to get riled up for a sport in which you’re a minor player. This is going to be the case especially if you’re used to winning, as is the case for the US. Why would a country that regularly wins the most medals in the Olympics care about a game in which it does not have a dream of ever coming close?
Honestly, I don’t think this is somehow surprising or exceptional. What I find more surprising is that people from countries in, say, the Middle East go bonkers over football teams in Europe and football in general, when their own teams have never performed well - but then again, it’s not like people in the Middle East have tons of internationally played sports that they’re always winning at, so it’s not like they have an easy substitute that could give them that sense of ‘hey, we’re winning’. Americans do, some of them are always winning. Except for when they play soccer.
I think it’s more a case that we really don’t have a tradition of sports representing the nation. We really are used to teams representing things much smaller. The Olympics are the main exception, and that’s not entirely an exception. It got big when it was promoted as us vs the dirty commie Russkie bastards(I’ve heard that the U>S>A chant was first done at the famous US-USSR Olympic hockey game). And now that that furor has died down politically,caring about the US as a team has mostly as well.
The Golf and tennis cups for national representation are followed mostly by heavy fans of those sports(I am as much of a general sports fan as you will find, and I can’t remember the names of them).
The World baseball classic was completely ignored.
As a huge hockey fan I thought it was a cool little variation when the NHL did all-stars as North America VS. the World, but the idea of “Continental pride” is laughably absurd.
Cheering for the country just really is not a default mindset of American sports fans, and mostly only comes up in embarrassment; “How the hell did THEY beat us at basketball?”
You can’t just stop hoping the Buckeyes and Yankees all die of Leprosy for two weeks just cause it’s convenient for the country 
I cannot take seriously any “sport” that is played by grown men in shorts.
3 consecutive olympic gold medals and two world cup titles disagree with you.
Oh, wait, you’re only talking about men, I guess?
It certainly would be interesting to see what happened if the US men drastically overperformed and went on a run deep in the WC. My guess is… the US TV audience would increase by a modest amount, the mockery of soccer by other Americans would increase in volume and rage, and a month later everyone would forget it had ever happened. I think to really get a big and lasting bump you’d need both an overperforming men’s team in the WC and a hook of some sort, something to the story to get people’s interest aside from just “team does better than they have in the past in sport you know little about and frequently mock”.
It’s an interesting point - but soccer at its highest levels is played by European clubs in European leagues. Although playing world cup and to a lesser extent Euro Cups remains the high point of soccer players’ careers, the vast majority of football is played at the club level, and that is also where the vast majority of the money is spent by networks, clubs, and fans. The rivalries between soccer fans at the club level dwarf those between fans of US franchises (and I don’t think that that is a good thing for soccer). And yet many people cheer for national teams in spite of those rivalries.
My point is that love for football rarely has to do with hoping that your country will do well, and much more often with hoping that your club will do well. So if Americans are not accustomed to their sports team representing their nation as a whole (which frankly I don’t think is true), I don’t think that explains the general meh-ness towards football, because that’s not a huge part of what makes football as popular as it is elsewhere in the world.
Yeah. Sorry. But so is everyone else in this thread. Women’s soccer is far more popular in the US than it is in most places in the world that love men’s soccer. It kind of proves my point about how a sport becomes more fun to watch once your team is good at it. This cuts both ways - there is zero interest for women’s soccer in most of Europe, a failure to start up even the most rudimentary of national leagues, no screen time on TV networks or a great demand for more women’s soccer. And I think except for the Germans, European teams have not done particularly well, like, ever. Girls and women in the US and Canada are probably more likely than their European counterparts to take up soccer, probably due in no small part to the success their country’s teams have had historically.
Maybe. But that does not really invalidate my point. Just because a great run in a single world cup is not likely to make a great difference, does not mean that if counterfactually the US was always amongst the top 5 of soccer powers, more people would be interested. I think that is ultimately a stronger argument explaining why many Americans don’t care about soccer than 1) the nature of the game itself; or 2) the way people who are fans behave.
(haven’t read the thread)
Easy. Spain currently rules – in fact we broke the record for most consecutive undefeated official matches in history today (28). You don’t want a former defeated Empire to come back to life. Afraid we keep on course and you might lob a missile or two – your favorite sport.
Seriously: You already have an established sports priority – B-ball, Baseball, A-football and hockey. Not enough fans for all.
Yeah, real sportsmen wear capris, like in football, baseball, and hockey.
Even if a ton of US colleges started taking soccer seriously the US wouldn’t drastically improve. The NCAA schedule and competitive nature of most of US youth sports programs sacrifices development time for potential superstars in order to build a winning grade school/high school/college team.
I’m in a non-US country that follows that model (school based sports development) and was surprised at the difference with the rest of the world.
