Here’s another side of the coin
Speaking as someone who was born and raised for decades in a nation where baseball is one of the biggest sports… cricket is a lot easier to understand than baseball. It’s still a lot more complicated than, say, soccer (get the ball into that net without using your hands), but you can’t really understand why anything is the way it is in baseball until you see what it evolved from.
It’s the closest thing you’ll get in the US to the division structure of world football, where everyone has their local team to passionately support even if they aren’t going to be the bigger winners. Every state has at least one state university after al.
AFAIK, the popularity of gridiron Football in Mexico is increasing, it would be even more today if it wasn’t for the Mexican government and the Mexican press in the 60s blaming college American Football for violence and unrest back then.
Revolutionary uprisings were erupting all over the world in 1968. That summer, as Mexico prepared to become the first Latin American country to host an Olympic Games, unrest first emerged on the UNAM campus. It started at a football game.
“At the universities, even at the high schools, it’s the students’ sport,’’ Coach Rivera says of football, echoing the words Hector Castro told me at the game. “Soccer is for everybody, but football is most popular with the students.”
Two high school teams affiliated with UNAM and its big rival IPN played each other in late July 1968. After the game, a fight broke out among fans. The fight itself has been described as no particular big deal. The government’s response, though, felt like overkill. Riot police barricaded students inside UNAM’s high school, holding them captive for days. One officer discharged a bazooka, obliterating a door that had been hand-carved in the 18th century.
The massacre at Tlatelolco effectively ended Mexico’s student movement. Ten days later, at Estadio Olimpico, President Diaz Ordaz opened the Summer Games. Volunteers released thousands of doves in a symbolic reference to the Games’ theme, which was peace.
…
The 1968 football season was canceled across Mexico. In 1969 UNAM tried to field a team but other universities declined to play them. A year after that, in 1970, Pumas players were divided into three separate squads, to dilute their talent. The games of those three teams were monitored closely by the government. Garcia Miravete, the former player, tells me rowdy “fans” were planted in the stands to disrupt the games, to steal wallets and purses, to smash stuff and make the stadiums unattractive places to spend an afternoon. Castro, the doctor and Pumas fan, tells me the same thing, as do several histories I’ve read.
“They didn’t want the students to get together, so they tried to disrupt football,” Castro says. “There was still that taboo linked to football, because of what happened in ‘68.”
UNAM football players didn’t unite again as one team until 30 years after the massacre, in 1998.
Actually the quote is much older. It’s usually credited to Wee Willie Keeler, a player from the 1890’s.
Edit: I guess I should have read the rest of the comments first.
This makes me wonder what stickball is to Australians. In the US, it’s an informal baseball game played with a broomstick and a spaldeen.
My guess would be the deep marriage between football and television. Football has been promoted and followed heavily on TV for several generations - it’s practically instituted as a fall activity in much of the country - not playing it, as much as watching it. Add in the college football broadcasts, and now the whole weekend is covered with games from Saturday morning to Monday night. Additionally, in many locales, high school football is a big deal - JV plays Thursday and varsity on Friday nights, and while not usually broadcast, many people attend in-person their local HS games, even if they don’t have kids playing, or even at that school. Toss in junior leagues Saturday morning, and for a lot of people you have Thursday evening thru Monday night to follow football, either in person or on TV. Plus, a whole industry of sports broadcasting and commentators filling-in all the gaps.
To me the saturation of the airwaves here with football games and news and commentary, and accessibility to attend local games, is why it’s so popular here, and not popular where there is little coverage, or competing with more traditional local sports favorites, like soccer, rugby, or whatever.
It’s always been very popular in the border towns with the US. Is it spreading south?
He could just as easily been talking about tennis.
bob_2 is in the UK…
I have heard that the Raiders are really popular in Mexico City.
Here’s an article talking about the NFL’s history of playing in Mexico:
I’ll pay out on the pedantry, but how does this improve the quality of the American exceptionalism gambit?
I think gridiron has been very slowly gaining in popularity in the UK. The NFL can sell out 2 games per year every year in London, I doubt it could’ve done that 30 years ago. It is admitttedl quite a niche sport though, My direct experience is that of UK NFL fans is that they are people who like every sport under the Sun with more mainstream (in the UK) sports like football and cricket coming higher in their affections. They are still pretty enthusiastic about the NFL though.
Personally I can be entertained by most sports, though I don’t spend much time watching sports any more. I never managed to get on with gridiron and baseball though. The stop-start nature and the seemignly-unnecessarily long gaps between actual play just made them unwatchable for me.
Football is fairly popular in Canada. Many other sports are also popular, although there is no equivalent for the intensity of American college or even high school sports. Our local university has a popular and generally strong football team. It has a stadium, relatively large compared to others, that might hold at most 8000 people.
I remember my ex, who originally came from Colorado. She showed me her high school in Pueblo, and its football stadium, which held (as I recall) 20,000 people. My high school football “stadium” (really it wasn’t; it was some bleachers beside the field) in Toronto had space for perhaps 1000 people.
Still, I’ll agree with Dr. Paprika. We used to play pickup touch football games in the local park in summer, unless we decided to play baseball. At any rate, in our neighbourhoods, football, road hockey, and baseball were the games to play. Soccer was completely off our radar.
Apologies for the drive-by post, but this has been discussed a few times and I think there’s a pretty straightforward answer.
Football in the US grew from the bottom up. The first organized teams were amateurs, local athletic clubs and college kids, and they essentially grew the game organically. The rules evolved, there were regional variations, and it developed a following in somewhat of a sports vacuum. There was no radio or TV, little news coverage and everything was local. By the time the NFL was well established, the rest of the world had found their own sports and the vacuum was gone.
Football, moreso than every other sport, requires this sort of grassroots support to succeed. The teams are large, the equipment costs are high and there’s a steep learning curve. You simply cannot top-down force this into other cultures no matter how much money and time you put into if. You’re unlikely to find 22 people all interested enough to learn and with enough resources to make a go of it. When you’re competing against simple games like soccer and basketball, it’s not realistic.
The NFL is a pretty big television sport in the UK, but that doesn’t mean it trickles down from television viewers to sports participants. I speculate that there are probably more active Quidditch players than there are American football players in the UK.
I’d say that it’s probably because American football, as a full game, is more fun to watch than to play. And the scaled down versions, such as touch football or flag football, need people to have some interest in the full game to have participants. For people who want to play that sort of sport, rugby is already established and has more infrastructure for playing and learning.
I thought you were doing well until you got to that line.
If you ever were to travel internationally and get to New Zealand, try and watch some high school rugby like the Moascar Cup a national challenge cup between high schools. You’ll see a lot of sporting endeavour that you will be familiar with, apart from the equipment, the crowd and yes they do play on grass and mud, not astroturf. You’ll also get an idea for why the All Blacks, for the last century or so, are the winningest team in world sport.
Agreed. It may also be the most expensive one because of the equipment, the size of the teams, and the huge cost of medical insurance.
It’s called backyard cricket.
A bat, no pads, gloves, helmet or other protective equipment, a wicket made from a box, a bin or painted onto the fence, a tennis ball half taped with insulation tape take to get it to swing, played on grass, the concrete or the road with the standard laws of cricket overlayed by complex local rules to rival Calvinball.