There’s a good line in the New York Times feature on the Ajax academy from a couple of years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=homepage&
Possible, but again that does not really do anything to the broader point I’m making, which is that for budding athletes in the US there are many incentives to become involved in numerous sports other than soccer, which reduces the talent pool for soccer, which in turn reduces the performance of individual American players as well as American teams, etc., etc.
Incidentally, since you mention Ajax - now there’s a great reason to hate soccer. Bunch of fuck-asses.
Americans don’t hate Soccer - take it from me. You (those that proclaim to hate it) merely have a mild dislike.
When all your colleagues talk about, day in, day out is that sport, when the countries T.V schedules are built to accommodate that sport, when everytime there is a competition your workplace assigns you a team to support (seriously, assigned teams? - Last world cup it was Paraguay or something) and when ever guy who is trying to make small talk turns to ‘last nights game’ and assumes you saw it and care. In short, when your entire country (i’m in UK) is batshit crazy for a sport that you find less interesting than watching snails race…
Then you will truly hate soccer.
And I say this so that you will know where i’m coming from when I say:
You sir, are a troll. Not even a very good one.
I’m totally uninterested in sports, but I can enjoy a good football, not to mention cricket, match and I find American football as utterly boring as baseball.
I suppose the lack of popularity of soccer in the USA could be attributed to fans preferring what they’re accustomed to. Just one instance, but all three of my daughters played youth soccer and gave it up quickly. (Mostly because they weren’t good.)
Two of them were on the HS swimming and softball teams and one of them never played a sport after about 10.
Today, two of them don’t care about sports at all and one of them is a big Yankee fan, even though I have always hated the Yankees and never watched Yankee games myself. None of them gives a wit for soccer.
I have always liked the objectivity of the wicket in cricket. Either it’s knocked over or it isn’t. The trade off for having an umpire and called balls and strikes is the byplay of stolen bases.
Baseball is set up to make for close calls at first base on infield grounders. If the ball is hit slowly and the runner is fast there is usually a very close play.
In the (very few) cricket matches I’ve watched part of, players catching balls on the fly are given praise for making a brilliant play. In baseball the same flight paths would be described as pop-ups or routine fly balls, so maybe the gloves have their place.
As baseball evolved the balance between offense and defense has been adjusted many times.
Early on the same ball was used throughout a game and not only got dirty and scuffed up, but actually became softer and harder to hit for distance. That was cured by replacing balls during the games and eventually wrapping them harder so they became livelier.
Defenses countered by working on spit balls and improving their gloves.
Baseball eventually banned spit balls, but outfields became bigger and pitchers developed new pitches. Babe Ruth didn’t see many of the sliders or splitters routinely faced by hitters today.
Back in (I believe) 1969, the elevation of the pitchers’ mounds was reduced after the 1968 season had too many low ERAs and not enough offense. More recently, with the banning of performance enhancing drugs, fences have been brought in to produce more offense.
It seems the game has been aiming at an average score of about 5-3. Of course two equally matched teams could have a three game series with scores like 10-8, 0-1, and 21-12. These things happen, especially at Wrigley Field.
Even though I love college football, I agree with George Carlin with regard to baseball vs. football.
The US got to the quarterfinals in 2002, I think that’s about as overperforming as we’re likely to get in the forseeable future.
I don’t recall any particular rise in the mockery or rage, but you’re right in that any interest only lasted until whatever the next big story in sports was.
Wasn’t that the world cup where the US was denied a clear penalty (German handball in the area I think?) - that probably drove some Americans from the sport too.
I’m a (I’m gonna call it for the sake of the board) Soccer fan, and yet I’m glad that there’s places where other sports are predominant. If anything I wish we gave here in Europe more chances to equally entertaining sports, like handball.
You’ve surely been involved in enough soccer discussions on this board to know that a lot of international posters have said this very thing. Hell, if I was more motivated, I could probably dig up a few in this very thread.
Didn’t this happen in 1994? We did much better than anyone ever thought and the game after our miracle advancement took place on the 4th of July. I remember ESPN was really pushing that game and my uncle (who, admittedly was already a huge soccer fan) threw a party and had a ton of people over to watch the game. If the US beats Brazil in that game, the whole history of soccer in the US would have been very different.
That’s because this is an American message board. And in America, the sport is called “soccer.” Full stop. The only people who call it football are foreigners living in America, people who are trying to be purposely antagonistic, or both.
Soccer is clearly the “5th sport” in America and I really think it’s only a matter of time before it passes hockey. This is just the growing pains stage.
I tend to consider every board as “international” unless explicitly stated otherwise. Hell, most boards have servers on Ukraine or wherever, anyway.
But a game is a chapter, not a book.